A body swap cat

The Cat, The Girl, and Him

In the corner of a dimly lit room, the coldness of the dusty flooring seeped into my entire body as I lay prostrate.

I was in a state of violent confusion. Only a few hours ago, I should have been sitting in a chair as an adult man, facing the girl before me.

“I’m sorry, I can’t be with you. I only think of you as a friend.”

I remember her expression the moment I said those words. She didn’t cry, nor did she shout. She simply stared at me with unfocused eyes, a slight, inorganic smile pulling at the corners of her lips. From that point on, my memories are muddy, as if silt had been poured into them.

When I came to, my vision was abnormally close to the ground.

“…gh! Hey, what is this?!”

My throat, attempting to scream, vibrated with an unpleasant frictional sound.

“…N-Na… Nyaa… Nyaa…”

What leaked from my mouth were not words. It was the cry of a beast, produced as air pushed from my lungs forced an underdeveloped vocal cord to vibrate.

Driven by panic, I tried to stand. But the “legs” my brain sent commands to were not there. Instead, there were four limbs—slender, supple, yet shockingly weak. I didn’t know how to balance myself. Every time I tried to take a step, my vision swayed violently from side to side, and the grain of the wooden floor loomed before my eyes like a giant cliff.

A cat’s body—it was a restrictive cage that fundamentally destroyed the sense of balance I had cultivated as a human.

“Mike, how is it? Getting used to it?”

A sweet, viscous voice descended from above. I looked up, and there she was. She sat leisurely on the sofa, clutching the mug I used to favor. Her gaze was fixed on the “me” crawling at her feet. But what dwelt in her eyes was not the affection of the past, but a cruel sense of ownership, like someone cherishing a newly acquired toy.

I tried desperately to plead with her—to tell her I was human, that this eerie phenomenon had to be undone immediately. But no matter how desperately I made my throat rumble, it reached her ears only as the mewling of a cat that was hungry or seeking affection.

“Nyaa! Nyaa! …gh, Nyaa!!”

When I tried to unsheathe my claws, a sharp pain shot from deep within my paw pads, and hard claws sprang out. A horrific sense of dissociation—as if I were operating a machine I couldn’t control, despite it being my own body.

Suddenly, I turned my gaze to her lap, and I froze.

“…!”

Sitting there was the man who was supposed to be me. The body of “Ryota Osaki.” The physique of an ordinary, average man you could find anywhere. But the face on “me” wore an expression more innocent and hollow than I could ever have possessed. Every time she stroked his head, my body (now inhabited by the soul of Mike the cat) narrowed its eyes in ecstasy and—of all things—licked her slender fingers.

“Good boy, Ryota. You’re much more honest and cute than Mike was.”

She called my body “Ryota” and called the me crawling at her feet “Mike.” The final boundary that defined my self—my name—was being ruthlessly rewritten by her hand. I could only look up from the floor as my own flesh was contaminated by a “someone” I didn’t know and tamed like livestock.

Every time I moved, my feline senses burned through my brain as a torrent of information. The sound of cars driving outside the house, audible even without listening closely. The excessively sweet scent of her perfume hitting my nose. And my own inescapable body heat trapped within the fur covering my entire body. These were not convenient things like “sharpened senses.” They were stimuli too excessive, crude, and violent to maintain human intelligence. My spirit was being shoved into the brain capacity of this small beast, being whittled away incessantly.

“Why… why did it come to this…?”

Though words swirled in my heart, there was no exit. I walked around the house, searching for a way to return to normal or a tool to convey my will to her. But a cat’s limbs do not allow for gripping a pen or hitting a keyboard. Even a doorknob was nothing more than an “unopenable barrier” far above my height.

Reaching a mirror, I stared at my reflection. Standing there was a calico cat. A rounded head, pupils that slit thinly in response to light, and ears that twitched unnaturally. No matter how I looked at it, it was an animal. The worries of a troubled man, social responsibilities, anxiety about the future—none of what my former self possessed was reflected in this lump of fur.

I touched my face with a forepaw, as if tracing my (Mike’s) body. The soft sensation of the paw pad touched my cheek. It was unmistakably my “skin” now. I was struck with the realization, at a cellular level and through tactile sensation, that I no longer belonged to the human species.

“Ryota, shall we have dinner?”

When she headed for the kitchen, the “thing” that looked like me followed her with the awkward gait of a four-legged beast. I felt nauseated by the sight, but my body wouldn’t even let me vomit freely. Instead, what arrived was a fierce “hunger.” Independent of my intellect, my stomach cramped and my throat rumbled.

A plastic dish placed on the floor. It was piled with cat food that emitted a fishy stench.

“Mike, you eat too.”

Her cold-blooded voice. At first, I tried to reject it. I told myself that for the sake of my human dignity, I could not put such a thing in my mouth. But as the minutes passed, the survival instinct emitted by the beast’s body painted over my self-respect like mud.

Before I knew it, I was groveling on the floor, stretching my tongue toward that fishy mass while feeling a humiliation akin to being covered in filth. The gritty sensation passing down my throat. It was the taste of the beginning of the end—announcing that I had ceased to be human.