Fatty Carbonara (he wasn’t fat, that just happened to be his name) stepped out of the shower bright and early one morning to find a little heap of dark green leaves piled on his bathmat.
“What could those be doing here?” he wondered aloud. “For one thing, it’s the middle of winter, so it’s not like I could have tracked them in, and for another, I haven’t been outside since the last time I was in the bathroom and there definitely weren’t any green leaves on the bathmat then.”
He looked up to see if there was some manner in which they could have fallen from the ceiling – which still wouldn’t have made sense of it all, but might have been the first step in so doing – and that’s when he noticed that he actually wasn’t standing in his bathroom at all, but rather hanging upside down high above the forest floor in what was, if he was not mistaken, a Ficus tree. In fact, it was almost certainly a Ficus tree, because now that he thought of it, the leaves he’d initially spotted on the bathmat, and by which in his present perch he found himself surrounded on all sides, looked a lot like Ficus leaves, not only on account of their dark green color but as well their glossy texture, deep veins, and fiddle-like shape.
“Okay,” said Fatty, “I guess that settles that, but the bigger question is, what the hell am I doing hanging upside down way up here in a Ficus tree when just a minute ago I was stepping out of the shower?”
That was when he looked down at himself and realized that, unless his eyes deceived him, he had taken on all the physical characteristics of a sloth. For example, instead of fingers and toes he now had three long claws curving out of each of his upper and lower limb extremities, and his once fleshy body was now encased in a wiry fur coat that was itself host to various species of moss, algae, fungus, and even a few moths ripening inside their little pupae.
“Good lord!” he exclaimed. “I’m not sure what could have caused this to happen but I’d better to get to a doctor right away to and see if they can undo it. Maybe a witch doctor would be more qualified for the task than a regular doctor but one of those shouldn’t be too hard to find out here in the middle of the jungle.”
Just as he was about to start descending limb by limb from his pendulous roost, however, it suddenly occurred to him how very comfy it was up there, far away from the endless hustle and bustle of his life in the city working in a stressful job as a financial risk analyst for a multinational asset management corporation, and so he decided that perhaps he’d prefer to stay where he was for a little while longer, even better still, for as long as possible – at least, he thought, until the next time he had to poop.
And as it took a full week for that to happen, it would appear that Fatty’s transmutation was complete.