Story: ‘Metamorphosis’
“As Genjiro Shinzo looked out of his window one morning he found that everybody he had ever known had transformed into monstrous insects.”
I’m happy to announce that my latest short story, ‘Metamorphosis’, has been published in the latest edition of the excellent Great Ape. Print and digital copies of issue 5 are available to buy here. Thank you to the Ape team!
I am not, by most standards, a happy person. I know, I know, but all my stories are so upbeat! Especially the ones about dying relationships, breakups, grief, breakups, dying relationships, abduction and mental illness, alienation, racism and rape, and grief and breakups. I’m a laugh riot. (OK, this one is pretty funny, mainly because it’s metaphorically quite true and if you can’t laugh at sexy lizards then … well.)
In Real Life I’ve been told I’m funny. Making people laugh is great. Usually I’m just quite silly and this doubles if the person I’m with is quite silly, or is a dog. If the person I’m with is a dog then we both get to be quite silly together, and dogs tell me I’m funny all the time. A happy life comes from being around happy people. You can’t have a happy TV or smartphone, and they won’t make you happy anyway, despite what fucking Microsoft would have you believe.
I admire people like the British comedian Stewart Lee, who writes satirical Dadaist columns for the Guardian occasionally about such awful real life events as the death of the arts and Britain’s post-Brexit pollution of our rivers and oceans, but is still extremely funny (two of his best headlines are both from this August: “The Tories’ culture war - what is it good for?” and “National Trust members: get ready to choke on your carrot cake”); and people of the Larry David kind, who like me seem to be in a state of perpetual bewilderment at society and its refusal to laugh at itself. I am the Gentile schlemeil.
Amongst those who know me I am an infamous curmudgeon, a person who has yet to physically grow into the old man I’ve been since I was 12 (although I’m working on it) - a sort of social luddite who carries his wounded misanthropy with an air of disguised but deeply-running revulsion. I wear literally the most boring clothes. People frequently refuse to believe that I don’t use social media (my Twitter is still, technically, available - see below). I am clinically chronically uncurably miserable and one reason is that it’s 100% normal to be seen carrying a selfie stick without a flicker of embarassment or shame, and TikTok exists. And yet.
And yet…!
I can sometimes write funny things. I wrote the first version of this story in 2010 which was a whacking whole 12 years ago. Every now and again I’d come back to redraft it, knowing it had legs but always wondering “Who is going to want to publish a reverse Kafka story in 2014 / 16 / 18 / 21 / 22?” In the redrafting it got better, and less jokey but generally more absurd and poe-faced, which makes me laugh in the way that our absurd 21st century Western society makes me laugh, when it’s not making me a little sick.
If you haven’t read Franz Kafka’s famous story, then don’t worry, you don’t have to. In that surreal tale, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he has been transformed into a giant “vermin”, usually translated as “cockroach”. He lumbers around as a giant roach for a while and then dies. It’s fine. Nowadays it’s usually interpreted as an allegory about how society treats a certain class of ‘unwanted’ people, and how we drudge about our wack daily business in our awful alienating world.
I came up with the ‘idea’ for my story after wondering what the reverse of Kafka’s story would be. Should it be Gregor wakes up and everyone else has turned into roaches? Or would the true opposite be a roach wakes up one morning to find it’s turned into a human? The latter is more tragic for the roach, but the former is probably funnier. I actually wrote both of those stories. If there’s any demand, I’ll post the alternative version here.
Meanwhile, please enjoy this silly story which has found a home in one of the silliest literary journals around.
If you have any thoughts on this story, please do share them on this page, or @ my Twitter account, @davidbrookesuk, which like a good roach may only appear to be functionally dead. But I still sometimes use it to view Content and respond to meaningful DMs.
—-db
