"BAD BOY! Leave daddy's sofa alone!"
The golden brown mongrel was over there digging his claws into the sofa with reckless abandon like a chainsaw cutting into a tree.
"I really should have enrolled you into that obedience schuuuuuuuh..."
Thomas's voice trailed off into a moan as his body seemed to lose its responsiveness somehow. He started to feel like he was floating, and when he managed to look down he saw himself still standing there with its mouth open, a trickle of drool running down his jaw. He'd heard of out-of-body experiences, but he'd never believed in them until now.
'Does this mean I'm dying?' he thought to himself.
As Thomas's spirit was carried even further from his own body across the living room, he noticed that Rufus's body, too, had come to a standstill. He even saw a little ghost-like version of Rufus floating away from the couch. While Thomas tried to figure out if Rufus was dying, too, he found himself floating closer and closer to the couch, until all at once he was ON the couch, and everything was different!
For one thing, he was standing in a physical body again, but not on two legs. He was on all fours, and he could feel a fifth limb sticking out behind him. The couch he was standing on looked just like the couch Rufus was digging in, except eerily different: the stripes were blurring together, and the colors of the fabric had a washed-out look, the purple stripes bluer and the red and green stripes harder to tell apart. It was barely a distraction from the cacophony of sounds that had erupted around him, such the faucet dripping, the mumbled conversations down the hall, and the tiny insects crawling around in the couch cushion. Oh, and let's not forget the nearby smell of a startled dog and a male human, the faraway scents of various people and residents wafting in from outside the apartment, the entrancing aroma of food from within the cabinets, and the leftover smell of butts on the couch cushion beneath him.
'What's going on? This isn't the afterlife, is it?'
Suddenly Thomas heard the sound of his own voice from the bedroom doorway, except it seemed to be trying to imitate the sound of dog's bark. This was soon followed by a human-voiced whimpering which was oddly reminiscent of the noises Rufus was prone to make when hiding under the bed from a thunderstorm. Looking back toward the sound, Thomas got a blurry vision of his own body with its arms out, seemingly unsure about balancing on two legs. Then he remembered the little ghost creature he'd seen floating in that direction.
'Wait a minute. If Rufus is in my body, then I must be ...'
Craning his had backward to look himself over, Thomas was disturbed to see his rowdy pet's canine form from the vantage point of Rufus's head. The long, shaggy tail he'd taken possession of spontaneously ducked down under his abdomen while his breathing and heartbeat picked up speed.
'Oh no, it can't be! Have I gone nutty? Somehow I'm a dog now, and my dog is me!'
Thomas whimpered frantically in Rufus's voice, laid his head down on the couch and covered it with his paws, trying to drown out the clamor and stifle his own fear so he could think straight.