You reach into the fruit bowl on the counter, past the pears and oranges. and go to grab a banana off the huge bunch around the back of the bowl. Good thing you thought to make that little garden behind the cabin. Thanks to some seed packets and a bit of hard work, you're able to grow all your fruit right here at home. No need to wait on deliveries or drive into town. Plus you find the gardening helps relax your nerves.
You pluck a banana from the bunch, making sure to choose the one that's ripest so none of them go bad before being eaten. A little jab of your fingernail into the top makes the peel open nice and smooth, like always. You finish off the banana before you even know it, and immediately grab another one. Man, you're way hungrier than you thought. You grab a third off the bunch and bite right through the peel, swallowing the sticker by accident. But these things taste too damn GOOD for you to care.
All of your muscles tense up as you devour banana after banana, making you feel stronger, more powerful. Your hair feels like it's standing on end, from your neck all the way down to your feet. Your nostrils flare to pull in more of that amazing scent, each sniff more vivid and intoxicating than the last. You can barely think of anything except getting more of these things in your stomach as fast as possible.
Maybe that's why you don't notice it at first. How every time your muscles tense up, they get a bit larger. How every sniff pulls your nostrils further back, your nose receding into your face. You're eating two, three bananas at once now, your stuffed mouth bulging forward, rising up and merging with your nose, the nostrils wide and flat and open above your lips, your canine teeth longer and sharper as you gorge on the fruit.
Your muscles are still growing, becoming dense and primal, thickening your frame and pulsing with power. Hair bursts through your skin, thick and wiry dark brown that starts at your back and rapidly engulfs your arms, your neck, your legs, but avoiding your chest and stomach, ass, ears and face, stopping just short of covering you entirely. You feel every strand growing. It itches, but you need both of your hands to keep eating. Your arms bulge and lengthen, more flexible now than you could ever hope. As the hair reaches your wrists it stops, but the changes don't. The skin of your hands gets thicker, tougher. Your knuckles creak and pop as your fingers grow longer, and you fumble momentarily as your brain adjusts to their new shape. You can fit three, four bananas into your new apelike hands now, and that's exactly what you do. It occurs to you that you've eaten more bananas than you even had in the house, yet the bunch in your hands is even larger than when you started. The sheer pleasure of this endless fruit pushes the thought from your mind. You keep eating.
It's still not enough. You need more, faster. Your feet twitch and spasm, going through the same changes as your hands, but it doesn't stop there. They warp and fold over themselves, the big toe becoming an opposable thumb and the joints of the other digits becoming flexible and limber. You feel a static tickle in the back of your mind and the new nerves wire themselves up. Within seconds your feet are fully simian, waiting to be used. On a strange whim you reach over with your right foot and grab a shoe from under the dining table and throw it against the cabinet, and the noise is strangely delightful. Your laughter is a hooting screech. The noise surprises you, and makes you laugh even more. Your delight drives you to jump up, makes your new hand feet grab onto the counter's edge and pull. For a second it makes you lose your balance as your hip joints pop out wider and tilt so you can climb with your legs just as easily as walking. The powerful muscles of your stomach tense and compact as you manage to haul yourself off the ground and hang from the cabinets off the wall, your underwear tearing in half and flinging off to the side with a loud SNAP. You feel strong, free, alive. Your fully apelike face opens up as you fill the cabin with sheer joyous noise, proclaiming your freedom with the power of a chimpanzee's lungs but the words and voice of a human.
The room feels smaller than before, as your body creaks and groans and bulks out into a strange fusion of human and chimpanzee. You're barely recognizable at this point, though far from fully animal. You're even larger than before, maybe seven feet tall, and your long arms would dangle past your knees if you stood on the ground. But why in the world would you do that, when you're jumping from countertop to table to couch, creating a massive mess in your sheer glee, with the bunch of bananas nestled firmly against your chest, being eaten as you go. Forget hiking, forget driving, you could swing from the trees of this forest, freer than any man.
You excitedly babble to yourself about the sheer possibilities of this change, eating even more bananas as you talk. Your eyes glimmer with imagination, mountains you could climb, feats of strength you could manage. And that's when you notice something odd about your voice, besides the changes that have already happened.