From Your Mind to Paper

“…one eyed, one horned flying purple people eater…” blared from the alarm radio that Gregor slapped fearlessly with disdain just moments after the knocks quieted at the bedroom door. When Gregor withdrew his arm, he noticed it wasn’t an arm; it was calloused with crusty, hairy grey scaled talon-like claws. It was startling to Gregor and the sight of this made him spring up from the bed. In a single bound, he found himself standing before the dresser mirror and was peering at, what was no longer a familiar face. Where there once were ears, Gregor noticed long antennas that coiled at the tips. He reached out with his talon and grabbed at it and if forcefully sprung back into place. He shrieked and gasped because his face was no longer his own. His flesh was no longer flesh. Where there once was teenage acne were now green scales, the color of his father’s old army fatigues. He had prickly gray hairs coming from numerous precarious places.   His eyes were no longer his own, they were a hematite black color they had silvery gleam. They were enormous, even and proportionate to his enlarged head but as large and round as bowling balls. The diameters of his eyes were the size of dinner plates and his head the size of a backboard.   His anger and awe would normally have him piercing his lips with confusion, anger, fear, and uncertainty yet he can’t. He doesn’t have lips any longer; he has pinchers and not just two pinchers, but four, one set inside the other. The outer set open and snapped closed, horizontally and the inner pinched closed vertically.   Gregor widened his newly developed jaws and wailed out a metallic shriek of horror. The sound reminds Gregor of the awful sound of the bugle that his best friend Jimmy played every year at Eagle Scout camp when they were young.   That is when Gregor eyed eight, nine, maybe even ten rows of uneven and jagged teeth that looked like shards of glass inside of this gruesome mouth of his. They were transparent and the light hit them...