Grasshopper Becomes Female: Gender Change

As the sun peeks through your window, you feel different. Stretching your arms, a flicker of an unnatural sensation runs through your body. You give it little thought, assuming it must be fatigue or perhaps a lingering dream. However, the strange feeling continues to amplify. Your skin prickles and suddenly feels oddly taut, and as you glance at your hands, they're beginning to grow a hardened, greenish-blue exoskeleton. It's fascinating but simultaneously terrifying. A panic surges through you as your human fingers merge, transforming into barbed-like appendages. The room around you starts to tower above, furniture morphing into monstrous, looming hills as you continue to shrink. Your standard human sizing is replaced by a tiny, scarcely noticeable form. Movements around you seem to slow down, like trying to move through a world dipped in honey. You touch your face, surprisingly not screaming. Instead, you find yourself scrabbling with alien mandibles protruding from where your mouth once was. Your nose disappears into a ghost of an impression, your eyes balloon, darkening to an onyx abyss that now takes up most of your face. Bending, your spine crunches oddly, your legs start to bend in ways they never had before, springing back as you jump. The sensation is peculiar, liberating even as your mass turns lean, prolonged. Your rear end swells into what you realise must now be an abdomen, rigid and segmented. Looking around the room which now seems like a vast jungle rather than your familiar homely surroundings, you find your being craving for the sunlit spots in the room, for you realize the prospect of photosynthesis now becomes your primary means of sustenance. Your thoughts, your memories; that time at school, the road trip last summer, your childhood pet... they fragment, dissolving like sugar in water only to be replaced by something innately primitive, animalistic. Your mind becomes a whirl of green and sunshine, the taste of dew on leaves, and the gentle rustle of the wind through the grass. Human thoughts dissipate, replaced entirely by the instincts and limited cognition of a grasshopper. Your profession, family, daily routines, forgotten and replaced by the urge to eat, to escape predators, to reproduce, and to survive. So there you sit, no longer the person you were, no longer even human. You, a small creature of grass and sun, a hymn written in exoskeletons and the need to survive day to day. It's simpler now, quieter. The world is vast, and the wide green pastures call for you. You give one last look to the place that was your home with your newly formed compound eyes, your antennae twitching in the overbearing silence of the room. With a soft chitter, you take a leap, bounding towards a new life, an existence as fascinating as it is alien. Your journey as a grasshopper begins as your human life, now a forgotten dream, fades into the silhouettes of yesteryears.