While his chest grew fur and his ears swelled up, Archie got a big surprise as his thumbs grew claws and his other fingers stretched out. They stretched and stretched, with each bone looking thinner as his knuckles spread apart. Each hand seemed destined to outgrow his whole body!
Then the skin between them also started stretching, until each hand looked like a giant leathery sail. It got weirder when the same kind of skin started connecting his thumbs to his shoulders and his pinkies to his feet, so that his whole arm was just embedded into the sail. It felt freakish, and it was freaking him out.
"What is wrong with me? Why am I changing into a bat? I wasn't even thinking about bats, was I?"
Well, maybe he was. Bats were Archie's favorite animal, and turning into a bat was always Archie's favorite part of the vampire movies. He had always liked to watch the real bats flying over his house at night. The furry little fliers had what seemed to Archie like an easy life: eating insects out of the air, sleeping in caves all day, and hibernating through the cold. And then there was that wish he made about being an animal.
"But who would have known I was thinking that?" he wondered as his tail grew out and even more webbing connected it to his legs. He now looked like one giant wing with a little furry body in the middle and a head sticking out. He was a bat!