The story in its original language can be found here
I don't know if this is a fanfic on The Metamorphosis by F. Kafka, not a fanfic, or what it'd better be called.
OTTO THE BEETLE
Waking up one morning after a restless sleep, Otto Falcon realized that he had turned into a hideous insect in his own bed. His huge, clumsy body, barely concealed by the blanket, was covered with numerous, bigger and smaller, armoured plates. Two whiskers protruded from Otto's head and jutted unpleasantly against the wall, reminding him of a head or a stiff arm resting uncomfortably on a pillow. He tried wiping his eyes or pinching himself to wake up, but his tiny, jumbled limbs weren't suited to human-like movements. Otto rolled over onto his belly, dangling the back of his beetle body off the bed. Then he managed to bring one of the front legs towards the head part and, touching the articulation that serves as the neck in the insects' anatomy, placed the foot of the limb in front of his eyes.
Otto's current arm consisted of several segments and had a mirrored black colour. Otto felt panic. The panic rang unaccustomedly in his head and lodged in his throat like a piece of unchewed food. He screamed, trying to force the slimy, lumpy feeling out of his mouth, but only a monstrous chirring sound filled the room.
Otto crawled instinctively into the light, into the barely lit corridor, as if lit by lamps, revealing that the huge body was struggling to fit through the door.
"Good morning," his mother told him. "Breakfast is on the table, as usual. You look like you've overslept today. I love you, kisses, I have to go," she kissed the air three times and disappeared from Otto's sight: it meant that she headed down the stairs, into the hallway.
Otto followed her to get to the dining room, but it turned out to be a true challenge. The stairs were narrower than the doorway, and Otto had to stand on his back legs and walk sideways down the stairs. In spite of these difficulties, he has finally managed it and, a half an hour later, found himself in the dining room, where his sister, an eight-year-old girl with dark, crown-curled curls, was already at the table eating a pumpkin pie, disgruntled.
"Mum lepfft youphf phome pfereal," she said with a full mouth. "Eaft."
Otto stared at the deep bowl full of milk-soaked cereal and bits of dried fruit mixed in with it. The smell of warm milk made his body shudder, and the shell plates on his back rose up, ready to release the two transparent wings beneath them.
"No flying at lunch," his sister said sternly after chewing a piece of pie. "Or I'll tell Mum and she'll punish you."
"Is this happening for real?" Otto muttered in misery, but his breath came out again with the same chirring that he had made in the room.
"Don't buzz," his sister chuckled.
Otto obediently bent down over the bowl, staring at the brown flakes floating in the white milk. His whole life, his former human life, flashed before his eyes: school, arguments with his parents and the tattletale Louise, the first can of beer in his buddy's garage, the meticulous teachers, the summer bike walks. And that morning, an unexpected morning, so insane that it couldn't have been anything other than a hallucination.
"Yes", Otto said to himself, hearing the inaudible chirring again. "It's an illusion of perception. Obviously, I'm not a beetle". He stretched his leg forward and gazed long into its tiny black scales, so unpleasantly rough that they scratched the table a bit.
"What's wrong with you today?" Louise asked suspiciously. "Otto, Mummy won't be happy if you don't eat your breakfast. She told me yesterday that you seem to have become out of hand and that I should keep an eye on you to prevent you getting into bad company."
"Yeah, that is, my name is still Otto Falcon, I'm still Otto to her."
He dipped one whisker into the milk and tried to scoop up a piece of cereal, but nothing came out. Only the thin skin of the whisker became wet and even seemed to swell a little, soaking up the milk. It was an unpleasant feeling. Sponge-like wrinkled skin after a bath was the first thing that comes to mind to describe it.
Otto repeated his question about the truth of what was happening, this time trying to give the chirring a more arbitrary shape. A cacophony of harsh rhythmic sounds was predictably born from his mouth.
"Mum, Otto's misbehaving!"
"Mum has already gone to work". Dad wasn't at home either: he had left on a business trip a few days ago and still hadn't come back. In that company, the boss always paid a lot of travel money, so Dad was happy to agree to any trip, even the most difficult and distant one.
Louise finished half of her slice and put the half-eaten stump back on the plate, stood up from the table, dusting off her dress. She began to pack and soon left the house. It was Wednesday, that was why she was staying at home till so late. On Wednesdays, Louise had to come to the school to the second lesson.
Otto, who had still not managed to eat his breakfast, tried to crawl back into his room to sleep. He had given the incident some thought and was inclined to think that he was still asleep, and if he fell asleep in this dream, the dream would be over; another, real morning would come in which he would wake up as a human being.
The only thing Otto had not considered was that it was harder to climb the stairs in an insect-like body than to walk down. He almost broke his legs on the steps and was desperate to get to the first floor. There was still his parents' bedroom, and he could go to sleep in it, because the choice of the room made absolutely no difference to interrupt his lingering sleep.
Otto crawled along the corridor away from the dining room to the room he was looking for. Everything in his parents' bedroom was as it should be: a wide double bed, gold wallpaper with embossed rose silhouettes, two nightstands, and a window covered with thick night curtains. On his mother's bedside table there was a tall white vase of fine porcelain, containing a few dried plants, the fragments of the bride's bouquet as a memento of the wedding.
However, something had changed. On his father's bedside table there was usually an entire army of photos in vertical frames: Otto's family, distant relatives, friends of his parents, and child photos of Otto and Louise.
This time it was all wrong. The photos obeyed the general line of Otto's dream madness. In one of them, the central one, where there used to be four people - their small but rather friendly family - there were now three people. Between them, like a fake, a clown or a character from a children's cartoon, a huge slouching beetle lurked.
The photo was taken three years ago when they had a trip to the lake. The beetle was wearing a loincloth, worn for decency, and his head was covered with a colourful bandana to protect the top of his head from overheating.
As it should be, but nearly. And the other photos. A smaller beetle playing ball with Louise. The same insect on the mast of a wooden ship model is waving its fragmented black leg and showing how high it has climbed. There should have been a little boy with a funny multi-coloured cap, dashingly turned backwards, but the beetle has done something bad to that boy, the beetle has stolen his life, stolen the photos of his family, stolen the family itself.
"Is it really me? Or is it not? What is this... this guise doing here?"
He touched the base of the whiskers with his leg for the umpteenth time this morning, brought one of the upper limbs to his eyes, wiggled it, experiencing an unbearable, world-shattering sense of discord.
Otto the Beetle sighed heavily and sank down on the bed, closing his eyes. The dream would pass, like all dreams, he told himself, falling asleep and being sure in his heart that this was no dream, and that his family, that crazy family, had adopted the beetle thirteen years ago, named him Otto and raised him. Everything was real, not fake. The whiskers, spread out on the pillow as ugly black wires, reminded him of it, like a throbbing pain talking about itself in a festering wound.
Otto the Beetle fell asleep, already knowing that he would wake up to what he had been all his life - an insect.