Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams. Armor-plated back. Brown, dome-like belly divided into stiff arched segments. Numerous legs, pitifully thin, waved helplessly before his eyes. Etc. He rolled over in his bed, pulled the covers tighter. He closed his eyes to the mid-day sunshine insisting on itself behind the blinds. His mind unclouded and he suppressed the urge to sob. His mother tapped lightly on the door. What has happened to me, he thought quietly to himself.

*

I wonder if you would say that Kevin Costner's movies were all about transformation. I wonder if you'd go along with me if I proposed it as an idea. I suspect you would because you were a fun student and a good sport, always willing to humor me. It's one of the things I came to appreciate about you—how I could say Kevin Costner's movies are all about transformation, and you'd say, Yeah sure, and we could talk about Dances with Wolves and how John Dunbar changes—gradually, slowly slowly—from one kind of person into another, so that by the end of the movie you barely even recognize him and he barely recognizes himself. And we could talk about Roy "Tin Cup" McAvoy and how he learns when to take the shot and when to act more cautiously—please don't take the shot—and lay up instead, for safety, to stay longer in the game. And we could talk about how the Mariner from Waterworld has grown gills and webbed toes, or how Ray Kinsella learns to trust the voices in his head and act on them, but then we might agree that maybe it's not the best message a movie could send and our conversation would grind down to not much, and I'd observe that all stories are about transformation, really, and we probably could have made better use of class time, and you would laugh because you knew you'd managed to wind me up.

*

That gentle voice! If Gregor's mother had ever noticed his long, twitching antennae, his prothoracic legs, the spiracles in his sides that suck and gasp for breath, she never mentioned them. Always careful not to pry. He had the urge to tell her everything, to show her all the new parts of himself, to explain. To spread his wings that were too weak to support the weight of his body. But the bed was so warm just now. The covers like an exoskeleton. He pulled them over his head and called out: Ma, I'm up.

*

Later, years after you'd graduated, I took my daughter to a birthday party. Her friend was turning six, which was, it seemed, an age of chaos. They'd learned impulse control but gained independence, which meant that, as parents, we no longer had to trail behind them righting their spills and remediating sneeze events and cupping our hands over every sharp corner, but could only watch as they narrowed their eyes and formed murmurations, floating from room to room to perform secret acts of destruction in small places. This was the long, slow process of gradual release just beginning, and the earliest indications of how little control we have over the choices they make when they know we're not watching. If it dawned on us in the moment that one day we would lose them, we didn't let on, even to ourselves.
     In a tight hallway, I passed one of the other parents—a mother, younger than most of the others, with one kid in the mix and another perched on her hip. She gave me a smile of recognition that sent a panic through my endocrine system. I struggled to place her.
     "I took a class of yours once," she said to me, helpfully. "This was ages ago."
     "Oh right," I said. "Which one was that?"
     "Introduction to Creative Writing." I scrolled through faces in my mind, nodding to buy time. "There was a guy in that class," she said through a crooked smile, "who was obsessed with Kevin Costner. Do you remember him?"
     "Yes," I said. "Eddie. I remember him."
     "He was a riot."
     "Yeah. He was fun."
     She chuckled and shifted her boy from one hip to the other; his eyes stayed locked onto mine like a peregrine falcon's. "I wonder whatever happened to him."
     "Mm," I said, noncommittal.
     She cocked her head in intrigue. "Do you know?"
     I raised my eyebrows and looked at the wall above her head. You'd friended me on Facebook and posted sporadic messages on my timeline until suddenly you didn't anymore, so I did know. But this was a children's birthday party and it was not a funny story and her own child was still looking at me from under the line of his bangs, expressionless, his mouth the shape of a bird in the sky. I drew in a breath to speak with no idea about what I'd say, but a crash from the kitchen yanked her attention away and I was saved from spilling what I knew about Eddie, that you'd transformed in your bed into a gigantic insect.

*

And what now, said Gregor to himself as he looked around in the darkness. His compound eyes saw a world in mosaic: a huddle of bodies, laughing; a plastic cup in the grass; moths making figure eights in a flood light; a trash can full of ice. From somewhere far away he heard a sound and recognized it as his own human voice. His body was pain. The vibration of his phone. No trace of light in the ink of night sky. He drank and drank. I'm sorry, ma, he broadcast to the ether. This worked for so long, but it isn't working anymore. He thought of his family with tenderness and love. He would perform for them a mercy.

*

My god, though, that ending. That's the real bitch of it. That's the part that really gets me. In which the Samsas are at last freed of their burden and their lives immediately improve. The sun shining down on the tops of their heads. Their prospects unfurling before them. Increasing vivacity, stretched her young body, etc. Gregor's father lets "bygones be bygones." Fuck.
     I have to admit I never saw the movie Draft Day and I don't really know what it's about. Reading the plot summary, it's hard to say whether Costner's character undergoes any kind of significant change. Reviews are mixed. As far as I can tell, scrolling through your timeline, this is the last of Costner's movies that you were able to see. I hope you liked it.
     As for Kafka, I don't teach that story anymore. It's long, for one thing; the students resent its length. And anyway, it didn't save you. How could it mean anything else to me?
     I wonder if you ever thought about it again, though I grant that you must have had more pressing and chaotic thoughts pinballing through your mind. But still, we had that conversation in class. I really thought it might stick. How the ending seems projected through a warped lens of what must have been the author's own sadness and hurt. How misguided the whole notion is—that our family would be better off with us gone. How our mothers love us and would miss us, and how the real burden would never be lifted but set down upon their shoulders, how the weight they already carry would only be compounded and hazarded with razor wire if we ever were to leave them. How they might raise their faces to the sun, but it would never quite feel as warm again. We talked about that. Do you remember? Is there any way it ever could have made the slightest difference?
     Perhaps we should have written our own, better endings. That's something we could have done. That would have been a productive use of our time. Kafka's ending is a body blow, but I can imagine a truer one. It is sad and mundane in equal measure and you'll never get to read it, and it doesn't matter anyway because it's nothing much more than my own emotional condensation. It's the last and only thing I have left to offer you.
     In it, the charwoman returns to the house but finds it dark and quiet. The Samsas are out. The floors have been vacuumed but there's dust on the picture frames. The bananas have all gone black. She sets down her caddy of cleaning supplies and the sound bounces from the hardwood, echoes through the empty halls. She stands and listens. The energy is strange.
     She walks into Gregor's room and it is full of his things; his closet spits out shoes and shirt sleeves. His hats. His laptop like an empty shell on the floor. She sits on his half-made bed; it smells like sleep in the sheets. She puts her hand out to the pillow but doesn't touch it. She wonders if his mother has done this—sat in this very spot and run her hand across her son's cold pillow, laid herself down and pulled the covers up over her head. Breathed in the last flakes of his skin.
     The charwoman isn't sure how to feel. She didn't know Gregor very well, but—like everyone who met him—she knew him well enough to remember him. She knew him well enough to smile when she thinks about him. She closes her eyes and opens them. Everything in her life is exactly as it was before, aside from this one small thing. But still she is not surprised to discover, there on Gregor's bed, plain and invisible, that she has been transformed.

__

I'd been trying to tell this story about Eddie for a while, but could never quite find my way into it. I knew it would have to involve Kafka and Costner, but struggled to get much farther than that. And then, like a gift, Facebook dropped the title in my lap. Everything seemed to fall out behind it. And still, once every month or two, Facebook will remind me about the time that Eddie Miller wrote on my wall.