Vulture Metamorphoses

by SaraG

One morning, when Cindy woke up, she discovered that she had been transformed into a monstrous vulture.
Turning around, she saw her boyfriend’s body lying next to her. Drew looked peaceful in death–if it hadn’t been for the gouged eyes, Cindy could have sworn he was sleeping.

“Well, well,” she said, knowing she should feel horrified at the sight. “What a juicy treat!”. The thought caught her by surprise but once it was out, there was no taking it back. She dipped in (for the kill? For the scavenge?) and sunk her beak into the soft flesh of his apple-cheek. He was as tasty in death as he’d been in life.

Cindy realized this was wrong, but her vulture nature got the best of her. She dug in, and tried not to think.
Afterwards, she sat down wondering what to do. Damn Drew! He was always talking about genetic experiments and trans-species splicing. Doctors! A sick lot, all of them.

The next day, she ploughed a neat ditch down Drew’s body, but when she got to his testicles, she couldn’t proceed. She felt the faintest hint of an emotion and grabbed onto it. Those weren’t any random pair of balls, they were Drew’s balls, and she couldn’t bear to destroy them.

Instead, she nipped them off and half-jumped, half-fluttered to the kitchen. Perching on top of the fridge, she wrapped her neck around the handle of the freezer door, opened it, placed the balls inside and closed the door with a light nudge.

She was cold and wondered if she was getting sick. She set the oven to minimum temperature and crawled inside. The pain was a little like constipation and a lot like menstrual cramps. After the longest twenty minutes of her life, Cindy laid two eggs.

She’d always wanted to have kids, but Drew said it was too soon. Elated, she dragged herself back to the corpse, leaving the oven to incubate her offspring.

Four days later, as she died of indigestion, she wondered if the babies would make it. There’d be no loving parents to take care of them, only the corpses but Cindy didn’t doubt that, like all children, their babies would find a way to get the most out of their parents.

In extremis, instead of College money, the kids might find Drew’s testicles in the freezer.

Monkeypants

by Kat Beyer

On my planet, “Monkeypants” is not just a loving nickname. We have these tiny monkeys that will just crawl right up into your pants. I’m not kidding! Listen, really. Mature adult females are about as long as your forefinger, tail included, and mature adult males are just slightly longer and have bigger shoulders.

The babies are maybe about as big as a knuckle by the time they are allowed to leave the pocket, and if you have got pant monkeys breeding in your trousers, you are in big trouble, because the babies will scamper around a lot and play with each other like crazy, and you will spend the whole day jumping around and barking. And let me tell you, if you happen to be a member of the Pan-Planetary Parliament and you’re trying to give an important speech on upper canopy financing and about three tens of baby monkeys start playing “Chase the Martian” up your inseams, well, let’s just say that the top fifth of your forests might not see much chlorophyll funding that day.

And there’s nothing like having to jump up and down squeaking and jittering while trying to give a serious government speech to ruin your credibility. Although, fortunately, the voters in my quindrant thought it was hilarious and sweet.

You can’t kill them to get rid of them, for sure. That would be awful anyway. They are so cute, with their big googly eyes and their soft, soft fur. If you pet them (carefully, with one finger) they spread out flat in the palm of your paw and you can feel their tiny heartbeat tickling against your pads. My friend Nicholas from Earth says that all mammals call to each other, and when I look down at my tiny relations running all over my imported Levis, I can only agree.