Archie was sitting in his lawn chair with his homemade margarita beside him daydreaming about being an animal again. He thought about what it might be like to be a bird flying through the air and eating berries or a hare listening to the world the big giant ears. He felt as though he almost knew what it was like, from those dreams of his, but they felt so distant now as his thoughts trailed off into a daze. He just sat their in the evening sun, mind cleared, relishing the feeling of the warm glow shining down over him from above. The smells of the summer gardens and forests caressed him, he could even taste them, as he found himself sticking his tongue out repeatedly into the warm humid air.
* Why am I doing that? * thought Archie as he finally noticed. He stuck his tongue again and flailed back in the chair suddenly as he noticed his tongue was long and forked!
* What happened to my tongue? *
He jumped up off the lawn chair and noticed he was shorter and his pants were falling down! He was covered in black and yellow scales; lifting up his long, dress-like shirt revealed the two-colored scales were running in noticeable stripes all down his body. He gulped and ran his hands down over them, marveling at the sensation of scales against scales.
He jumped again when he noticed he felt something writhing in the dirt behind him. Looking behind him, it was a long black-and-yellow-striped tail as thick as his body, narrowing out to a point far behind him on the ground. It was thrashing and bouncing off of grass, dirt patches, and even the plastic legs of his lawn-chair. He took deep breaths and gave himself a few seconds to gain control of it. He got it worked around to a place where it was easy to pick up, then he held it up in front of him, marveling at its length and trying to understand that he knew what it felt like to have a tail now.
Archie had to let go of his tail as his arms had noticeable shrunk and weakened while he was holding it. He lowered himself onto all fours when he could no longer stand, but soon he was just sprawled out on his belly, flapping his shrinking limbs uselessly until they were gone. He was nothing but a head, a body and a long tail now, flopping back and forth trying to figure out how to move. He learned to move forward by twisting his body and tail in a certain way, and soon Archie was slithering across his garden path like the garter snake he had become now.
* Yo! I can't believe I am actually a snake now. * he thought to himself in his reptile brain.
* I was probably really a hare, too, and maybe a bird before that. Speaking of which, I would love to eat either one of those right now. I'm hungry! *