Gloria loved being a fly more than anything, but she wanted to go back to her room and see what it was like being a human again. She had plenty of time left at the Transformation Resort and wanted to try out lots of different things. She could always become a fly again.
So Gloria flew through the morning air back into the vent over by the patio, and flew into the first room she could find. She saw, to her shock and delight, that she had made a mistake and was in someone else’s room. A couple was asleep on the bed. As tempting as it was to fly around them for a while, she did want to be human again. So she turned back into the vent, thought a little more about where she was going, and she arrived in her room.
On the floor of her room, she noticed a basin filled with a bluish liquid. In large letters on the side, the basin read “DRINK TO TRANSFORM BACK.” Gloria carefully landed on the surface of the blue liquid, finding that she could stand on the liquid itself without breaking its surface tension, and drank.
Only seconds later Gloria found herself falling into the water, as her body parts twisted and contorted and grew bigger. By the time she crawled out of the basin, she was mostly human already. A few moments after that, she stood up, looked at the floor-length mirror, and confirmed that she had the same gorgeous human body she always had before.
Gloria couldn’t help but smile at her circumstances as she dressed and got ready to go to breakfast. Just yesterday she had mated with a fly. Earlier this morning she had given birth to a litter of maggots in the midst of a huge pile of dogsshit. And now here she was, putting on a bra and tying a ponytail. What a wild experience.
As Gloria walked down the corridor to the dining room, she expected to spend her meal alone planning her next step. After she went to the buffet and picked out her breakfast, she turned to choose a seat, and, to her shock, saw the one person at the Transformation Resort she knew. It was the woman from the cocktail party yesterday.
Gloria couldn’t stop herself as she approached the woman. “Excuse me,” she said sweetly. “Would you mind if I sat here?”
The woman looked up, a bit confused but friendly. “Oh, no,” the woman responded. “Feel free. I’m Barbra.”
“I’m Gloria. I just got here yesterday. How long have you been here?”
“Four or five days now. It’s nice.”
“Just nice?”
“Well,” said Barbra. “I don’t know what I was expecting. I’ve tried a variety of things, become a dog, aged myself up and down, became half as tall. It’s all been interesting, but I just feel ... I think I was expecting to learn something about life. Instead I’m just seeing the same things from different angles. Don’t get old, by the way.”
“I won’t,” Gloria said with a laugh. “I have to be honest, I’ve really enjoyed my time here so far. I think the key is to try to figure out what you’ve yearned for, sexually, out of curiosity, or whatever, and try to indulge that, even in vague terms. So if you don’t have any interest in being big or strong or whatever, you might not get anything out of being a horse.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” responded Barbra, lost in thought. “So what did you turn yourself into then?”
“Well, I wanted to try something really alien,” said Gloria, “and I like the idea of being insignificant, you know, someone who’s so unimportant not to be noticed. But then I also wanted to be in that insignificant position and still make myself noticed, like to still be able to express myself in those limitations. It just seemed ... hot.”
“Mmmm, I see what you mean,” said Barbra, who quickly composed herself. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
Gloria waited before answering, her heart starting to pound. She was going to tell her. “I became a fly,” she said. “A horse fly. Yesterday afternoon through this morning.” She did her best to state it plainly, without an expression.
Barbra missed it. “Oh, that’s funny,” she said. “The flies here are terrible. Last night at the cocktail party I—no.”
Gloria took her hand and slipped it under Barbra’s skirt, feeling the red welt on Barbra’s inner thigh where Gloria had bitter her. Gloria nodded slowly. “Yes,” she whispered.