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thinking about. gradual deer tf. antlers take ~4 months to finish growing in; imagine the transformation itself taking that long. the antler nubs are the first visible sign, of course. the other early stages are all quiet internal reworkings. but gradually. more and more.
like - you wake up with these bumps on your forehead and your stomach feels a bit weird, and by the end of the week you find you can't quite stomach meat anymore. you *can* eat it, kinda, but you're really prioritizing plants in a way you never did before. just feels right.
the slight bewilderment as those bumps on your head grow out further and start to grow fuzz. just so, you realize your body hair's getting thicker. but the hair on your belly's getting lighter? it's growing in off-white. odd
couple weeks and you're having trouble fitting into your shoes. they're at once too short and too wide, when they used to fit perfectly. your nails are growing in way thicker than usual, too, and look almost bruised with how dark they're getting.
just an uneasy and confusing initial month as your clothes fit strangely, as your arms thin and your fingernails start to match your toenails. as your belly thickens, your clothes fitting awkwardly even though you haven't really put on or lost any weight.
a month and a half in and it's impossible to ignore how ungainly your tongue and teeth are getting; even though you're wearing a mask around town you feel like people can *tell* your face is shaped - wrong. that you fill out the fabric in an uncanny way. at least no one can see.
you've taken to wearing high heels all the time, though, which gets you some *real* odd looks, but - you can't fucking balance flat on your feet anymore. your tendons have started to pull into a new stance, trapping you on your tiptoes. the heels are a formality really.
it's month three when you lose your voice, and you don't have long before your fallback - writing things, by text or by pen - goes, too, because your fingers have been getting stiffer and stiffer, clenching and seizing as they've reconfigured into a new and inhuman shape
like. at first you could hide your antlers under a hat, then you passed them off as a religious thing - claimed you converted to paganism or whatever and had to wear them; total bullshit, but what else were you gonna do? - but with everything ... ah. you stop going out.
just lucky really that you haven't had to go out much. (at some point you stopped turning your camera on for zoom calls. which, again - that worked till you couldn't talk anymore. when you just stopped showing up at all.)
thinking about how at the end of a tf like this, what'd really seal the deal, probably, would be the moment you found yourself itching to get the velvet off. rubbing your antlers against the walls of your house. barely aware of your old life slipping away with the soft coating.
(someone calls animal control when they notice a deer trapped inside a house; the place is trashed. no one can figure out how it got inside with the doors locked and windows all intact, and no sign of the person on the lease.)
