MidReal Story
Secrets of the Sewer: A Shrek Transformation Tale
Scenario: I am Cemre, I turn into Shrek every day and I live in the sewers, I am on display at Key College every day.
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I leaned forward, my hands on my knees, and tried to catch my breath.
I was almost late again.
If I had to run into Professor Huxley’s class late one more time, he was going to make me do push-ups.
I didn’t care about push-ups, but I didn’t want to be any more noticeable than I already was.
It was hard enough to get through class without calling attention to myself, but I did my best.
I’d learned to be okay with being the weird guy in the back who never said anything, who always looked like he was ready to eat everyone.
It was a small price to pay to keep from being evicted from college.
The door in front of me, which I’d been walking past for the last two years, creaked open with an echoing groan.
I’d never noticed that before.
It’d been two years.
Why was it only making noise now?
I stepped onto the threshold and turned around.
The door closed behind me with a soft click.
I was in a small room with a single light hanging from the ceiling.
I blinked and looked around.
There were two other doors in the room.
The one behind me was plain metal, but the ones to my left and right were made of wood, pockmarked with age.
I stepped toward one of them and gently pushed it open.
It revealed a set of stairs leading down into darkness.
I’d never seen them before.
What if someone found them?
What if they didn’t want anyone down there?
I needed to be careful so that no one saw me go through this door.
Of course, that meant I couldn’t walk into class late either.
In fact, it might be best if I just went back home for now.
I’d figure this out later.
I checked to make sure no one else was around and then slipped through the door and down the stairs.
Every day I woke up not knowing if today would be the day that it happened, if today I would turn into Shrek for good.
It was always there, right on the edge of my mind, waiting for me like an executioner waiting for his next victim to come up on stage.
I’d been fighting it for as long as I could remember, but it was a battle I knew wouldn’t last forever.
Even now, when I thought about it, my skin tingled, like it was waiting for me to fall asleep so that it could finally come out, to let me rest while it had some fun.
I’d never had my skin do that before this started, but it did it every day now.
Then, when I finally did fall asleep, I had such strange, vivid dreams that I woke up every morning feeling like I hadn’t slept at all.
I sat up and looked at my alarm clock.
It was time to get up anyway, so I swung my legs out of bed and stood up before my body had a chance to protest too much.
I shambled over to my dresser and pulled on a pair of pants, then made my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth.
I splashed water on my face, staring at my reflection as I did so, and tried to ignore the way my skin looked different every day.
I’d been living like this for almost two years now, ever since one of my classmates—Lily Thompson—had found out about me.
It’s not that I hadn’t known what would happen when she told everyone, but when she actually did it, when everyone started looking at me like I was some kind of freak… It hurt more than I’d expected it to.
I’d been living with this condition for almost twenty years now, but somehow never getting used to it.
When we were living on the surface, where people could see us and judge us, my dad had kept me mostly inside so that no one would know about me.
It worked… until it didn’t, until Lily found out, anyway.
When we were forced to go underground to keep our secret safe, he’d continued trying to keep me away from people where he could—when he wasn’t working or off on his own adventures—but it hadn’t always been possible.
As a result, there were still people who knew about me, even down here, but most of them left me alone for which I was thankful.
It’d taken time to adjust to being underground all the time.
My dad had built a room for me to live in and had gone out of his way to make it feel as homey as possible, but it was still hard.
The first few months, it had felt like prison, like there were bars on every direction that I looked.
I still sometimes felt that way, especially when we went out on trips.
It wasn’t easy to get around with everyone staring at me, and it was even worse when I knew my dad was struggling to figure out how to explain what they were seeing.
When we were home, though, it wasn’t quite as bad.
I could move around freely without worrying about what others might think of me, and no one was going to try to put me on display, like they did with those traveling circus freak shows.
It was far from perfect, but it was better than anything else we could have done.
My dad did his best to help me keep up with my bathroom needs, but it wasn’t always easy.
It was one thing to help a little kid wipe his ass, but it was another thing entirely to have to help a full-grown man do it.
Plus, with how often we were running out of water down here, it wasn’t always easy to find enough water to fill up our tank so that we could clean ourselves.
I’d finally told him that it was okay if he didn’t wash me as often as he used to.
The first time he’d done it—and the subsequent times—had been an awkward experience for both of us, and it was still awkward now that we’d been doing it for a while.
Luckily for both of us, he’d agreed to let it go.
He’d also started allowing me to eat more things than just the canned and dried food we brought with us so that we wouldn’t have to get water as often to cook, but it was still a struggle to find enough food for us to survive on without having to go out and get more.
So far we had been able to manage by going out only once a month for clothes and other supplies, but we couldn’t stay down here forever.
Eventually the college would come looking for us, or we would run out of money to survive on our own.
Something needed to change soon.
I finished up in the bathroom and headed out of my room and down the hallway.
I’d been in his room many times before, but he always seemed to think that it was a big deal when he took me through there.
I shook off the feeling of unease that had settled over me and continued on into the main area of the tunnels.
I walked down the main tunnel of the college’s underground passageways and sat down on the bench near the door where we usually came in.
I put my headphones on and opened up the book that I’d brought with me today, eager to lose myself in the world of the story once more.
I didn’t know how long it would be until dad came back to pick me up tonight, but I had plenty of time to read before then.
I was always eager to get back to the surface after a trip down here, but being here wasn’t quite as bad as it once had been.
I’d grown accustomed to being alone most days and had found a routine that seemed to help keep me from getting too bored or going crazy with loneliness while waiting for him to come back to take me home.
Alex came by with food for me most days when he was working at the college.
We didn’t talk much—he usually just left it by the door and went on his way—but we still had a sort of friendship that had grown over time.
He did his best to bring me things that were easy for me to eat and didn’t give me too much trouble with my body, even if it wasn’t always possible for him to do that, given the circumstances of his job and our situation in general.
Sometimes he even brought me things like books or movies or other ways to pass the time when he could get them for me without anyone noticing that they were missing from wherever they came from.
We didn’t talk much when he brought them to me either, but we did sometimes share stories or talk about our lives when he came by after hours to clean up around here (which was more often than he probably should).
He usually left right after we finished our conversation, but sometimes he stayed a while longer to keep me company until it was time for bed—or at least what passed for bedtime in our lives nowadays.
“Why do you want to be a janitor when you grow up?”
I asked him one day when we were talking about what we wanted to do with our lives.
He shrugged, and I could see the sadness in his eyes, even though they were hard to see in the dim light of the room.
“It’s not what I want to do, but it’s all I’ve ever known,” he said after a minute.
“I don’t have money for college, and I don’t have good enough grades to get a scholarship to help pay for it.
This is just the way my life has always been, and I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to figure out how to change that.”
It was one of the things that we had both shared about ourselves that we didn’t really like to talk about, but neither of us could think of anything else to say at the moment.
If I could have, I would have wrapped my arms around him and given him a hug, but even if I hadn’t been transformed into an ugly ogre, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.
“Life can be a real bitch sometimes,” I said after a minute.
