I.  Flesh

As a little girl, I was always a daddy’s girl. That’s how I remember it anyway. I followed

him everywhere, giggling at his jokes and smiling up at him like he was the sun. My little feet struggled to keep up with his long strides, but it didn’t matter—he’d always slow down, waiting for me to catch up. I think he did more waiting than anything else, but it never seemed to pester him. He was my father. Strong, capable, steady. He was the one who’d laugh when I tripped and help me back up afterward, the one who held me the moment I was born and every second after.

It was just him and me.

When I was bored, he’d make up stories for me. He’d ask me to create a prompt, and then he’d spin a new tale on the spot, each one different, each one full of magic. I was always his main character. The brave princess, the strong knight, the kind fairy, anything I wanted to be. My world was small, but it felt perfect. No one else mattered.

No one else could compare. It was just him. Just us. I wish it could’ve stayed just his little girl.

II.  Exoskeleton

It was late. Later than anyone should’ve been awake. I could feel it in the weight of the night pressing down on me, making my eyelids heavy, pulling me deeper into the softness of my bed. The moonlight filtered through the window, thin beams that shimmered like delicate webs across the room. They seemed to wait for me to stir, to catch me in their trap.

I heard his footsteps before I saw him, heavy and deliberate, breaking the stillness. The webs parted for him, bending under his weight. And then, a whisper. So soft it was barely a breath. It brushed against my arm—light, like a test, like a touch I wasn’t meant to notice I froze. My heart pounded harder than my thoughts. It felt like something inside me was being pulled away, torn from its place, caught in the web. The touch lingered, insistent and

impossible to ignore. I curled in on myself, trying to fold into the mattress, trying to escape.

Then a voice. A whisper inside my head, so quiet, so small.

“Breathe... slowly... form a shell.”

The voice sounded like mine, but thinner, softer. Like a memory of me, smaller than I was, something weaker. I tried to answer, tried to say something, anything —but my words wouldn’t come. They caught in my throat, trapped behind a barrier I couldn’t see.

I imagined my skin hardening, slowly, turning to something thick and strong. A shell. My spine began to ache, shifting, and I felt myself changing. My fingers bent, the joints twisting into unnatural angles. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I could only feel him still there, near me, watching, lingering.

When I woke the next morning, the world felt different. The furniture around me seemed larger, like it had grown while I slept. My legs, too long, stumbled through the hall, awkward with every step. My body felt alien. Not mine.

And the voice? It hadn’t gone. It was there, growing louder in my mind, pushing me to become something else, something smaller. Something... different.

III.  Epidermis

Nothing changed when the sun came up. Breakfast was the same. The table was the same. The food was the same. But everything felt too big. Or maybe it was just me who felt too small.

The chair I sat in had grown gnarled, like it was made from the twisted branches of some dark tree. My cup felt heavy, as though it weighed a hundred pounds, and when I opened my mouth to speak, the words didn’t come. They scattered, slipping through the air like threads of silk, too light to hold onto.

I tried to tell my mother what had happened. Tried to explain how the night felt wrong, how my body didn’t feel like mine. But all she said was, “Stop imagining things.”

Her voice was soft, but distant, as though she didn’t hear me at all. “He wouldn’t do that.

You must’ve dreamt it.”

Dream. The word felt like it was pressing down on me, heavy and suffocating. She wouldn’t believe me. Couldn’t. She was already too far away, lost in the sound of her own words.

I could feel the house around me, stretching and shifting. The walls pressed in, the ceiling rising higher than I remembered. The air hummed with something I couldn’t name, and every movement, every touch from anyone else felt bruising, too sharp, too wrong.

I could hear things now, things no one else seemed to notice—the vibrations in the floors, the creaks in the walls. I couldn’t stop myself from following them, from feeling their rhythm deep in my bones.

But no one else seemed to hear it. No one else seemed to feel it.

IV. Hemolymph

The pills came the following week. Small, white, unassuming. I didn’t think they’d do anything to me. I thought maybe they’d only fix the problem, make everything go away. But they didn’t. They blurred the edges of the world, stretched the light until it felt wrong. Shadows darkened, thickened, and the floor seemed to move beneath me like I was walking on water.

I felt delicate. My fingers were too thin, my arms too frail. Every movement felt strange, like I was learning how to move again in a body that wasn’t mine. I could no longer grasp the

world with the same ease I once did. The cup, the spoon, even the feel of my clothes—everything was too large, too cumbersome. I moved with a careful, deliberate rhythm, like I was rehearsing something I wasn’t ready for.

The world had become a foreign place, its sounds and voices muffled, distorted. The words people spoke became shapes in the air, patterns I could almost understand, but not quite. I nodded, smiled, and murmured the right things, but I felt like I was slipping further and further away from them.

At night, I traced the room with my eyes, mapping every corner, every crevice, every crack. The silence was no longer a comfort. It resonated with me, vibrated in the air like a hum I couldn’t escape. My skin prickled with something other than fear—something older, more primal.

The transformation was continuing. And I was helpless to stop it.

V. Viscera

I became more cautious. The house continued to grow larger, the ceilings stretching higher, the walls pressing in. I felt smaller, each day more fragile than the last. I could feel myself changing—my fingers too thin, my knees too bent. My voice too high. Too shrill.

I tried to tell them again. I tried to make them understand. But they only laughed. They handed me more pills, pills that made everything blur, that made the world spin in ways I

couldn’t control.

I started to crawl, smaller and smaller each day. The shell beneath my skin hardened, the transformation becoming inevitable. The house shifted around me, and I felt myself folding in on itself. The corners of the rooms became my sanctuary. Dust was my comfort. The walls seemed to pulse in rhythm with my own heart.

And then, her voice again—my mother’s voice, filtering down from above, from far away, out of reach. “Think of his future,” she whispered, her words catching in the air, thick and suffocating. “No one will believe you.”

I couldn’t speak anymore. I couldn’t answer. I only nodded, feeling my antennae brush the air, sensitive to things I didn’t understand. The walls had become my pulse, the floor my rhythm. Light no longer hurt. Noise no longer pierced. The transformation was complete.

VI.  Hemocoel

I had become more careful, more deliberate. The world had grown beyond me, stretching to a scale I could no longer comprehend. My limbs had changed—elongated, segmented. My voice, unrecognizable. The silence of the house was my refuge. The walls, the floors, they were all part of me now.

I had learned to move beneath the floorboards, surviving in the hidden geometry of the house, folding into the shadows. The world above, the one that had once been mine, carried on without me. It didn’t matter. I no longer belonged there.

I had become something else entirely. Something small, something quiet, something that didn’t need to speak to be seen. I existed in the spaces no one else could reach.

Alone. But alive. No longer just his little girl.