I've been thinking about using this for a while because I studied creative writing and Czech literature in Prague for a month in college and I had been assigned a certain story for the literature class and refused to read it because of the form of the main character. I don't think we ever talked about it in class, so I got away with it. But if I ever met the real life Raph (because we all know he's really out there like Elvis or Glenn Miller, right?) I would go, "I know, man… I know…"

I randomly got another literary homage in here. I don't think anybody notices or cares but myself though. Or you could prove me wrong and tell me so…

Raph drove the Pussy Wagon back to the lair and decided to give Casey his wrecked and cheese covered motorcycle and parking tickets the next day. He would rather lie in bed, sleep and pretend that he didn't exist than listen to Casey complain.

"Hey, how was it? I mean, is everything okay?" Raph stumbled slowly through the living room towards his bedroom and Leo and his perfect ninja instincts instantly zoomed in on his conflicted expression.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm going to lay down for a while. Can you guys leave me alone?" Raph slumped into his room and locked the door. It smelled like old fish. Maybe the cat died under his bed while he was gone.

He heard Mikey mutter through the door, "I thought guys were happy when they came back after vacations with their cute girlfriends…"

Raph lay in bed and stared dully at the wall, blinking sleepily. He was a failure of a man. Not only did he fail to make powerful love to his woman, but he'd actually cried about it and then tried to take advantage of her when she was drunk. Well, he was still really confused about that part. He hadn't really taken advantage of her, but he definitely wanted to. But was it really taking advantage? She had literally just offered herself to him an hour before that… Life sucked… Love sucked… There was a cockroach on the wall… But he couldn't move to kill it… Not that he would… He would run out in the living room and ask his brothers to do it for him like a big crying coward… Next time he'll be a man and fuck her hard…

He opened his eyes and stared at the yellow wall paper of the hotel room and if he stared long enough it almost looked like an animal prancing around the room in a field of paisley. Wouldn't it be weird if it were the only real being in the room and he and Shannon, asleep beside each other, were the imaginary ones? He wished he hadn't read that book of creepy old literature he'd found in the garbage a few weeks ago.

What an awful dream. He had spent the last few hours making love to Shannon in a whirlwind of sweat and heat. She had given herself up to him in complete physical surrender and he left her lying next to him with her hair tangled and her arms slightly above her head in a frozen state of exhausted ravishment. He congratulated himself and tried to count all the times he'd pushed her to the brink before she finally collapsed, her body shuddering against him. He had fallen asleep as soon as his manly deed had been carried out past the point of completion.

Why had he done that? She lay on her back next to him with her limbs splayed out in a rather undignified position. He hadn't even bother to cover her up completely, as he wanted to look at his trophy as she slept.

He felt terribly… flat…? Or small… or both small and flat. He hadn't gone to sleep feeling that way. He'd felt rather numb all over, but in a very excellent kind of way. He tried to roll over and flew off the bed as his lightness propelled him over the edge.

Shannon stirred and said, "Did you fall off the bed again?"

"Hey, I'm fine…" He sounded drunk. Didn't he have an awful dream where they were both drunk? His mouth moved and the syllables flew out in a mushy mess. He felt of his face and his lips were all misshapen and strange. Not really bigger or smaller, but just different. Definitely softer. Maybe she put lip gloss on him while he slept. But that probably wasn't it because she looked like she had just thrashed against him, gone limp and fallen asleep. He remembered her body moving with his force… Yeah…

Wait… back to the falling off the bed and being flattened problem. Was he flat? He felt like Gumby.

Shannon looked over the bed at him, her naked body froze in a half crawl as she saw him on the floor and she stared. Then she screamed. Then she screamed and rolled off the other end of the bed and nearly ran out of the room.

"Hey, wait! Put some clothes on!" He held his hand out in a gesture to stop her and saw a pink five fingered hand. Then he screamed and looked down to see a pink naked human man standing where he should be. "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!" he garbled since his mouth and tongue were all wrong. He probed the unfamiliar body and tried to walk, but tripped over the bedspread.

"Who are you?" Shannon was sobbing in complete terror. She thought he was a stranger. "Did you give me drugs? Where is Pretty Raph?" She sat on the ground in the corner and curled up in a ball.

He wanted to comfort her, but didn't think a naked man with his junk hanging out would be a source of comfort, especially since he was still rather warm from his reflections on the previous night, so he sought out his clothes, which just fell off his bony human ass. "FUCK! STUPID… CLOTHES… WHAT IS THIS…?"

Shannon shivered in the corner and choked as she cried. "Get out of my room! I'm gonna call the police or my boyfriend will kill you and I don't mean figuratively! He'll pull your lungs out!"

Raph froze as he pulled up his pants again in a futile attempt to keep them on his backside and said, "I am Raph! Okay! I'm… I woke up all different just now!"

Be cool. It wasn't that bad. At least he didn't wake up a giant cockroach or something. It was almost like he'd gotten his greatest wish. He kept thinking that he should "man up" and "be a man" and "fuck her right" and things like that. And now he could. He could get a job, a house, marry her…

But she had to first believe it was him and that he wasn't a rapist who had just made off with the real Pretty Raph. "Hey, calm down. I need to… put on some pants since my junk is hanging out everywhere and then I'll come over there." He considered putting on her Little Mermaid pajama pants, but they looked too small. He couldn't tell if he was abnormally large or small for a human because all of his parts seemed out of proportion. His spine was all stretched out and flat and he didn't have his hard shell to roll on anymore. It felt like he'd been stretched like taffy. He'd never had taffy, but he'd always heard that it was very stretchy.

Raph went in the bathroom and found a complimentary bathrobe hanging on the back of the door. He pulled it off the hook and shrieked when he saw a naked man's reflection out of the corner of his eye and he jumped into an instinctual defensive position. Then he realized it was himself and stared in the mirror. He looked like a big brawny dude with black hair and thick muscles. Not necessarily a scary dude, but a tough one. He prodded at his face and didn't like his coloring. His eyes were brown and he had rough hair growing all over his face. It felt like sandpaper and he scratched it madly. Did he need to shave? He'd never shaved. He never had any hair. "Shannon! How do you shave?! Do you have shaving crap in your bag! I need to get this shit off my face before I go crazy!"

Then he poked his thick biceps. Bleh. They were smaller now. He thought he was probably proportioned about the same as before, but on a smaller scale. And his skin was so sensitive that it nearly hurt. Now he wondered how Shannon tolerated all of his touching and licking and sucking all over her body. Maybe it made her skin hurt from too much stimulation. Orgasms must be agony! And he'd given her several last night! Maybe he should apologize…

She didn't answer or come to the door and he supposed she was still hiding from him. Poor girl…

He had to piss and spent several minutes cursing at his penis for not operating properly. "Just work! Come on! Is it supposed to come out of my ears now!" Finally, something happened and he spent a few more minutes poking around his testicles in disgust.

"I'm coming out. Just a minute! Don't scream or anything!" Raph put the bathrobe on and opened the door.

Shannon was dressed and sitting on the bed very demurely, her face puffy and red and she was still shivering. "Who are you?" Her voice was baby soft and afraid.

"I said it's me. It's Pretty Raph. I woke up all human this morning. Did we eat any funny mushrooms last night? Did you meet any crazy scientists outside or evil looking shaman? Or voodoo women? They all find turning us human to be really funny shit. I'm going to come over there. Don't worry. You know I wouldn't hurt you…" He held his hands out to her as if approaching a feral kitten. "It's alright…"

She scurried to the other side of the bed as he approached.

"Okay, remember how we first met? I was in a cage fight and a dude pounded me in the face because you came up to the cage and told me to quit fighting and then you said you couldn't remember how to get home? And you kissed me when you got on the back of my bike? And you thought you were going to ride on the handlebars of a bicycle or something? Now I never told anybody about that. So do you know it's me now?" He came a little closer and she didn't move away this time.

"How come you're human? I don't think I like it." Shannon poked his bicep and then ran a hand down his back.

He shivered at all the new sensation and twisted a little, making a face. "I hate this. My dick looks like a dead chicken. Is that how all guys look?"

"Yeah, all humans have pretty ugly genitals, I guess. Boys and girls. So that's nothing weird." She pulled her hand away. "Should… I not touch you? I feel like I'm cheating on you with you."

"It's okay. I'm not sure how this happened. There must be somebody out there!" He grabbed his weapons and spent the next half an hour stalking the woods surrounding the hotel in a bathrobe looking for Bishop or Chaplin or Baxter Stockman or some other crazy scientist that would think it was funny to fuck around with his DNA. But eventually his testicles turned to icicles and shrank like withering grapes and he went back inside. "I hate this! I feel like I'm made out of tissue paper!"

"I got you some clothes while you were running around naked looking for bad guys!" Shannon said and she held up a paper bag full of men's clothes. "The general store across the road had some clothes that might fit you."

He pulled out jeans and a flannel shirt. She even bought him shoes, socks and underwear, bless her heart. "Thanks, Da-Rin!" He moved to kiss her and she shrank back, her face going completely red. "What's the matter?"

"I can't kiss you like this! You look like… some guy…" She shuddered and said, "I'm sorry if it makes you feel bad. But you don't look like you anymore."

"You mean you PREFER that I look like a big green monster?" He stared at her with his mouth open and wondered how much more or less stupid he looked doing this as a human as opposed to doing it as a mutant.

"What are you going to do now?" she asked, obviously avoiding the question. "Do you want to go home and ask your brother what to do? That really smart one that likes to set things on fire?"

"I don't know." Raph thought about it for a while. Didn't seem like a great idea.

Raph shook Don by the shoulders and shouted, "FIX ME! PUT ME BACK! MY GIRL LIKES THE FACT THAT I WAS UGLY! NOW I'M A BURLY BROWN HUMAN AND SHE WON'T TO TOUCH ME ANYMORE!"

"You look kind of Hispanic if you ask me, Raph," Leo said as he all three of his brothers poked him all over his body. "Or Italian maybe?"

"Yeah, it really suits you!" Mikey said as he pulled on Raph's black hair.

Raph slapped his hand away and said, "I'll remember that when I'm killing whoever did this! PUT ME BACK RIGHT NOW!"

Don took a blood sample and hummed complacently as he looked at it under a microscope. Raph motioned for Shannon to sit on his lap, but she sat next to him and tapped his foot playfully with hers. He felt like he had cooties…

"Well, you're a human…" Don said. "Genetically speaking anyway. You seem to have Western European DNA. Like… Greek or Italian? I mean, you have some genes in common with that genotype more than others."

"That's fascinating. Make me a mutant turtle again."

Don rolled his eyes and the goggles he was wearing made him look like a big green cockroach. Raph shuddered and felt goose bumps all over his skin. He scratched at them and yelled, "What the hell is this?!"

Shannon took his hands gently and held them in hers. "That's what your hairs do when you're cold or scared. It's okay."

He had never felt so overwhelmingly horny in his whole horny teenage life and had a blind urge to force all his brothers out of the lab and throw her down on the lab bed and…

Leo said, "Did you feel anything unusual today?"

"Like waking up as a human? No." Raph rolled his eyes and pulled himself away from Shannon in an attempt to regain some self-control and then notice that his pants were tenting and put a large coffee table book about Czech culture on his lap like a table.

Mikey pointed and laughed.

"You've wanted to be a man so that you can give Shannon what she needs right? Like a home and money and a decent sex life? Since yours was so… let's face it… terrible before right?" Don crossed his legs like he was his therapist and watched him intently.

"Yeah, well…" Raph scratched his stubble and wished he could just brush it off. "Do I have to shave this shit off every day for the rest of my life now? Can't I get it waxed off or something?!"

Leo said, "I believe that as a Buddhist, we are in whatever form the universe wishes for us to be in at that time. Buddha, in his great wisdom has seen that you should now be a human. So I say that it's fate and you should go out and forge a human life." Leo crossed his legs and said, "I think we should all meditate on this."

"Well, I have to get out there and figure out what I'm going to do if you think I should stay like this," Raph said, pulling Shannon behind him as she tripped on her long skirt. Anything to get away from Leo and meditation.

"I used to be a cockroach and was transformed into the form of a turtle because you being so afraid of cockroaches, it would really ruin sparring," Leo said.

Raph shouted back to Don to turn down the nitrous oxide tank if it was still busted. It might give him the giggles, but clearly Leo didn't seem too tolerant of it.

Johnny No Thumbs flicked through a collection of fake ID's and social security cards and Raph glanced in all directions as several pedestrians passed them all without a second look. Shouldn't they all stare at him with abhorrence?

"You look good, Butch! You should have done this before when your ex-wife needed you to take the kids to summer camp, but you couldn't because of the skin affliction." Johnny fanned out some possibilities from his selection of fake ID's.

Shannon said, "You were married?" She frowned and her eyes welled up.

"No! I was never married! You're one brain cell away from being a lobster or something, Johnny! Give me something from New York! Why the fuck would I want to be from New Jersey! Or Ecuador! Do I look like I'm Ecuadorian?!" Raph pulled out the single New York driver's license in the bunch.

Johnny clicked his tongue and shook his head, "Now that is racist, Butch. Does anybody really LOOK Ecuadorian? Like you're always going to be a great big mutant turtle, even if you look like a muscular Italian."

"Just shut the fuck up and tell me how much I owe." He looked at the ID and read the name. "Gregor Samsa? What kind of dumbass name is that? You got any idea how I can get a job?" Raph searched his pockets and kept making very odd motions with his hands as he tried to avoid a non-existent shell.

Johnny said, "You can always work for me. You have no work history, you know. Or any history of any kind. You should just be one of my body guards. I trust you, man. You could pass for my son! Look at us!" Johnny put an arm around Raph's burly human shoulders and he hunched away, growling.

"Just what I always wanted…" Raph grumbled. "Sure. For the time being. Any risk I'll get arrested?"

"Does it matter? You're live the thug-life. Am I right?" Johnny asked with overbearing joviality. "You need a place to stay?"

"Uh…" Raph didn't want to live with Johnny. He knew he would offer and he found it repulsive.

He felt Shannon's hand slip into his and he fumbled to link all five of his fingers with hers. It felt strange and overly complicated. "We need to get an apartment," she said. "We need a place of our own."

Raph thought for a minute. "You want to live with me right? I mean… that's like… been all we talk about for weeks now. I'll get us a place and we'll live together and wake up together every morning and be able to fuck all night in peace."

Shannon looked him up and down as if he were a stranger. "Could I get used to the new you first? I only seen you as a human now for about four hours. But I want to live with you and stuff. We need to get married though. My grandma will stare at me if I move in with a boy. Especially one that's a criminal! Will I have to change my name to Mrs. Samsa?"

Raph slapped himself on the forehead. Ouch. His skull nearly cracked with the force. He felt like he was made of porcelain. "We can do that… I don't want to ask you to shack up with a mob thug." Didn't he used to beat up guys like that?

"Hold on now, Butch!" Johnny said, his hands in the air as if he were stopping him from running straight to a chapel. "You're only sixteen! You can't get married!"

"I'm a fucking ninja turtle! Just make it happen!" He pounded a fist in his hand and knew that it lacked the same threat that it had before.

"You need a social security number. And you'll need your dad's permission first."

Raph balked and said in complete astonishment, "How do you remember my age?! Is this a joke!" He grabbed him by the lapels of his cheap suit and yelled, "YOU DID THIS TO ME, DIDN'T YOU?!"

"Pretty Raph! Stop it!" Shannon swatted his arm and he instantly released Johnny and watched his eyeballs rattle around in their sockets.

Johnny got on his phone and made a few calls to a few buddies and soon found Raph a cruddy apartment. He bragged that it even had a bathroom! Raph wanted to slap him upside the head, but bowed like a marionette puppet, still clinging to weird Japanese family affectations and thanked him in Japanese. A few girls walked past, staring and smiling at him.

"WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? GET LOST!" Raph yelled as they fled from his rage.

"They were looking at your butt," Shannon said, as she took a minute to examine it herself. "It's different now…"

He resisted the urge to pat his own ass in public and then asked Johnny how to get a key to his new place or did he have to break in?

Raph put the key in the lock of the new apartment and turned several times. A woman with a basket of laundry walked past, staring at his ass. He nearly whirled around to scream at her, but the door opened and he ushered Shannon inside.

He looked under all the furniture and then went in the hallways after ordering Shannon to kill all the cockroaches he'd seen scurrying around the room. He could hear her pink sneakers plodding on the walls as she flattened them. Finally, she opened the door and told him it was safe. As soon as he shut the door and locked it behind him, he put his hands on her hips and then went to unbutton her shirt.

Shannon took a step backwards and said, "I don't… You're like a different person now… I still think you're going to come in the door and call me a whore for cheating on you with a human…"

Raph wondered if an angry Italian might come running through the door in his body screaming that his wife had just left him because he'd woken up an ugly green mutant. He said, "You know this is still me. I'm the same inside. I just wondered if you wanted to give the new body a spin."

"Um…" She bit her lip and looked rather uncomfortable with the idea. "Can we… just kiss first before we have a lot of loud crazy sex?"

He blanched and realized what a weird situation this must be for her. So he approached her as if he were walking on crunchy egg shells, or possibly crunchy dead cockroaches and softly kissed her.

She kissed him delicately and it was like they had never kissed before. She sat on his lap the first time and it was awkward, but so nice. They were at her parents' house. She has such soft lips. He wanted to relieve that moment over and over. That moment when he had hope that she saw something more than an ugly thing.

He pulled back and said, "This shouldn't be so new…"

"It's okay…" She seemed confused and licked her lips as if she'd found his mouth full of onion juice. "Do you want to keep going…?"

Of course he did. But he felt an invisible hand pulling him back, telling him it was wrong somehow. "I want you to be comfortable first. Okay?"

He noticed her face and neck and chest were all bright red and she said, "We could try to practicing kissing more so we get used to it. Is that okay?"

Raph approved of this plan and…

Leo knocked on the door and told him to come out and get his lazy butt in the dojo… Was Leo in the apartment…?

She looked in the cupboards, surveying his needs for survival as a semi-bachelor. "You need food to cook. Do you cook? I don't want you to burn the place down, you know. I can get you groceries that you can heat up. Or I'll cook for you! And you need sheets and blankets and bathroom stuff."

"I can get some of those from home." Raph scratched his scruffy face. "Are you happy now? I mean, this is what we want."

She made a face as she looked in the refrigerator. "Yeah! Now we can have sex whenever you want! That's what makes us happy."

A few weeks passed and Raph worked for Johnny and was only shot four times. He couldn't believe that Bald Tony was his boss and he realized that he didn't really have as much of a problem taking orders from a really short guy, since he'd always taken orders from his father and he was much shorter than Raph.

As soon as Shannon was comfortable with his body then she was pregnant and she had to stop performing publically because of the stress on the baby. She told him she was happy with their new life as she rocked the baby at night, like the perfect essence of maternal love. But he knew she was empty inside. She lay next to him at night and he knew she wasn't really there. All her windows were empty again. They'd had to pawn her instruments to afford things for the baby. She lay under him at night and he wondered if she were hiding in a room in her house from him.

A giant cockroach mocked Raph as he struggled. The cockroach's laugh turned into Leo's voice and asked, "Are you coming out?" through Raph's bedroom door. "You've been asleep for three hours. Are you still alive?"

Raph groaned and rubbed his sweaty face. So where was he? He patted his chest and sighed with relief. He was still an ugly green mutant and had no itchy chest hair. But he wasn't in the hotel or the apartment…

Which meant he really had… last night at the hotel…

He opened the door and asked Leo, "Could I borrow your phone for a minute? Then I'll be right in." He yawned and rubbed his eyes.

There had been lots of cockroaches in his dream. And it seems like he'd gotten laid really successfully and then turned human and gotten Shannon pregnant within five minutes. Sometimes dreams about Shannon were great. She smiled and touched him softly and he watched her sitting amongst flowers and lots of girlie-ass imagery that he would never tell another soul. Sometimes he wondered if he needed his brain scrubbed out with soap when he woke up from other less pure dreams. But this was one of the sad dreams. She couldn't even manage to be angry with him when he let her down. She just existed. That was so much worse.

He dialed her number and heard her sweet voice answer with curiosity at the unfamiliar number. His heart jumped happily at the sound of her voice and he said, "Hey, it's me. I was just thinking about you. I wanted to see how you were. I mean, you're alone at the hospital right? Why don't you call my sister and see if she and Casey will take you out for some dinner and see a movie or something. How's that sound? I mean, don't be afraid to ask if you need something. If you're all alone. You can always tell me if you're lonely or if you need something…" Don't lay under me and stare like a haunted house…

"That's a good idea!" she gushed and he heard her thump into a musical instrument and presumed she was spinning around in her socks. "Casey said I could dye his hair pink! Are you lonely too?"

He glanced at Leo who had weirdly narrowed eyes. "Yeah, sort of. But it's okay. I'm going to go train so I'll be busy. Just… keep your head up." He smiled at finding a cheery voice on the other of the line instead of lamenting at his failures. "And sorry for the… uh…" He glanced at Leo and hissed, "Could you get lost please?!"

Leo huffed and marched to the dojo like a put-upon soldier. Raph continued, "Sorry about… um… you know…"

"Sorry about what?" Shannon asked. "I had lots of fun last night. I was so happy that I got to wake up in the morning with you holding me! It was really beautiful! Because you're so good and nice to me! I think it was my favorite night ever in my whole life. It was so nice when you sang 'Sweet Child of Mine' while I was falling asleep. I felt sick, but I knew it was okay because you love me so sweetly."

His vision blurred for a second as he looked at his feet. He sang her the song in the hotel room as she lay drunk in his arms. He listened to that song sometimes after he visited her or when he couldn't see her. Just a song about a sweet and innocent love. They had looked into each others' eyes as he sang it with their arms around each other and at the time he thought it was the most perfect moment in his life and he could just die then and there and have had a perfectly fulfilled life. He wished she didn't remember it. "I'll have Mikey bake some cookies for you and I'll sneak them over tonight... How about that, pretty girl?"

"COOKIES!" Raph held the phone away from his ear for a second. "BRING ME COOKIES! I'll buy you dinner and your sister can bring it to you!"

"Cool!" He hoped April wouldn't mind being ordered to deliver his dinner. If she did he would remind her of the time she ordered him to drive two hours to New Jersey to give Casey back the $20.00 she owed him after a bad fight while they were still dating.

"Okay, I'm going to call them. They won't mind?"

Now he smiled again. "Nah, they'll be happy to spend time with you. And Casey would look great with pink hair. I think you should do it. Really. Do it! I want to see pictures."

"Okay!" Happy girl. "And you'll come over tonight?"

"Yeah, I'll come and hold you for a while. But not for too long…" His heart sank a little. He knew that the momentary joy was just a set up for unavoidable disappointment when he inevitably had to tear himself away. "

"Bye. I love you."

He sighed. Nearly over. "Yeah, you too." He hung up.

Leo took his phone back and sighed. "What if I'd gotten a very important call while you were gabbing with that woman?"

Raph ignored him and relaxed. Then he left the dojo and waited for Don to kill a cockroach and let him know that it was safe to reenter.