Tim was trying not to look at the small square on the screen that showed his picture. He didn't really want to know exactly what he looked like in this form, he just wanted to get out of it as soon as possible. But it was awfully difficult to avert his eyes. Even when he was trying to look away, he kept sneaking peeks from one moment to the next until his mental image of himself became clear. Smack-dab in the middle of his many sharp green needles, three ornaments still were hanging. Two of them were white baubles that served as his eyes, while the other was a flat wooden piece with a picture of a cartoon mouth painted on it. The designs on each of these were magically animated, and could match his expression just as easily as any real facial features could. Other than that, he was indistinguishable from any other spruce tree - particularly now that the rest of his ornaments were gone. The others had either fallen off and been broken, or had been helpfully removed by Mindy.
Mindy, feeling a responsibility to make sure everyone she'd accidentally afflicted was okay, had been helpful in a lot of other ways these past few days. She'd made sure to pour some water in his pot of soil each day, to keep him from drying out. And she'd asked everyone on their floor if they'd be willing to volunteer to help Tim whenever he might need it. So far, the only other person who'd agreed to help was Callie. The name meant nothing to Tim until she walked into the apartment, and he could immediately recognize her as the pig-woman from the party. She'd seemed so distraught, he remembered, when she came back out into the living room, partially undressed, and learned that her changes wouldn't be going away. Her tiger boyfriend, Keith, had been a lot calmer about the idea, though.
And, between the two of them, Mindy and Callie were doing what they could to make Tim's bizarre new existence a little easier. They'd sent in an application for transformation reversal on his behalf, in addition to each filling out one of their own. And, realizing that he certainly had it worse than either of them, they'd gone the extra mile and signed him up for a group therapy session, which was what he was in the middle of right now.
The whole thing, of course, had been hastily assembled in the past few days. Since many people couldn't leave their houses, or were afraid to go out, the meeting was held over Zoom. The leader of the discussion, a licensed psychiatrist, was a teddy bear of a man - literally. A barely visible assistant at his side pulled the string on his back and his voicebox came to life. "We don't know how long this is going to last," he said at the start of the session, "but we know that it's going to be temporary. Think of this as an opportunity to let out your frustrations, and know that you're not alone in feeling that way. And if you're not ready to speak up just yet, that's okay, too."
Tim certainly didn't feel like saying anything to the group - just watching and listening to the others was more than enough for him. The meeting had particularly attracted those whose changes had seriously disrupted their lives - probably because everyone else was at work in the middle of a Monday afternoon. And while he could very much see that he wasn't alone in what he was going through, that didn't exactly make him feel any better about any of this. In some of the little squares on the screen, he couldn't even tell what the person had been turned into - the camera just seemed to be showing an empty room filled with ordinary furniture. He shuddered to think of how much worse things would be for him if he couldn't even move or speak.
For instance, a woman with a rabbit-like face and long, floppy ears had just finished recounting her experience from that night. "I know he's really still alive somehow," she was saying, her eyes red and her fur stained with tears. "But to see my brother just collapse into a pile of bones like that... it was like watching him die right in front of me. And what really seems unfair about it all," she said, her sorrow stiffening into indignation, "is what they've been saying on the news, that the way you changed was based on the way you thought about your costume, not just whatever the costume is. So other people went out and bought the exact same skeleton bodysuit from Dollar City, and they're walking around just fine right now, and my brother is lying lifeless on the floor, because of what? Some tiny little subconscious idea that he never even really thought about? That's such... bullshit!", she finally spat out, her tongue still tripping a little over her buck teeth.
Tim's eyes kept wandering across the screen - anything to keep himself from lingering on his own image - as she finished her point. In one square, a tiny fairy was flitting her wings rapidly to stay in the air where the webcam could see her and she nodded at what she was hearing. In another, a smartphone was propped against a chair and pointed at a mirror - which seemed like a strange setup until Tim noticed the barely visible face that the phone had just above its screen. And in the next square over ... there was the most beautiful face Tim had ever seen, surrounded by a halo of yellow petals. She was a sunflower, and there was nothing else human about her outside of the face. Another woman sat beside her to assist, since she had nothing that could pass for limbs, just a few leaves sticking out from her long, thin stem.
Tim couldn't stop staring at her, and not just because it was better than looking at himself. He was embarrassed to be so blatant about it, and grateful that no one could tell he was staring. But what really troubled him was why he found her so attractive in the first place. He never would have thought that he'd have the slightest bit of interest in anything other than a normal human woman before. For fuck's sake, was it because they were both... plants? Did he seriously have some sort of uncontrollable, perverted desire to... pollinate her?
But his eyes kept being drawn back to the sight of her right up until the Zoom call ended and he was left staring at an empty desktop screen. And then he was alone again, with nothing to do but wait for one of his neighbors to come back. He looked down at the floor, his branches drooping. Even if he was one of the first to get magically fixed, this was going to feel like a long, long period of his life.