The New Metamorphosis
by Amy L. Bernstein
Charlotte Bradley wasn’t sure how much time remained before the changes to her body were impossible to hide, especially from colleagues in the faculty lounge at Anton Elementary, which used to be a supply closet, so there wasn’t much room to maneuver. Or from her pupils, who seemed wildly inattentive until she realized they were preternaturally attuned to the smallest changes. Like the day she came to school with hair cut one inch shorter than usual. Nearly every kid had an opinion about it and said so.
Charlotte was struggling to define the alarming reality of her altered…still altering…life. She’d read Kafka and knew all about Gregor Samsa’s disgusting transformation. But he was lucky, in a way, because he turned all at once; he went to sleep as a human and awoke as a cockroach. On her worst days, Charlotte consoled herself with the thought that whatever was happening, she clearly would not end up a bug. Of course, Gregor ends up dead from self-imposed starvation. Charlotte tried to keep horrifying thoughts like that at bay.
Nevertheless, the slow drip-drip of minor modifications occurring over days, weeks, and months was agonizing. Losing control over her body bit by bit, a patch of skin altered one morning, a breast nipple the next, was terrifying. Why was this happening? Where would it all end?
Am I dying? Am I diseased? Am I cursed?
She ruled out medical consultation. Gregor and his family certainly didn’t consult a physician. Why would they? What could any doctor possibly explain to them that they didn’t already see for themselves?
Charlotte carried on as normally as possible. The more radically her bodied changed, the less inclined she was to make radical, life-altering decisions. As if “carrying on” would engender a cure. She converted her school wardrobe from slim black pants and blouses to baggy dresses and combat boots to mask her slow-morphing shape. She knew there were rumors floating among both kids and faculty: that she was pregnant, or gaining weight, or maybe she was depressed, or she thought her new style would impress the kids as “cool.”
“Listen, are you okay?” Principal Verna Riggles cornered Charlotte in the hallways between periods one morning.
“Why?” Charlotte put a hand to her face to make sure everything up there was still normal.
“You seem…different. Distracted, maybe? And you haven’t turned in your quarterly markings. That’s not like you. Come and see me after last period, yeah?”
Charlotte didn’t show. Instead, she turned in her report to get Verna off her back.
In the faculty lounge the next day, Ken, who taught math, sidled up to her, sandwich in hand, and asked if she was going through “the change.” Charlotte laughed—the first laugh in a long time.
“Are you, Ken?” she asked so all could hear. Fritzi Jones, the librarian, was brewing a new pot of coffee. Sasha (art) was cleaning out the mini-fridge.
“Whose yogurt is this?” Sasha asked. “It’s unmarked. How many times—”
“Are you going through a change, Ken?” Charlotte asked. “Learning how to keep your eyes off the chests of fifth-grade girls?”
“Charlotte, that’s not—” Sasha began.
“But it’s true,” Fritzi said. “Ken needs to be called out on this.”
“I have never, not once, touched a student at this school,” Ken said, hurling half his sandwich in the garbage.
“Oh, but staring is fine,” Charlotte said. The briefest flash of an image: Ken splayed on the floor, covered in blood. She blinked it away. “Prick,” she muttered.
“What’s wrong with you?” Ken asked her. “What are you so worked up about?”
Sasha and Fritzi paused, suggesting they were interested in an answer to this question. So was Charlotte. But she didn’t have one.
With each passing day, she knew less about the world and how it worked, what it expected of her. She knew even less about her future and where she’d end up—or how she’d end up.
On Thursday, she was teaching her third-period language arts class about adverbs. A list of words ending in -ly were written on the blackboard. She was about ask for a volunteer to put one of those adverbs in a sentence when a switch flipped in her brain—she heard a click—and she said something else entirely.
“Forearmed is forewarned.” What? “When they arrive, I’ll be ready. I am all that stands between you and your bloodiest, scariest, most awful nightmare.”
“Ms. Bradley?” Davy Franklin, pale and skinny, eyes like brown saucers, was staring at her. Everybody was. But Davy’s thousand-yard stare was more intense than most, as if he didn’t need to blink. “Are you okay, Ms. Bradley? Has the devil got you by the tail?”
“Of course I’m okay!” Charlotte roared. Davy kept staring at her while the other kids shrank a little in their seats. “What gives you the idea I’m not okay?”
A rare silence ruled the room.
“Colin,” Charlotte said. “Put one of the words on the board in a sentence.”
The kids looked around. There was nobody named Colin.
Naomi put up a hand, cranked it slowly into the air. “Do you mean Curtis, Ms. Bradley?” Curtis sat next to Naomi.
“Curtis,” Charlotte said. “Put…” But where was Colin? She needed to check up on him. Or keep him in check, maybe that was it. “Curtis,” she began again, eyes closed to avoid a roomful of frightened stares. “Please choose an adjective on the board to put into a sentence.”
It was a minor miracle that Verna didn’t get wind of this little episode. The kids were perhaps too scared shitless to report her short-lived run-off-the-rails moment to their parents. Or maybe they didn’t have the words to describe what had happened.
What did happen?
She couldn’t say. She hardly remembered. She thought maybe it was all in her head and that nothing unusual happened in class right up to the bell. She knew who Curtis was, of course she did—the dark-haired boy who sat in the back and stared out the window more often than not.
She knew all her kids by name, by habit, by grade. She knew who, in all likelihood, would move on to college in seven or eight years, and who most likely would not. She remembered the extra-special ones, like Stacy, who read a book a day. Ben, who turned wood scraps into percussion instruments.
She didn’t know why she said what she said to them—if she said it—about being armed, about bloody nightmares. She remembered the click in her head, like someone turning on a noisy light switch. After that: fuzziness.
At home that night, she sat in the dark drinking whisky, wondering if she’d consciously recognize a moment of no return once it arrived, that moment when she’d lose control not only over her body parts, but over her thoughts, her volition…the complex dance of neural pathways and the once-orderly war between ego and id…all spinning across an inscrutable landscape beyond her understanding.
Charlotte’s dreams ceased to mimic the emptying out of random desk drawers of the mind, focusing relentlessly, instead, on scenes of apocalypse: bloody battlefields littered for miles with the ragged corpses of children, cannons releasing lethal iron balls that tore through limbs, while laser guns gutted bodies with heartless precision. Weapons of all types and sizes, amassed and deployed by invisible forces.
And when she awoke, bathed in sweat, Charlotte felt that force massing inside her, like a cancerous tumor.
She debated calling in sick, but substitute teachers were in short supply. Verna would be furious. And Charlotte didn’t want her kids believing that not showing up was okay.
She dragged herself to school that Friday, her body heavy, lead in her veins, every step a fight with gravity. She coasted through first and second periods, relying on autopilot to move from adverbs to adjectives, from analyzing a passage in a short story to prepping the kids for a spelling quiz.
She avoided the faculty lounge at lunch, remaining behind in an empty classroom, the hallway chaos seeping through the closed door. She fell into a stuporous sleep, head on hands at her desk, loose pens and coil-bound notebooks pushed to the floor.
The apocalypse dream takes over: screams and shouts, running feet, banging. A piece of her rebels inside the dream. Not here! Not this! Not in school!
A sudden shift to louder noises.
“Charlotte! What the fuck!”
Charlotte lifts her head, caught between dreaming and waking. Ken is yelling through the open door, his face red, veins bulging on his neck.
He spits three words. “Active shooter situation!” He disappears, leaving the classroom door open, revealing a familiar dreamscape of bodies fleeing in all directions at once, children crying and screaming, teachers running after them. Fritzi runs by, then Sasha.
Charlotte parses Ken’s message outside the bounds of normal time. She rises, maybe fast, maybe slow. She walks, no, she lumbers, her body heavier than ever, limbs going rigid, muscles hardening like steel, flesh yielding to something sturdier. Her sight sharpens, she senses she is taller.
She walks the emptied hallway, her clanging boots the only sound now. In the art room, Naomi, 11, lies flat on her back, a red hole drilled through her belly. Blood pools beneath her, a shade darker than the nearby container of spilled red paint.
Charlotte walks on. Room 104 is empty. So is Room 106. She completes the first-floor survey and heads to the second floor, taking the steps three at a time.
In the library, Davy Franklin holds a gun as big as his head. It’s clear he knows how to use it; his hands are in all the right places and the weight of the thing appears not to faze him. Davy stands near Fritzi’s desk in the center of the room, surrounded by low shelves full of books. Half a dozen kids stand shoulder to shoulder a few yards from Davy, still and white as marble.
Charlotte knows that Fritzi and the other teachers have shepherded as many kids as possible as far away from Davy as they could get. They’re probably crammed in the boiler room in the far end of the basement. They rest are hiding in the tightest spaces they can find.
Charlotte edges into the library, slow and relaxed.
Davy squints at her. “Is that you, Ms. Bradley? You look…weird. You’re, like, sticking out in funny places.”
“What’s going on, Davy?” Charlotte’s voice is deep and metallic, completely unfamiliar. “Last time I checked, you didn’t need to kill anybody to borrow a book from the school library.”
“The library is evil,” Davy says. “It’s a bad place. It’s doing bad things to us kids.”
“Who says?”
“My mom and a bunch of other people. They come to my house. They talk about how they gotta remove the bad books from the library before we get hurt. My mom’s worried that every time I come in here, Ms. Jones puts a spell on me. Mom washes my mouth out with soap on library days, to get rid of the demons.” Davy looks at his classmates, waving the gun in their direction. “It’s too late for you. The evil got inside you, already. Naomi too. I’m real sorry for you. But I can’t let the bad stuff spread around more. The devil’s got you all by the tail!”
Davy cocks the gun.
That sound, that particular click-thunk of sliding metal, sends shock waves through Charlotte, as if the sound alone were a bullet piercing her, cutting deep into whatever remained of tender, feeling flesh.
She’s back at Remington Elementary-Middle, her original self.
Once again, she reaches Colin’s desk and hands him the paper with a big red F at the top.
Once again, she and Colin exchange a look, his eyes dark and empty.
Once again, he rises slowly and reaches into the backpack slung across his chair, while she moves onto the next student.
Once again, he calls her name. Charlotte Bradley. She turns. He fires a gun at her belly. It does not go off. He looks at the gun, slides the action mechanism again—click-thunk—and shifts his aim slightly to the right of Charlotte’s shoulder. He fires again. An earsplitting bang. Charlotte turns in time to see Susie Hamilton falling to the ground, blood spilling out from an enormous hole in her chest…
Davy is locked and loaded. A thousand scenarios whiz through Charlotte’s mind. A thousand ways for this to go. But no, there is only one way. Davy fires. Marc crumples to the ground. The children cry without making a sound.
Charlotte suddenly knows her why. All moments were leading to this moment.
Davy raises the gun again. Charlotte looks straight at him and fires her body. She knows who she is, what she has become. She is a weapon. The weapon, firing not cannonballs or lasers, as in her dreams, but a barrage of lethal pellets manufactured within her personal biological factory of destruction.
In that instant, a kick-back, an orgasmic release, shudders through her.
Davy drops like a small stone, blood blooming on his forehead, his thousand-yard stare intact.
The kids look at Davy, then at Charlotte.
“That was amazing, wasn’t it?” says the unfamiliar metallic voice. “You’re safe. I saved you. Go find the others and tell them they can come out now.”
The children move slowly, in unison, small steps toward the door.
Charlotte roars unexpectedly. Her body shudders mightily, as if she were shedding an afterbirth. Then a surge, a surge, builds up inside, she needs to discharge again, only bigger this time…
This is unexpected…the aftermath is shifting…
This is the point of no return.
“Run!” She screams at the children, who awaken from their spell and bolt.
Old Charlotte realizes she must get out of school as fast as possible. New Charlotte feels invincible, ready to wage bloody hell, to rid the world of all the Colins and Davys, the curdled innocents corrupted by their elders, none of whom would escape her wrath.
She opens the window and jumps, landing solidly on unbreakable limbs. Runs and runs toward open land, away from people. No longer Gregor Samsa trapped at home with an indifferent family, she is the reincarnation of Frankenstein’s monster, heading to a barren, icy land where a different kind of death awaits her, not the funeral pyre with its implied finality of ashes, but a living death where the urge to destroy overwhelms the urge to save. Where retribution is the only justice and salvation ceases to exist.
And where Charlotte Bradley will have an eternity to contemplate the mysterious forces at work that turned her into the very thing that had wounded her most.
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