Taking a deep breath, letting it out.
Repeat.
Everything seemed dark. Quiet.
Inhale. Exhale.
He flashed back to the woman's face as she opened dainty lips and consumed the last morsel of Dan off her fork.
Inhale. He fought to inhale. His lungs felt deprived, cheated.
They demanded air.
"I can't breathe..."
He staggered onto his feet.
"I can't...breathe..."
His spindly legs collapsed, one at a time, and he thrashed weakly on a rug.
Multiple legs? That wasn't right.
Parched gills, normally blood-filled, feathery organs efficient at extracting oxygen from water, looked limp and dry at the base of this spidery lobster's legs.
Kat lied.
He was suffocating.
He tried to swirl desiccated eyestalks. "No!" Dan protested. "I'm supposed to be me again."
He tried to inhale, but his crustacean respiratory system depended on water.
"Dan!"
Kat's voice sounded surprised. "When did you get back?" Then she produced an excited little squeal. "Oh, does this mean...Oh, it does! You got eaten!"
His eyestalks had trouble focusing on Kat's enormous, blurry, looming shape.
"I can't breathe!"
She looked down at the weakly thrashing lobster on a bedroom rug.
"Well, of course not, silly!"
Kat waved a hand and Dan suddenly found himself dipped into a tank that materialized along a bare wall in Kat's bedroom. The water felt so good as his frilly gills began to wave in gentle currents.
Rejuvenated, he immediately beset his duplicitous sibling with accusations.
"Is this your idea of re-spawning?"
Kat affected a yawn. "Of course," she answered and added a short laugh. "Oh, did you expect to come back as your old nerdy self?"
The water suddenly felt more chilly. "What do you mean?"
"You're still a shape-shifter who became a lobster, silly. You've got to pull yourself together and reclaim your human form. If that's still what you want."
"What do you mean? Of course that's what I want..."
"Then just do it." She looked through the tank and pretended anticipation. "Go ahead."
Dan's antennae waved in agitation.
"Or have you found your true calling." She giggled again.
"Just help me!" Dan insisted.