As I was eating breakfast, I heard a faint " 'morning", followed by the sound of lazy steps going to the bathroom. That made me smile. Busy digging deeper into my cereal bowl, I barely felt the room flicker. I opened up 9gag and scrolled brainlessly for a while. Rhythmic thumping sounds brought me back from my daydream as my roommate entered the kitchen.


"Hey, how's it going?" Said Katie, finally dressed. "I expected you to sleep through the whole day."

I shrugged. 

"I guess I drank a lot more water than I thought yesterday. No headaches or lazy asses this morning." I gestured towards her leg. "Nice work there, by the way. That's what you did yesterday evening I suppose?"


Her gaze droped to her pants : bright red skinny jeans she had bought the day before during our shopping session. Powers oblige, they had instantly changed appearance earlier when I modified Katie's body and since she didn't come to the party anyway, magic thought she had time to fix 'em up last night. The right leg was now properly sewn against her short stump. She turned as red as her pants and reached for the seam with her nails.

"Yeah, not the most edgy thing to do on a friday night. Took me a couple hours, but huh."

She sat down beside me and sighed, resting her chin in an open hand. I tapped her other hand with my spoon.

"Sooooooo, what do you want to do today?"

Her fingers quickly receeded inside her body, leaving just a bit of flesh at the base of her palm. She blinked and shrugged.

I tried again. "Movie? Stroll in the park? Library studying?"

"Not sure. I'd just hang around." She got up and hopped to the fridge to grab the orange juice. She pressed it against her using her incomplete hand, and held onto nearby walls with the other one. "Here, the mall, the park, doesn't really matter I guess." She drank directly from the box and wiped her mouth with her stump.

"Ok then, I have the perfect plan. But you'll have to trust me first." 

"Tell me then, stop being so mysterious." She absently twiddled with her stump, pinching it or rubbing the skin in her other hand.

I took a deep breath and put a hand on her shoulder. I anchored my eyes to hers and said in a dead serious voice : "What if I told you magic was real? What if I told you I could rewrite history, make us queens, or destroy entire continents in the blink of an eye? What if I told you I could turn you into a cat for the weekend and you could keep all your memories of it? Or even grow you a penis? What if I told you normality was an illusion, simply waiting to be sculpted by a greater force?"

Her intact arm had evaporated while I was monologuing. "Are you sure you're feeling fine? Surely you're delirious from a fever or something. You're kind of freaking me out." She reached for my forehead and smooshed her stump on it to check my temperature. A puzzled look materialized on her face. 

Our faces grew closer: "Katie what if I told you not even 20 minutes ago you still had your four limbs and I was the one who cut them off?"

She froze. Breathless before what I had just told her. Her eyes watered and her poor face morphed into a mask of pure anger. She hit the table hard and yelled : "YOU'RE DISGUSTING, ROBYN! YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?! My life is hell, I'm basically helpless and you dare mock me this way? What a sick joke!" Tears ran down her cheeks. "What is wrong with you?! I thought you were my friend!"

Gosh, this didn't go quite as planned. 

"Oh my god Katie calm down please! You don't understand!"

"No, YOU don't understand!" Her ire was now mangled with sadness and my heart cracked a bit. "Do you have any idea what I've been through? I got beaten in elementary school and laughed at in high school for being a freak, I never had a boyfriend, I can barely cook for myself, it takes me 45 fucking minutes every morning just to get dressed... I can still take a few jokes but this had gone too far!

"Holy hell, I'm so sorry! Here!" I snapped my fingers and restored her memories.

She stared strait ahead without saying a word, her mouth wide open. She looked at me, then at her short arm, then at me again before closing her mouth. She shrugged her naked shoulder trying to wipe her face and opened her mouth again, still speechless before her new body. She hugged herself to pat her right side, running her palm along her collarbone to the point where it abruptly ended, where her arm should've started.

"Holy fuck. I hate you", she said under her breath. "I mean look at that!" She sniffed and rubbed her nose. "Half of me is gone and I didn't even notice!"

"That's because I didn't want you to know. But now I do."

"That's still wrong, Robyn. But also pretty cool." She looked away from me and back to her body. "What the actual fuck..."

She brought her stump near her face and alternatively contracted several muscles in her arm. You could see the skin contract and shift and fold a bit under the effort as she tried to hold the box of juice. The same thing was happening to her short leg. The abbreviated muscles tensed beneath the fabric of her pants without her noticing.

"What are you anyway?"

I scratched the back of my head. "I don't even know myself, so..."

She reached for her leg stump and and admired her own work at sewing the fabric to a tight fit. Her face lit up and she spoke again.

"Ok. Surprise me now."

She laid her arm flat on the table and closed her eyes. Following her demand, I deleted it and elongated her leg back to its original length (don't worry about the pants, they're ok). When she noticed the changes I had made, she stood up and paced back and forth around the living room.

"Gosh I didn't notice how much I missed walking." She flexed her legs, squatted, sat on the couch, and brought her legs up in lotus position. "They feel different, though. I think I'm much more flexible now. Also I can feel all the imperfections in the floor... as well as every inch of fabric on my skin from my waist down."

"That's normal", I told her. "Your senses are limited to fewer limbs now, so you can feel more with each of them than before. Like how blind people use their hearing a lot more since they can't see."

"Makes sense. So I guess I could..."

She bit her lip and leaned back, bringing both of her legs over her head. Using her toes, she managed to undo her ponytail and jam wild locks of hair behind her ears.


"What else do you want to try before we head out?"

"Hmm." She brought her toes to her mouth and pondered. "No more feet. Only hands now!"

Some would argue I took that request quite a bit literally, but that's how the best bodies are made. In an instant, her legs melted away, leaving absolutely nothing attached to her pelvis. Then, I gave her back some hands, but connected them directly to her shoulders. Did she ask for arms? No? That's what I thought.

"Do you like them?" I giggled.

"Oh my god that's even worse than earlier."

Her small hands bore only three fingers each, none of them being thumbs, giving her an amusing T-Rex look. Good thing she wore a tank top right now, because I'm not sure they would've made it out the sleeves. She had to lean her head to one side to be able to reach her face. She jokingly picked her nose before spotting the tv remote.

"What if I want to turn on the tv now?"

Her torso bent forward and she fell flat on her stomach, her hands barely able to reach their target. Whipping her hair away from her face, she wiggled herself a little further and clenched her fingers around the remote. 

"God, I can't even press the buttons now! Can I have at least thumbs on these suckers?"

"Nope." I said, crossing my arms. "You can do it, I believe in you." I winked.

She sighed again and crawled all the way to the armrest to swing herself back up. Just as she brought her hand to her face and stuck her tongue out to reach the controls, I slowly shortened her limbs again, first to keep just out of reach of the controls, and then continued until she was completely limbless.

"Hey, not fair! Woaaah!!!" She had tipped over once again and now laid on her side, her back against the couch. "Ok, I'm tired now. Can I go back to sleep with at least one arm?"

"Actually", I said with a sly grin, "I know exactly how we could use your body to our advantage today." I snapped my fingers again.

"What's the plan?" If a second ago she struggled to move with her limbless body, she now appeared to have lived her whole life this way. "If you're thinking what I'm thinking, it'll never work. I wasn't admitted on any roller coasters since I was 10 because the staff think I might slip through the equipment and fall to my death."

She shrugged and sank her teeth in a nearby cushion, straightened her body and threw it on the floor right beside the couch. She then bent forward to land on her belly and squirmed her hips back and forth to drag them closer to the side of the couch. Finally, her chin gave the final push and her rump delicately landed on the padded floor. Leveled with her laptop, set on the now-shorter living room table, she flipped it open with her mouth, grabbed a dull pencil between her teeth and started typing.

"Hmmff!", she dropped the pencil, "the new exposition on Egyptian pottery and art starts today at the National History Museum! It's going to be so crowded though, we'll never make it inside."

"My dear, the reason why you can't ride coasters shall be our savior today."

After a few waddles, she turned around to face me with a sly grin.

"How couldn't I think of it first? I can get us priority passes! Let's roll!"

She gave me a beaming smile and shrugged her shoulders high, waiting for me to pick her up, so I put my hands on her waist and swung her into my arms. Holding her was a piece of cake now since she was extremely lightweight. It was like carrying a talking potato sack with a head and breasts. Remembering the incident earlier in the kitchen, I felt bad for my friend and restored her memories. She gasped then frowned as she became both annoyed and amazed at the whole situation. Like you'd do with a baby, I feigned to let go of her for a second just to tease her and her eyes grew wider than I imagined they physically could. Her back arched as she desperately tried to prevent her fall but my securing hands brought her back to me. She tried to bite me in return, but threatening her to erase her memories once again, she calmed down. As I walked around the apartment to gather supplies to today, one hand beneath her shorts, I could feel her torso squirm as she evaluated the last remains of her anatomy.