Transformation
There was a novel on Earth called Metamorphosis.
It told the story of a married man who woke one day from an uneasy dream and found himself transformed into a hideous insect.
His family still thought of him as the man of the house at first, but after enough hemming and hawing they eventually treated him like the bug he had become. In the end he died after his father threw an apple that struck him and the wound festered.
He had been human, but the moment he became a bug, people stopped treating him like one.
The essence of humanity turned out to be surprisingly powerless. If you could not speak and looked like an insect, no one would ever see the person still trapped inside.
And me…
I woke up and found myself turned into a cat.
I had not even had an uneasy dream. I had not dreamed at all.
"Meow."
The face staring back at me from the mirror belonged to an extremely cute cat.
Not some loathsome insect oozing sticky fluids, but a fluffy, soft-furred, thoroughly adorable cat.
If I had turned into a disgusting bug… there would have been no hope whatsoever.
Looking at my reflection, something suddenly occurred to me that I desperately wanted to try.
I slowly lifted a front paw. Right in the center of that white, cotton-ball pad waited a soft, vivid pink jelly bean of a toe bean.
The texture was so vivid and real it made every YouTube Shorts clip I had ever watched look like a pale imitation.
Wait. This is not the time to be cooing over how cute I am.
Reality slammed back into me. I sprang up onto the bed and lunged for the smartphone lying by the pillow. Somehow I had to get word to a friend or the police.
A cat's paw was nothing like a human hand. Humans could freely work five fingers across a capacitive touchscreen; a cat's toes were blunt little clumps.
Whenever I pressed, the pattern smeared, and the screen—whether it understood my desperation or not—refused even to unlock.
"Me… meow…"
I was trapped in this room.
The thought made my heart seize.
Trapped in here… was I going to starve to death?
What should have been a cozy, snug home had transformed into a vast wilderness.
I could not climb onto the sink and turn on the gas stove. I could not open the refrigerator and pull out food. Water I might manage by lapping whatever had pooled in the bathroom basin, but food was a complete dead end.
I could not just sit here and wither away.
"Mrow…"
The first thought that formed was that I had to escape the room.
Going out the window would be suicide. We were on the fourth floor.
People always said cats were so flexible they could land lightly even from high places, but that applied to real cats.
My outside might look feline, but the inside was still a human who had walked on two legs his entire life.
I had no idea how to twist my body in midair. If I jumped, I would simply smash into the asphalt and end up a broken wreck.
Change the approach. I need help from someone else.
The face of the woman next door flickered through my mind. She had moved in not long ago. We had exchanged the occasional greeting.
Wandering the streets until I got run over or got scooped up by a shelter for strays sounded far worse than earning a little pity from a neighbor I already knew, however slightly.
"Mrow mrow!"
Once I had a goal, my body moved fast. I raced to the front door and stared up at the handle. Luckily our door did not have a round knob; it was a lever-style handle you simply pushed down.
Huff, huff. I steadied my breathing and gathered strength in my hind legs.
Thwap!
I leapt high in a single bound and slammed my front paws down on the lever with my full weight.
Beep-beep!
The electronic lock disengaged and the door eased open. Success!
"Mrow!"
I let out a cry of pure joy and shoved myself through the gap. Hallway air brushed my nose.
Thud!
At the same instant a sound echoed behind me. The door's automatic closing function kicked in and the front door sealed shut with finality.
I froze in the quiet corridor.
Come to think of it… could I even get back inside in this state?
Oh no. As I was now, I could not lift the cover over the keypad outside, much less punch in the password. Going home was no longer possible.
Like an army that had burned its boats, I had crossed a line with no return. There was nowhere left to fall back. The only place I could turn was the tightly closed door of the neighbor next door.
Ringing the doorbell, of course, was impossible.
What I had to do next was simple.
"Myaaaaooo! Myaaaaaooo!"
I scratched at the door with my claws.
And I wailed as mournfully as I could so the woman next door would hear me. I had no choice. I was in a cat's body now.
Thankfully my desperate prayer reached her.
A cheerful electronic chime sounded and the door opened.
"Ugh… what's with all the noise…?"
I used to look down at people from above. Now I was looking up from the floor.
It could not be helped.
Thinking about how tall I had been as a man, seeing the world from a cat's eye level was no different from lying flat on the ground.
"Meow meow!"
I rubbed myself against her legs for all I was worth, exactly the way a cat buttering up its butler would do.
I had already done my homework watching YouTube videos, so I knew exactly how to melt a butler's heart.
No cat alive understood a butler better than I did.
"Oh my gosh! You're so cuuuuute!"
Luckily the neighbor woman had perfectly ordinary tastes.
She liked cute, adorable things.
"Upsy-daisy."
She slid her hands under my front legs and lifted me up.
"Mrow mrow!"
The sudden rise in altitude left me flustered, but I was about to enter paradise.
Fwoomp!
"Kyaa! You're so cute! Where did you come from, kitty?"
She pulled me against her chest. She was not wearing a bra underneath.
I could see the soft skin through her T-shirt.
Still… if there was one good thing about being born a cat, maybe this was it.
Women did not see me as a man. Of course they did not. Right now I was nothing but a cat.
And that was how I chose my butler.
Two in the afternoon. Merciless sunlight forced its way between the curtains and stabbed Han Yuyeon's eyelids.
Han Yuyeon.
Twenty years old. Full-time unemployed layabout.
Today was the day a change arrived in her daily life.
"Uuuuugh…!"
Yuyeon let out a pained groan and buried her face in the pillow. Her head felt like it was splitting open. How late had she drunk last night?
She and her game guildmates had fired up Discord and run a soju boot camp into the small hours. The price was brutal. The shining youth of twenty years old had long since been tossed in the trash—just another ordinary day for a jobless shut-in.
Today, however, was different.
At least until a cat's sharp, high-pitched cries drilled straight into her eardrums.
The sudden meowing yanked her out of sleep. It was so loud there was no way she could have stayed asleep.
So she opened the door.
Snow-white fur without a single speck of dust. Blue eyes that shone like gemstones set into its face. An angel of a cat that looked like it had just stepped out of a picture book was staring up at Yuyeon.
Men and women alike loving cats was a universal truth.
"Holy crap… where did you come from?"
As if entranced, Yuyeon scooped the creature up and carried it inside.
"Mrow…"
The cat seemed to be gauging her somehow. Yuyeon tilted her head. Then she got a proper look at its condition.
This was absolutely not some alley cat that had been rolling around on rough streets. It was clearly someone's precious, carefully raised treasure.
"You're a runaway teenager, huh? Your owner must be going crazy looking for you."
Just ignoring it and crawling back into bed would have pricked her conscience. She could already picture the owner's face, weeping tears of blood after losing this tiny, adorable life.
Yuyeon picked up the cat and set out to find its owner.
Whoever that person was, they had to be frantically searching right now.
Since it had been found right outside her own door, odds were overwhelming that it belonged to someone in this villa.
Yuyeon threw a thick hoodie over her still-braless state, yanked on a pair of training pants, and mashed a hat over the bird's nest of hair in the mirror. Ready.
Cradling the cat carefully against her chest, Yuyeon began a thorough search of the building.
"Meow meow!"
The cat struggled not to slip out of her arms, but she held on.
Starting from the fourth floor, she worked her way down, knocking on every door. Each time one opened she tilted the cat in her arms so the resident could see it and asked if it was theirs.
The responses were either cold or simply baffled.
"I'm busy. We don't keep a cat."
She scoured every floor of the five-story old villa and came up with nothing.
The unit next door had no one home at all…
And looking back, it seemed no one in the villa kept cats in the first place.
In all the time she had lived here she had never once heard a dog bark or a cat meow.
"Haa… what am I supposed to do with you?"
When Yuyeon sighed in defeat, the cat answered by nuzzling its little head against the hem of her hoodie.
And that was how Yuyeon ended up stuck with the cat.