"Metamorphosis: Brothers in Skin"

They never come for you in the daylight. At least, that’s what I used to think. My brother Lucas and I were walking home from school, burnt-orange leaves swirling around our sneakers, when the van did a slow crawl down our block. Doors swung. Hands grabbed. The world spun.

Darkness. Smelling like oil and wet leaves. Rope scratches on my wrists. Lucas breathing beside me, faster than normal. “Ben,” he whispered—just once, the way he needed to when he was scared.

Voices outside, metallic and echoing. Then: a prick in my arm. I barely had time to blink before sleep sluiced my mind away.

---

I woke on cold tile. Fluorescents buzzed overhead. I turned my head, dizzy—Lucas lying a few feet away, blinking back at me and going, “Bro? You awake?” That’s how I knew I was alive.

Slam—door open. Lab coats swept in, and I swear one of them grinned through scar tissue that mapped his cheek. My body felt wrong; blood hot, hands tingling. They made us stand under spotlights and told us not to move. Some machine clicked and hummed.

“Initiate sequence,” one muttered.

My heart hammered—I wanted to ask what the hell was happening, but my voice wouldn’t work. Instead: a shudder ran through me. Fingertips stretched. My bones… moved, twisted, snapped. The pain wasn’t sharp, but deep. Fluid. Like being emptied out and filled with something new.

Scales. An extra thumb on each hand which grew into thick claws. My whole face pushed forward into a massive jaw. A sail of skin rose on my back—I looked over one stumpy shoulder and saw orange and green streaked across it like paint. Freaking sail. I lashed a new, thick tail and the walls blurred until my snout smacked stone.

Lucas? I spun, every movement awkward and NEW. A raptor stood blinking at me—bird-bright eyes behind little gold glasses.

He chirped, a high, confused note.

“What am I?” I tried to say, but it came out a thunderous bellow, echoing off the hard walls. The lab coats flinched. One of them laughed. “Beautiful,” she said, fingers worming into her computer’s keys.

We were caged for days. Maybe weeks. Sometimes they put us under again and tinkered with machines; sometimes we made each other laugh by snorting at the humans or spinning in circles.

Eventually, Lucas figured out how to change back—at will, like flicking on a flashlight. He’d been practicing, he told me: remember the feeling, hold it in your chest, picture yourself, then will it. For me, it took longer. My spiky tail smacked into things; my sail got crammed in doors. “Think human,” Lucas said, popping from feathery blue raptor back to his skinny, bespectacled self.

It took me four hours and a screaming headache, but I did it.

That night, the woman with the scar came in and told us they’d made a mistake. The program was compromised. We’d be “disposed of” soon.

I looked to Lucas. His hand trembled but his jaw set, fierce. I remembered playing hide-and-seek as kids, him always finding the best hiding places, the smartest escape routes.

“Ben,” he whispered, “We gotta dino up.”

We changed—this time on purpose. My senses exploded: I could smell the others, hear the lock clicking as one scientist prepared to open the cage. Lucas darted in raptor form, slicing with his sickle toe, and the guy crashed down, out cold. I used my bulk: smashing torn steel, flinging humans like toys.

Somewhere, alarms screamed. As we scrambled through the halls—one spinosaurus, one raptor—the world felt both enormous and smaller than I’d ever imagined. My hands might now be claws, but my brother was still here, fast by my side.

There was a hatch; it led up, up, up. The surface. I crashed through, sunlight blinding. For an instant, I thought I’d go mad with relief.

We changed back just long enough to hug—awkward and still half-shaking. Then, vanished into the woods behind the facility. We ran long, ran scared, till the only thing to hear was our breath and the wind.

We live in hiding these days. Lucas says it’s like being a superhero and a monster, wrapped in the same skin. Sometimes, when it’s safe, we practice. He loves the speed his claws bring. I love the feeling of the water cradling my sail when I swim as something impossibly old and strong.

I hate that we had to lose our old life. But I know, deep in my every cell, that whatever comes next, my brother and I will face it—claw, scale, tooth, and all—together.

This story was generated by user kade with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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