The night you changed, you didn't dream. Your head hit the pillow, and darkness immediately overtook you. Your first indication that something was wrong was how... instant... waking felt. You were wide-eyed and alert, straight from the dark. Unblinking. Even when you try, you can't blink. Why can't you blink!? You bring your hands to your face, or at least try to... and a pair of cloth facsimiles fall against your cheeks. You panic, your heart should be racing, but there's no pounding in your chest. Your bed feels small. The covers feel heavy. You struggle to even crawl out from beneath them. Terror has sunk in now. You hurry across to the mirror on the far side of your bedroom. You can't believe what you find reflected back at you. Staring back at you, albeit with a pair of button eyes and stitched-on eyebrows contorted in worry, is a puppet. Immediately, you recognise the design. You resemble a Sesame Street knockoff of one of your characters, minus a hand puppeteering it. You're unsure how your spindly fabric limbs are even holding you up. Rather embarrassingly, your self-examination reveals you are indeed hollow, just like a hand puppet. If someone wanted to, they could stick their hand in you and use you like one. When you scream, you're grateful that you produce a noise, even if you have no idea how you're capable of it. A family member rushes in, and soon your entire family is screaming in confusion. --- Medical testing begins a day later, after you scare a doctor half to death. Their scans reveal no skeletal structure, no musculature, and no DNA. No matter how deeply they examine you, they can find no way to identify you. What's worse, they can find no reason why you are alive. You have no blood, no lungs, no brain, no heart, and no cells. Your existence is revealed to the public not long after, although many believe you to be a hoax. Halloween is around the corner, which doesn't help your case. In quiet echelons of government, politicians quietly ponder if you, or someone like you, is still a citizen. In courts further afield, you are a point of discussion when considering human rights, who receives them... and who does not. --- It has been several weeks now since you changed. You haven't had to eat, which is fortunate. After all, you have no stomach. You haven't had to sleep either, which is less fortunate. This new reality is inescapable, and the realm of unconsciousness is denied to you. It's far from the first part of your humanity that you've accepted is now gone, but this, in particular, affects you. Soon, the questions you ask yourself grow more morbid. Are you ageing? Will you live forever? Can you die? When you raise this with one of the scientists watching over you, they give you an honest shrug. As far as they know, you could be held together by an anomalous shift in the universe... one that could very well correct itself at any moment, rendering this new body of yours completely inert. Understandably, that doesn't make you feel better. --- On the rare occasions you go out, people ask what happened to you. You construct the first story only a few days after your change. You tell some strangers that you were cursed by a witch, and others that you drank a strange, smouldering potion. These lies are easy–Easier than the truth. That truth, of course, is that you don't know why this happened to you. When you imagine the supernatural; a spell or a curse; things feel more fantastical, more fictional, and most important... more reversible. You know, though, in your heart, that your new body was not the result of some incredible sorcery or the exciting initiator of a grand journey to reclaim what you've lost. It was a flash in the dark, a millisecond where the laws of the universe faltered. An anomaly, just as you are now. It was as unlikely as bringing your palm to a tabletop and having it pass straight through. It was a random, uncaring moment. Some faltering of the cosmos where a grand lever flipped, only for a moment. Your body was obliterated and, like air to a vacuum, reality rushed in to fill the gap. --- A few weeks after your transformation, you are at a party with friends. Jokingly, an acquaintance lifts you and, to your absolute horror, pushes their hand inside the hollow of your new body. You immediately go limp, losing all agency. It is if all this time, the only thing allowing you to move was some vestige of your own hand puppeteering this body... and it's now been pushed to the side. The stranger makes you do embarrassing things, taking your involuntarily lack of resistance as opting in to the joke. When one of your friends snatches you away, you quietly ask to go home. They agree and apologise for leaving you alone. --- A few months after your transformation, you are horrified when one of your button eyes falls from your face. Strands of thread hang from where it once sat. The button itself falls out of view, never to be rediscovered. There is no pain to accompany your "injury," if you can even call it that. A friend wonders aloud, a few hours later, if they can't just attach a new button. You allow them to try, and your sight is immediately restored. They celebrate having "repaired you" far more easily than any human with a similar loss of a body part, but you aren't celebrating. No. You have just learned that your body parts are replaceable. That /things/ can replace them and work just as well. When you confide in the same friend that you worry your eyes can be replaced so easily, they simply give you a confused look. "You don't actually have eyes, though, do you?" "Oh... I suppose not." What do you have? --- Six months have passed since your transformation. You are growing bolder now, opting to make the most of your new life. Unfortunately, just as you're getting comfortable, the universe reveals another cruel trick. It all happens in a flash. You were only checking the mailbox. You thought you could handle such a simple task by yourself. You were wrong. The neighbour's mutt must've hopped the fence again. Before your transformation, you might've been happy to see that slobbering creature... but now it spells the end for you. At least... this you. Fabric and stuffing go flying, and just like prior injuries, there's no pain. You feel vindicated as you are destroyed for the second time–if this body were really yours, this would hurt, wouldn't it? The dog carries home the remaining scraps of "you", now far too damaged to move or make a sound. Their owners worry that their pet has damaged one of the neighbourhood children's dolls and elect not to tell anyone. Their dog destroys the rest of your body that evening, even eating a few scraps of fabric in the process. Over the next few weeks, the dog's owners take them to the vet. They notice that their movements are sluggish and clumsy, as if they've forgotten how to walk properly. Scans find nothing, of course. They didn't the first time you had them. Dog food takes some getting used to, but you warm up to belly rubs quicker than you would have expected. You pass by missing person posters on your morning walk and feel embarrassed by the button-eyed thing pictured on them. Are you really a missing person? Well, at least you're not a puppet anymore...