The sun hung low over the beach, casting everything in a molten, golden haze. Bob stood by the grill, wiping his hands on a towel, and Kate was maybe twenty feet away, flipping through her phone under the umbrella.
It started with a feeling deep inside Bob's bones. A shiver that had nothing to do with the salty breeze. His vision blurred. The smell of cooking meat twisted into something acrid, metallic. He staggered back, his skin prickling painfully.
Kate gasped across the sand, dropping her phone into the hot grains. Her body seized, arms snapping stiff at her sides, her knees buckling as if yanked by invisible strings.
Bob tried to call out, but his voice caught in his throat. He felt his insides shift, writhe. His hands once calloused, broad, strong thinned before his eyes, the veins pulling back, fingers becoming slender, delicate. His arms shrank, muscles softening and smoothing, hair vanishing like smoke.
Pain lanced through his torso his chest tingled, compressed and then ballooned outward, flesh rising under his shirt in a sickening, alien pressure. His ribs snapped into a narrower shape, his waist caving in sharply, hips widening with an audible pop. His stomach flattened, hardened with youthful tightness. Every second was wrong wrong his own body betraying him at the most fundamental level.
He looked down in horror as the beach shorts he wore sagged, sliding over suddenly narrow hips. His legs, once thick and sturdy, became slim, shapely, smooth. The hair receded rapidly, leaving behind youthful, unblemished skin.
His scalp tingled violently and he reached up just in time to feel his hair lengthen between his fingers, cascading over his shoulders in silken sheets. His face twisted his jaw softening, his cheekbones lifting, nose reshaping, lips plumping into something unmistakably feminine and painfully familiar.
Bob collapsed onto the sand, breathing in frantic, shallow gasps and the voice that escaped his lips was higher, sweeter Kates voice.
Across from him, Kate or rather Bob's original body was undergoing its own grotesque metamorphosis. Kate screamed, but the sound was quickly swallowed as her vocal cords thickened. Her limbs expanded, bulking up, stretching awkwardly. Her delicate fingers cracked and thickened, callouses forming by the second.
Her torso widened, her waist broadening into the solid, everyday thickness of a man who had long since passed his physical prime. Hair sprouted across her arms, chest, and legs in patches, coarse and dark. Her face itched furiously, jawline pushing forward, cheeks roughening, stubble exploding along her chin and jaw.
She now he stumbled to his knees, clutching at the sides of his face, trying to hold onto the last pieces of herself as the beard crept over her once-smooth skin.
When it was over, the two figures gasped for breath, staring at each other in terror.
On one side of the sand: a middle-aged mans body, shoulders slumped, hands trembling, blue dad-jeans sagging awkwardly at the hips.
On the other: a teenage girls body, tangled hair falling over wide, panicked eyes, wearing a slightly too-big T-shirt and bikini bottoms, still clutching Bob's old grill towel.
Somewhere, a seagull cried out above them. Otherwise, the world was utterly still.
And Bob, trapped in Kate's youthful body, realized in sickening clarity: he could feel everything the smaller heartbeat, the different posture, the alien flexibility of his joints. It was all real.
Kate, meanwhile, screamed again but this time it came out as a rough, booming man's voice that wasnt her own.
The rest of the family, a few yards away, turned toward the commotion and the nightmare had only just begun.