It was an ordinary spring day when Franz Kafka awoke. Much to his consternation he discovered that during the night he had been transformed into a rather large and fairly unattractive crustacean. A lobster in fact. “Well, this is quite an inconvenience,” he thought to himself as he waved his massive pincers before his eyestalks, “how will I button my shirt?”

He could not help but to feel shame at the embarrassment this would undoubtedly cause his family. He particularly felt grief for his sister, who, due to this most unfortunate happenstance, would now only be able to marry a lowly office clark instead of a barrister or perhaps even a fishmonger.

With a sharp flick of his powerful tail, he launched himself from his bed to the floor with a thunderous and slightly moist, plop. “What the hell was that,” he heard his father exclaim from the dining room where breakfast was being served.

Within moments, there was a pounding at the door, “Franz, what’s going on? Open this door immediately.” Try as he might, Franz found that he could not grip the knob with his claws. “Franz, you filthy little bastard, are you masturbating again?”

Franz tried to form a reply but his words were garbled as if they were coming from deep underwater. “Oh my Christ,” his mother cried, “he’s pleasuring himself orally.” At those words, his father began to throw himself bodily at the door. The jam splintered, and he nearly fell into the room. His mother, close on her husbands heels, recoiled in horror.

His father turned on his sister as she entered the room to discover the cause of the commotion. “Quick”, he commanded, “melt some butter… a lot of it.”

“Now where are we going to get a pot big enough in which to boil him,” he mused quietly to himself.

Franz raised his mighty pincers to plead with his father. He griped his fathers’ ankle to get his attention and neatly, almost surgically, snipped off his right foot.

“Aaaargghh,” his father cried.

“My lord,” his mother yelped.

“Bllaaarrrgghhh,” his sister barfed.

The maid, upon hearing the noise, correctly surmised that Franz must have been transformed into some fearsome marine creature, possibly a cephalopod. Thinking quickly she snatched a poker from the fireplace, charged into the room and skewered his carapace, pinning him neatly to the floor.

“Aaaacckkk,” Franz would have said, had he still possessed human vocal organs.

Meanwhile, Franz’s father slowly bled to death.

After his father had been quietly dismembered and disposed of in the furnace of their apartment house (it would have been most unseemly to have the neighbours know of such scandalous events and goings on), the maid cracked open Franz’s chitinous body and claws and prepared a delicious meal of roast lobster and bisque to assuage the pain of his father's death. Everyone remarked upon the tenderness of the flesh.