The Morning My Dog Became Human
The sight that greeted me the moment I woke up was a shock so intense it felt like it seared my mind white. The figure squatting beside my bed and licking my hand was not the small white dog I knew. Long silver hair sparkling in the sunlight, snow-white shoulders and delicate collarbones, and… a face that was unfamiliar yet eerily familiar. Jet-black, round eyes were staring straight at me.
Instead of screaming, I swallowed hard. Instinctively, my hand groped the empty space beside me. It was vacant. Somi, who had definitely fallen asleep right next to me last night, was gone without a trace.
“Somi… Where’s Somi?” I growled at the woman who looked like an intruder.
“Who are you…? Who are you…?”
“Master!”
When I looked at her like a stranger, her face crumpled with hurt. Then she flung herself into my arms, burying her face in my chest and hugging me tight.
“W-wait a second!”
None of this made sense. A woman I’d never seen before—wearing almost nothing—was lying on my bed… and calling me Master? Yet the scent rising from her wasn’t some unfamiliar perfume. It was a strange blend of Somi’s familiar shampoo and my own body odor.
“D-don’t come near me! Where’s Somi…? Where is she…?”
Overwhelmed by confusion and raw defensive instinct, I shoved her away with my arms. My bewilderment was so complete that proper grammar abandoned me.
“Master…” She looked up at me with an expression that said she was about to cry. “Master…! How can you act like this…”
Soon, fat tears began rolling down her cheeks. Somehow I had made a total stranger cry.
“No, that’s not what I—”
Some human part of me knew I should comfort her, but confusion and wariness had frozen my body solid. I glanced at her but couldn’t bring myself to look properly, terrified I might get reported for staring.
“Hiiing…”
When I gave no response, she drooped like a wilted puppy and climbed off the bed. What followed was even more shocking: she crawled across the floor on all fours. She went straight to Somi’s cushion, curled up, and tucked herself into a small ball.
Only then did the absence of my dog hit me again.
“Somi… Som… i?” I searched the room while keeping an eye on her. In this bizarre, sanity-shredding situation, it was the only thing I could think to do.
If this had been a normal morning, Somi would have come running at my call, tail wagging, leaping into my arms. But the room stayed deathly quiet. Forgetting the stranger for a moment in my rising panic, I shouted.
“Somi! Somi!”
“Master!”
The answer came from the last place I expected. The girl who had been curled up dejectedly on the cushion a second ago now wore a bright, sunny expression. She crawled back toward the bed on all fours as if nothing had happened.
“…Somi?”
The idiotic question slipped out on its own.
“You… How can you possibly be Somi…?”
Even stupider words followed. A woman I had never met before claiming to be my dog—an actual dog—was an impossible riddle I couldn’t solve.
“Master! It’s me, Somi!”
She licked the back of my hand exactly the way Somi always had. Then she dashed to the toy basket, grabbed the squeaky ball and duck doll in her mouth, and dropped them proudly at my feet.
“Hurry up! Don’t just sit there—play with me! Or let’s go for a walk! Walk!”
She had no tail, yet you would have sworn an invisible one was spinning like a propeller.
“Somi… you say? Just… hold on…”
I clutched my throbbing head. Who would go to such ridiculous lengths to trick me, and why?
As I fidgeted anxiously, she climbed onto my lap and gazed up at me. It was the exact adorable habit Somi had whenever she sensed I was upset. My heart dropped with a heavy thud.
“Master… are you struggling? Somi will hug you.”
She approached in an awkward, unsteady way and wrapped both arms around me. The sensation was clumsy and foreign. But the warmth that radiated from her was so identical to Somi’s that it sent chills down my spine.
I struggled to organize my thoughts and looked at her again—those round black eyes, the petite frame wearing nothing but a thin slip dress. That was when I noticed the faint scratch marks beneath her fingernails. The exact same marks she had gotten when she scratched at the glass.
“No… You’re… Somi…?”
“Master! Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No…”
“You always stroke my head the moment you wake up! You kiss me too! Please do it today as well, okay?”
Everything was too strange. Could the person in front of me really be Somi?
Almost in a trance, I glanced at the bedside table. The cheap silver cross necklace lay there, its shine long gone. Last night’s absurd wish and the impossible scene before me… I didn’t know anymore. Dream, elaborate scam, or actual miracle—it didn’t matter.
I gave up on everything and simply surrendered to my instincts as her guardian.
**
She had already moved to the full-length mirror and was admiring her reflection with constant gasps of wonder. She spun in circles, then carefully touched her face and hair with hands that had once been paws.
“Is this really me? I look like Master now! Hehe.”
With the most innocent face in the world, she toddled over to me on two legs. Seeing her approach so freely in human form made my heart race wildly from sheer bewilderment.
“Master… why do you look like that…? Do you hate me?”
“No! Of course not!”
When her face threatened to crumple again, I reflexively waved my hands and gently stroked her head. The soft texture of her hair felt completely different from Somi’s fur, and the sensation was oddly unsettling.
“Hehet… That feels nice… Master! Food please, food! I’m hungry!”
She beamed like a happy puppy just from being petted.
Food. That perfectly ordinary word jolted my stalled brain back into motion.
Even while preparing something at her request, my mind and body seemed to operate on separate tracks. The way she buried her nose in clothes that carried my scent and sniffed, or crawled around the room on all fours playing with toys, was unmistakably Somi—yet the fact that the body doing it was human created a bizarre sense of dissonance.
I thought I had let go of everything, but habit still won. I reached for the bag of kibble before catching myself. My hand froze in mid-air as I was about to set the bowl down.
Was I really supposed to feed her this?
“Master…! Hurry!”
The way she looked up at me and licked her lips was pure Somi.
“Uh… just a second.”
I frantically typed into my phone: “what happens if a person eats dog food.” After reading that “occasional small amounts are fine,” I scooped out only a tiny portion and offered it to her.
“The food… is a little different now… Want to try this first?”
“Hehe! Looks yummy!”
Her eyes sparkled as she stuck her face straight into the bowl like a real dog and began eating. The awkward scene sent me spiraling into confusion again. The cheerful crunching sounds stopped almost immediately.
“Ugh… It’s not good…”
She looked up with a deeply scrunched face. The search result had been right—kibble tasted bland to a human tongue.
“Not good, huh? Hold on…”
I took the bowl away and thought. Was it even safe to give human food to this being whose identity I still couldn’t fully accept?
But I couldn’t ignore the way she whimpered about being hungry.
Once again my hands moved on their own, ignoring reason. I pulled the remaining chicken breast from the freezer, boiled it, shredded it finely, and arranged it on a plate.
“Here… eat this.”
“Yes!”
Her face lit up again as she started on the chicken. Thankfully she seemed to enjoy it far more than the kibble.
In the face of a reality I still couldn’t accept, I had even forgotten my own hunger. While she ate, my phone’s search history filled with absurd queries: “dog that became human,” “dog turned into a person.” Naturally nothing useful appeared. I was left only with the question of how to process any of this.
“I’m thirsty! Water please!”
She even asked for water.
“Huu… Som… i.”
I had said her name countless times before, but never had it felt this difficult.
“So… you really are Somi…?”
“Yes! Master! I’m Somi! You always hugged me and petted me every morning… Master, pet me quickly please!”
The innocent way she craved affection was exactly like Somi.
“Then… yesterday we…”
“Master put me on your lap and talked to me! You said you wanted to live with Somi for a long, long time!”
I looked at the silver cross necklace again, but belief still wouldn’t come.
“Then… when it snowed…”
“We went out together! It’s not snowing right now?”
She remembered every private memory only Somi and I shared, recounting them as if she had lived them herself.
I thought I must be losing my mind, but I had no choice but to accept it. Any other explanation—new scam, hidden camera show—would have been more realistic than my dog becoming human. Yet I had reached the point where those theories could no longer sustain me.
“…Yeah. Somi… Come here.”
In the end, I chose to accept this impossible being as my Somi.
“Hehet, Master, Master~”
She—no, Somi—licked my face happily, as if nothing could be more wonderful. The human form made the sensation strangely intimate and unsettling at the same time.
“Master, then let’s go for a walk! Walk!”
Somi wagged her invisible tail and brought the leash from the front door, carrying it proudly in her mouth.
“…W-wait!! Somi… Today I’ll play with you at home!”
It was going to be an incredibly long day.