Katherine Sato sipped at her styrofoam cup, the hot cocoa’s steam warming her muzzle. She blocked out the lobby of First Federal; the rows of tellers and lines of patrons; the obsidian floor, and the high glass windows that looked out on snow-covered skyscrapers. There was only her, and her wet coat and cold desk, and the delicious warm drink in her claws.

She winced, and squirmed in her seat, trying to get her tails comfortable again. They were still sore from where she had fallen on them. And they were dirty and wet, and the back of her coat was dirty and wet, and her hair was all dirty and wet too. At least her side desk faced out into the lobby, so that no one would notice. But she noticed, and it grated on her like her unpaid credit card bills, and her boyfriend’s unbought Christmas gift.

She found her claws digging into the styrofoam, and forced herself to relax. Zen, she thought. Clear mind. Nothing in the world except cocoa. Nothing in the world but expensive, overpriced-

She sipped a little too deeply, and started breathing through her muzzle trying to cool off her burning tongue. Good cocoa, she thought, and fanned cool air onto her tongue. Very good.

Stupid Kath.

Something made her tails twitch and her ears perk, and she looked up to see an unusual presence enter the building. It wavered like it was out of focus, and she shifted gears back and forth with her mind to look at both sides of it, like she would have at one of those books with the 3d illusions. One side was a young man in a business suit, clean and executive looking. The other side was a Kitsune like her, with brilliant white fur that had a golden sheen. But he only had one tail, and his clothes — his real clothes — looked old and cheap. A worn out jacket covered a thin t-shirt, and a pair of jeans that went down over his shoes.

Kath raised her eyebrows, watching him from across the lobby without his noticing her, and wondered what kind of prank he was trying to pull. She remembered her older Kitsune brothers’ dumb antics back home in Vancouver, and the thought of someone like them trying to pull something at First Federal made her grin with anticipation. Go ahead, she thought. Bring it on. We’ll see who has the last laugh — the foolish young fox or the corporate behemoth.

Over the next few minutes, she kept glancing up from her paperwork to see how far he had gotten in line. A fox scent drifted towards her, on the cold air blown in by the doorway, and she detected a hint of forced confidence, overlaying an intense nervousness. She began to sweat as she realized that, because it made her recall her Becoming, and she didn’t want to remember it. Or how scared she had been, or how much her brothers had tormented her.

Her conscience began chiding her, and as always it had her mother’s thickly accented voice. "He is scared young man who has first Become, and you are just to ignoring him? You should getting up, going over there, saying hello to him. Those papers will still being there when you are to getting back." She imagined her mother’s tails fluffed out, as she folded her arms in a huff.

Not NOW, Mother, Katherine thought, and made herself focus on work. But her mind kept drifting off. Was he really trying to prank them, she wondered, or just trying on a persona? Did he have any foxes in his family? Had anyone explained to him what had happened?

A few minutes passed, a few frustrating minutes spent writing reports in Microsoft Word. Then something loomed over the flat panel display on her desk, and she looked up to see the other fox. He was projecting a sheen of businesslike confidence, so strongly that she could only see the young man in the suit coat.

His eyes flicked down to the nameplate on her desk. "Hello, Miss Sato." He smiled at her.

His persona was strong, but felt so fake that it was off-putting. Just like most of the real execs I know, Kath thought. She vanished her own persona for him, letting him see her fox muzzle and three bushy tails, and relished the look of shock on his face. His persona flickered a moment, and past him Kath saw someone in line staring at his fox tail.

To his credit, the young fox recovered quickly. "Do they, uh … " His eyes flicked to the side, and when he looked back down at her he seemed sheepish. "Do they hire a lot of Kitsune here?" He grinned nervously.

"Oh yeah," she said, and typed something into her report. "Lots. We’re just all over the place here." She looked up at him. "Can I help you?"

"Well I, uh … " He coughed, and pulled up a chair to her desk. "I was told you had a job for me," he said, and sounded like he was trying to be professional.

"Ah, yes," Kath deadpanned, still typing and looking away from him. "Can I see your resume?"

He got something out of his briefcase, and slid it across the glass desk towards her. She took it and glanced at it for a second. High school graduate, Microsoft Office experience, last position held two years ago. Unhireable. No wonder he was trying so hard to fit in.

"I’ll make sure my boss sees it," she lied, and put it into a drawer without looking. "If you like, you can take a card," she said, and waved a hand at her business card holder.

He took one, and sat there looking at it for a long moment. Kath’s face started to burn, as she realized that he wasn’t going away that easily.

"Can I ask you a question?" he finally said.

"Make it quick," she told him.

"How’d you get hired on, here?"

And Kath knew what he meant. He had just Become, after all; he had discovered his powers all on his own, and the world seemed like a new place to him. Kath remembered flying for the first time, and thinking her brothers could never find her up there. She remembered trying on new personas, and grinning at herself in the mirror, and discreetly playing with foxfire, careful not to burn anything important.

But she also remembered the shock of discovering that her brothers were Kitsune too, and that now that she knew they had no end of ways to torment her. She remembered how quickly her elation and self-confidence had worn off, and how the Monday after that weekend had been just another school day, and how her friends hadn’t even been able to tell that there was anything different about her.

She remembered her teenage years, and how irrelevant it had been that she was a mythical creature. Because nobody had liked her, and nothing could make up for that.

Kath remembered all this as she looked over at him, narrowly considering the naive young fox. And she knew that someone would have to burst his bubble, and that it’d be better done sooner than later.

"Fine," Kath said. "You want to know how I got this job?" She stood up, and indicated herself from the neck down. "This is how I got this job."

The young fox’s face turned red, and he looked away.

"I know what you’re thinking," she said, her own face reddened, and folded her arms as she spoke. "You’re thinking ‘Oh, I’m a Kitsune now, the world is magic! My every dream can be fulfilled! I’m going to go in and get a job at the bank, even though I haven’t held a position in two flipping years.‘" She gave him a scornful look. "You think anything can make up for that? Or for your lack of a degree?"

He had clasped his hands in his lap as she spoke, and was looking down at them now. "But … " He looked up at her. "Isn’t the world a magical place?"

"Yes." She sat back down. "And you know what the magical force that drives this world is? Money. That’s why you are applying to work at a bank, and not at a dumb charity."

"But … " And now all she could see was his real side, his fox side, sitting in a chair that cost more than his worn-out clothes did. "Today I … I discovered that I can become anyone that I want to. And I flew. I flew under my own power! Does all that count for nothing?" He gave her a pleading look, and his voice cracked as he spoke.

"Have you tried foxfire yet?" she asked, abruptly.

"Fox … fire? No," he said, twisting his face as he tried to think.

Kath held out her hand, and a flame the size of a cigarette lighter’s appeared in between her fingers. "This is foxfire. See? There it is," she said, and idly played with the flame for a moment, a bored look on her face.

He held out his hand and concentrated on it, but failed to produce a spark.

"Know what it’s good for?"

He looked up at her, his eyes daring to hope.

"Setting off the sprinkler system, and lighting cigarettes. That’s it." She snapped her fingers together, and snuffed out the flame. Along with his hopes.

He looked shocked and hurt, and Kath found that she didn’t enjoy that look on his face as much as she’d thought she would. She glanced back over at her display, and hoped that he would leave soon.

The corners of his eyes moistened, and his face twitched as he fought to maintain his composure. "I’ll show you," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "I’ll show you what Kitsune powers can do. I’ll imagine myself as the brightest, most successful college student ever. I’ll get the financial aid that I need. I’ll ace every test, and I’ll get that stupid degree, and I’ll come right back here and shove it in your face." He glared at her, his eyes wet. "And then I’ll rise to the top! I’ll-"

"Want to know a secret?" Kath asked, her hands clasped underneath her chin and her elbows leaning on the top of her desk.

He stopped, and gave her a confused look.

She beckoned him closer. As he leaned over the table towards her, she pointed out into the lobby, and he looked where her fingers were pointing. "See that lady right there?"

"The, uh, African-American one? In the red suitcoat?"

"That’s the one." Kath looked up at him. "She’s a Kitsune."

He stared at Kath, not sure if she was joking or not. Then he looked back out into the lobby and squinted at the woman she’d indicated, trying to see her fox muzzle and tails.

"She comes in here every week," Kath went on, "to deposit her paycheck. Every now and then she asks us about a loan."

"What does she do?" the young fox asked.

"Some high-level position. President, Vice President, VP of Marketing. I dunno. She’s gotten promoted a few times since I first saw her. Works at some Internet company."

Kath followed his gaze out into the lobby. The woman looked like a lioness … poised, elegant and powerful. She looked like she didn’t have the time to be waiting there. And in fact, as he watched a man came out of a back room and greeted her apologetically. She forgave him and shook his hand, and then they went down the hallway together.

"I couldn’t see her tails," the young fox said.

"That’s because she’s forgotten she has them."

He recoiled, and stared at her again.

"That’s what happens, when you take on a persona so intensely. You become it, and it becomes you, and you forget who you actually are." Kath continued to look out into the lobby, idly kicking her feet. "First you forget how many tails you have … then you forget that you have a fox tail at all … then you forget you can fly." She looked up at him. "Go ahead. Ask her if she’s a Kitsune. See what kind of response you get."

He stared into the hallway, visibly shaken, trying to comprehend what he’d just heard. "How … why?" He looked down at her. "Why would anyone let that happen?"

"Didn’t you just tell me, yourself? You don’t really want to be a Kitsune. You want to be another successful human, with money and power and fame. And you don’t mind having Kitsune powers, if they’ll help you accomplish your goal. But if they won’t, you’re willing to set them aside, and do whatever it takes." She smiled at him, a sly kind of smile that enjoyed the horrified look on his face. "You’re starting to see how the world really works."

He looked away and just stood there, his hands in his pockets, staring down at the floor. And after a moment, Kath turned back to her PC’s display, and started typing again.

The young fox mumbled something, and Katherine’s ears perked. "Excuse me?"

"You," he said, and looked up at her. "How come you’re still a Kitsune?"

She gave him an incredulous look. "I beg your pardon?"

"How come you still remember that you’re a Kitsune? I mean, if that’s really what you’re supposed to do. Forget who you are, and forget you can fly, and do whatever it takes to earn money and buy things. Then why do you still have your tails?" His eyes bored into hers. "Did you lie to me, when you said your Kitsune powers don’t help with anything? Or when you told me that’s how the world really works, were you just lying to yourself?"

Kath stood up, kicked her chair back and gripped the edge of her desk. "Listen, you little snot!" He jumped back as her tails went ablaze behind her, the air rippling with heat distortions, and several people in line gasped. "Don’t you ever talk that way to me. Ever!"

She glared up at his shocked face, and her eyes glowed. "Yes, I have my tails. Yes, I have my stupid powers! But I also have a job, and a life, and a place to stay besides my parents’ house. And you’ll never have any of that, because you’re worthless! The corporate world doesn’t want you, and you’ll be lucky if you can find a job scrubbing tables at Arby’s! Do you hear me!? I said-"

A loud, beeping noise cut her off. And for a second she looked around, startled, before the sprinkler came on over her desk.

The people in line cried out in alarm, unable to see why her outburst had made the sprinkler system go off but able to see the results. Her tails went out, and her suit was instantly soaked through. A second later her computer fizzled and gave off a loud spark, then shut down. Steam poured out of the case.

The young fox was nowhere to be seen.

Kath stood her chair back up and slumped into it, soaking wet all the way through, as her mother’s voice chided her. "That was not a wery nice thing you did, Katerina."

She sighed. It’s not a nice world, mom …

Two weeks later

" … consumer confidence at an all-time low, as evidenced by this year’s dismal holiday sales. Macy’s and JC Penney’s have revised their fourth quarter earnings projections, and … "

The TV newscaster went on, unaware that he was sitting inside of a beat-up plastic box on a bare wooden floor. The furniture had already been moved out, and Katherine’s things were piled up in boxes, hastily patched up with boxing tape and with black marker scrawlings across them.

She stood in the kitchen nook, wearing blue jeans and a white sweater with the sleeves rolled up, and mopped at her face with the bandana she’d been using to tie back her hair. Then she looked past the TV set out the window, at the tops of the trees on the street outside, and sighed into the telephone. "Hi, mom … "

" … been unable to stem the tide of rampant bankruptcy. Many lending institutions have been forced to close their doors altogether, including the First Federal Bank of … "

"Yeah, it’s me." Kath smiled a sad smile, and twisted the telephone cord around her finger. "Listen, can I … " She coughed. "Can I ask a favor of you and dad? I kinda need a place to stay for a few weeks — maybe months — and I … " Her voice cracked.

She turned away from the window and hid her face, as she started to cry uncontrollably. "I know, mom," she said, her voice husky. "I know."

" … pleas for a bailout were soundly rejected by both parties. But leading analysts warn that if taxpayer money isn’t pumped into the system, and soon, the entire country could face a financial crisis."

Kath sniffled, and tore off a wad of paper towels before pressing it to her eyes, and then blowing her nose on it. She kept the phone to her pointed ear, occasionally nodding to it. "Yes," she said, and sniffled again. "Yes. Yes, I’m looking forward to your cooking, too." She opened the refrigerator door. There were a pizza delivery box and a half-empty two-liter bottle inside. "Believe me, mom, I’m looking forward to it."

" … was brought to you by Consumer Refinancing Center. Got debt? We can help!"

"I love you too, mom." She nodded, then laughed, then sniffled again and brought another paper towel to her muzzle. "Yes. Okay, I’ll see you there then. Do svidaniya!"

She hung up the phone, turned around and then stopped, taken aback. Floating outside her window was a familiar-looking young fox, leaning one arm on the windowsill and looking up at her blankly.

He didn’t move or say anything. And Kath finally stormed over to the window, unlocked it and pulled it upward, paint flaking off as she did so. Cold air poured inside, and she ignited a foxfire in one hand, to ward off the cold and ward back the intruder. "What do you want?"

"Do you need any help?" he asked, unfazed.

"What makes you think I need your help?" she said, and sniffed.

He said nothing, but looked past her. And she turned and saw the stack of boxes piled up against the wall, haphazardly placed and crushing each other.

Kath took a deep breath, then let it out in a sigh. She hung her head in defeat, and squeezed her palm shut to extinguish the flames. "Come in," she said, without looking up.

He went around to the front door. And the TV played a commercial, that ended with scenes of a family playing on swings in a park. "So you can forget about your finances … and spend time on what’s really important."

"Hayaikawa!" His mother pounded on the door again. "Hayaikawa Iwao! Come out of there at once! We’re not paying for your Internet if you’re not going to get a job."

One ear on top of his head cocked towards the door. And a part of Hayaikawa’s brain, the part that hadn’t panicked, thought "Hey, that’s kind of neat." The rest of him just stared at his fox ears and muzzle, and the white fur and claws on his hands, and the bushy tail that was brushing the bathroom wall as he crouched on the sink in front of the mirror. And he was so scared that he was starting to have those detached thoughts, because it was like the part of his brain that could think and the part of his brain that could feel were no longer speaking to each other.

"I wonder what my friends online will think?" the part of his brain that was still working thought, and it was like the thought just came to him without his having to think it. The rest of him was gripped with this panic that was just getting worse and worse.

More pounding on the door. "Hayaikawa! You don’t have time to be staying in there. I’m supposed to be at work right now. Come out of there, I still need to drop you off at the bus stop!"

"That would not be a good idea," his brain thought, unbidden.

His throat began to tighten.

"What if somebody saw me?"

An animal whine started to build up in his throat, and he fought it back, not knowing what would happen if his family heard it.

"I mean, if you saw me, for instance. You’d start crying and screaming … "

He tried to hold it back as best as he could, but his eyes began to water. He could no longer breathe.

" … and you’ve already been mad at me for not getting the grades that you want me to. So what’re you going to do when you see … that … "

The whine came out of his throat.

"What was that?" His mother was startled.

Hayaikawa jumped down from the sink and curled up next to the bathtub, hugging his shoulders and burying his head in his arms and rocking back and forth slowly, too terrified to do anything else. "Go away go away go away … "

He kept repeating that in his head, as his fox ears cocked towards the door and listened to his mom and his dad arguing. They were talking about what to do with him, and they had switched to Japanese but he still understood most of it. So he knew that his mom was talking about grounding him for life, and his dad was being patient with her and suggesting that she wait on that.

Finally his mom left for work, and his dad knocked on the door. "Hayaikawa?" he asked. "Are you alright?"

"Go away go away please just go away … "

"Your mother is worried about you. You’re not talking to us, and we don’t know what’s happened."

The thought came to him that "I’d like to talk to you right now, but I don’t know what my voice will sound like and I’m scared that you’ll find out what’s happened."

"She’s worried that you are using drugs, and are trying to hide their effects from us."

"I’m not, dad. I’ve just been having these strange dreams lately, and they’ve been getting so real and vivid … "

"I told her that that was preposterous, because our son would never do that. But it’s hard to defend you to her when you are refusing to talk to us."

" … and I learned how to control them, and I looked forward to them every night. And that’s why I started getting my homework done fast, so I could get to sleep and get back to the dreams … "

"I would very much like it if you would talk to us."

" … and I never … I … I … "

"Are you alright?"

Another short whine escaped his throat. He buried his face in his arms and shook as he cried his new eyes out silently, choking back the noise that he wanted to make and just screaming inside.

His father stood outside, saying nothing, the entire time. Then, finally, "I have got to leave for work, or I will be late. You have my cellphone number. Please call me and let me know how you are."

Footsteps went away from the bathroom door. Then the front door opened and closed, and the car door opened and closed, and the engine started and his dad drove off. Hayaikawa was amazed at how clearly he could hear it all.

Then he heard a loud CLICK somewhere in the house, and it made him jump up and look around, fur standing on end. A second later there was another click, and then the heater vents turned on. Warm air blew into the room.

Hayaikawa huddled next to the heater vent, letting it dry his tears. He sniffled, and grabbed a tissue from off the sink to dry his muzzle with. Then another, and another, until he had a small pile of them. He threw them all in the trash, and shivered next to the vent.

What was he supposed to do now?

The thought came to him that what was happening was impossible. Because of that, he realized, he had to be dreaming still. The thought gave him hope, and helped him to calm down.

How had he lost control of the dream? How had he forgotten that he was dreaming? Hayaikawa did not know. But he knew a few ways to find out.

The first way he knew was to look in the mirror. If he wasn’t himself when he looked in the mirror inside a dream, his reflection was always distorted, and he was unable to look at it clearly. Hayaikawa had already looked in the mirror that morning, but he wanted to be thorough, because dreaming could mess up one’s perception of time. (He made a mental note to make sure that the clock readouts made sense.) So he crawled back onto the sink, and looked at his face.

His face was not even the slightest bit human. It looked just like that of an arctic fox, with thin white fur that was tinged with ice blue. His nose was black and his eyes were brown, and he stared into them, seeing a wide-eyed fox on the other side of the mirror and unable to comprehend that it was him.

He touched the tip of his muzzle, and could feel the pressure placed on his nose bone. Then he pinched it shut and tried to breathe through it, and was unable to. Finally he traced one claw all the way up to his forehead, and it made him want to sneeze. A thought came to him, and he scritched at the top of his head, but he wasn’t sure what to make of the feeling.

He held up his hands to the mirror. They looked strange, but he could see them clearly, too. He did not have fingernails anymore, but dull claws, which he could not retract and which stretched out past his fingertips. And the undersides of his fingers and the palms of his hands were coated in black, leathery pads. He pressed his two palms together, and it felt like he was wearing gloves. But from the back, his hands looked almost normal.

So did his arms, except that they had thin white fur on them. These are my arms, he thought, looking at them. And yet they’re not. They weren’t like his face, which looked all fox. They almost looked human. He traced a claw along the top of his forearm, feeling the hairs part in front of it. And then he carefully pinched himself. It hurt, just like it always had, and he smoothed out his fur afterwards.

Okay … he thought, and looked in the mirror again. Now what?

Behind him, his tail swished, and he turned around to look at it. It was bushy and pure white, and looked spectacular. Hayaikawa wished that it weren’t stuck behind him, because he very much wanted to look at it. He reached around and felt it, running his hand all along it, and it felt fluffy and soft. But it was uncomfortable for him to do that, because his tail didn’t want to be pulled upwards in the arc that his arm was traveling. He let go of it and let it do what it wanted to, and it swished itself as he looked at it and grinned.

Hayaikawa sniffled and blew his muzzle again, then tossed the tissue into the trash and looked back up at the mirror. There he was, a real live fox, with ears and tail and a muzzle.

He shrank from himself, because he didn’t want to accept it. It wasn’t a thought so much as a feeling; his subconscious was scared, and wanted his human parts to be him, and to think that his fox features weren’t. It felt like it had been violated, and was refusing to let itself be this.

Hayaikawa closed his eyes, and counted to ten in his mind. And when he opened them and looked in the mirror again, he was the fox, tail and facial features and all. And he sniffled, and grinned nervously, and let his subconscious stop worring about "How can I be that?" and just accept that he was.

Then he hopped down from the sink, unlocked and opened the door, and went to go set up his webcam.

Hayaikawa took a whole slew of pictures of himself, after drawing the curtains and making sure that the front and back doors were locked. Then he realized that he hadn’t showered yet, and decided he might as well do so.

It took him a long time, because his fur wanted to tangle instead of wash. By the time that he finally got out he was covered in soaking wet fur, which stayed damp even after he’d used two thick towels. He wiped the fog off of the mirror and looked at his messed-up fur, and decided that it was a good thing that he’d already taken the pictures. Afterwards he put on his pants backwards, so that his tail would have someplace to go.

It was eleven o’clock when he finally ate breakfast. Sugary cereal didn’t appeal to him at the moment, so he fried up some vegetarian sausage instead. It was warm and delicious, and he didn’t even need to add cheese.

He tried not to think as he ate, because he knew if he did he’d be scared again. But he couldn’t help it, because his mind was starting to wander. "What’s going to happen to me?" it thought. "What should I do?"

"What can I do?"

He tried to think of a government agency he could call. Then he imagined men in black suitcoats quarantining his house, their guns photoshopped into walkie-talkies as people in spacesuits climbed through the windows. And he didn’t think that he liked that idea.

Try as he might, though, Hayaikawa couldn’t think of any scenario in which that didn’t end up happening. The only question was, what would he tell his parents?

He did not want to face them, because he was scared of how his mother would panic and he had no idea what his father’s response might be. So he decided instead that he’d write them a letter, and somehow manage to be outside the house by the time they came back home. He wasn’t sure how he’d get anywhere on foot in suburbia without being noticed, but he decided he had to try …

… after he was done on the ‘net.

It was easy to get distracted on the Internet, because Hayaikawa really wanted to be distracted right now. He didn’t want to think about what he’d have to do, or how badly things would turn out, or what sort of panic his mom would be in. So he sat there on the chair in his messy room, in front of his old computer, and played Flash games for two hours.

After that he decided he needed to start planning what he would do. He wanted to pace, but there was nowhere in his room where he could, so he crawled over the clothes and things on the floor and went out to the hallway. Then he started pacing, going up and down the hallway, thinking with hands clasped behind his back and occasionally fiddling with his tail.

He had to go someplace. But where? Who could he trust? Was there anyone he knew online well enough? Would his relatives take him in?

His tail really was fluffy, he thought.

Hayaikawa began pacing faster and faster, not because he felt nervous but because he was forgetting how nervous he was, and realizing that he wanted to be out and about. He included the kitchen and living room in his circuit, weaving around obstacles and moving them aside when he could, surprised by how good it felt just to move around.

The lights were off, and the only light came from through the cracks in the drawn curtains. Hayaikawa wanted to look outside, but he didn’t want to be seen in case a car was driving past outside. And he knew what he’d see out there, anyway … suburbia, with its two-car garages and seven-foot fences that went all the way down to the curb.

All of a sudden, Hayaikawa wished that his family still lived at their old house up in the hills. His mom had hated driving down their dirt path to get into town, then coming back home when it was raining and driving uphill over ice and slush. He remembered looking out the window at wet branches that brushed over the window, and clanked along the roof, and went on forever in the thick forest … and he remembered breathing onto the window, in the chill air, and drawing faces in the fog.

But he also remembered how he had cringed, as his mother had shouted and swore and stepped on the gas pedal, making the wheels whine as they struggled to pull their car up. And he remembered sitting there in the stuck car for over an hour, listening to furious silence from his mom and talk radio from the speakers, and waiting for his dad to come down there and tow them up. By the time his dad had shown up, he’d really needed to use the restroom, and the jarring motions of the tow cable on his mom’s car hadn’t helped matters any.

Hayaikawa remembered curling up next to the wood-burning stove in a blanket, sipping hot cocoa and thawing out from the cold. He remembered looking outside at the rain, and thinking of how it would snow soon, and of how much he loved to sled down the hill that his house was on top of. And he realized that he missed it terribly, and wanted so much to be out there again.

"Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do," he said, talking aloud to himself and listening to the sound of his voice. It sounded like it always had. "I could go out and live in the forest … I’ve got the instincts for it, right?" And he knew that this was a big thing that he was suggesting, but it seemed so unreal that the impact did not even register. All he knew was that he had to get away, because being seen by his parents — or by anyone — was not an option. He didn’t want to think about what would happen afterwards.

Hayaikawa imagined himself catching rabbits, fishing with his bare hands, and climbing up trees to get away from bears. It didn’t seem like it’d be so hard. After all, foxes were designed to live in the woods, and he was a fox now, wasn’t he?

He set a pizza cooking for dinner while he thought about what he would do, and imagined himself living off of the land, running barefoot through the trees and starting a tribe of fox people with other outcasts like him. These thoughts kept him occupied, and helped to take his mind off of things. But pretty soon his mom pulled up in the driveway, and Hayaikawa took off for his room and shut and locked the door.

He knew that it didn’t make sense. But somehow, the thought of how he would deal with his parents didn’t seem half as upsetting as the fact that he’d had to leave that pizza behind.

For awhile, the house was silent. He heard his mom watching TV in the living room, and after a little while he smelled smoke and heard her open the oven.

When his dad came home they started to talk around the table while eating his pizza, and Hayaikawa realized that he did not want to hear what they said. So he put on his headphones and turned up his loudest MP3s, and played more Flash games with the curtains drawn and the door locked. Later on, when his dad knocked on the door, he turned the volume up even louder, until he couldn’t hear anything his dad was saying.

The headphones were kind of uncomfortable, since they weren’t designed to fit onto a fox’s ears. But he made himself tolerate it, because he did not want to talk to his parents. He couldn’t talk to his parents. He was barely sane as it was, and if he had to confront them and see their reactions he knew that he would break down again. And he did not want that to happen. So he turned up the volume as loud as it would go, and felt like a heel for it but knew that he had to.

Finally his parents went to bed. And he took off the headphones and sat there in silence, and knew that he was just delaying the inevitable. But he couldn’t deal with it now … he didn’t know when he’d be able to deal with it.

Hayaikawa was hungry, and his throat was dry. But he didn’t want to go out there yet, not until they were sound asleep. So he kept on surfing the ‘net.

An interesting idea occurred to Hayaikawa, and it was late enough at night that it made sense to him. So he went into his favorite IRC chat, and onto his favorite messageboards, and showed everyone the pictures he’d taken, just to see what would happen.

His thread didn’t get too many hits, and most of the people on IRC ignored him. But a few of them said "o.o;;;" and told him that he was amazing with Photoshop, while the people on the messageboards said "lol" and told him that’d made their day. One person posted a lengthy critique, saying that Hayaikawa should have used better lighting conditions, and that he could see the seam where he’d cut-and-pasted the fox’s head onto himself.

Hayaikawa was amused, and reiterated that he hadn’t used photo editing software at all. Pretty soon somebody called him on it, and made him take a video on his webcam. But his webcam was an older model, and was not very light-sensitive. And in the light of his 40-watt overhead bulb, all that could be seen was a blur.

Most of the people who’d clicked on the link stopped watching him, but a handful of them continued, in between doing other things. And when Hayaikawa finally held his flashlight right up to his face and waved at the camera, and spoke for the microphone, and held open his muzzle and ran his tongue along his teeth, they said "o.o;;;" again and started telling everyone else to watch.

Hayaikawa was sweating by now, but it was late and he didn’t feel he could back out. So he did his routine a few more times, and started taking requests like picking things up and balancing them on his nose. As time went on the requests got weirder and weirder, but it wasn’t until someone insulted him that he got embarrassed and turned off the webcam. After that, he watched people speculate as to how he had done that, and realized that he did not want to tell them.

He went back to the forums, to see that he’d gotten a personal message:

i kno that u did not fotoshop thos pics. u r a real fox n i believ that u r.

Hayaikawa grinned. But that grin was frozen on his face as he read the next part:

my dad works for the fbi. i am teling him about u. i traced ur ip adress so i kno wher u live. he is coming to lok u away 4 EVER.

Beter start runing

And Hayaikawa knew, in his head, that this person was just a troll. But that’s not what his heart thought. As soon as he read that, it said "I knew it. I knew this would happen. I’m dead. I’m so dead. My life is over, and I won’t even get to tell my parents how much I … "

He turned off the computer right there and curled up on his bed, rocking back and forth softly and holding his knees to his face. But he only did that for a second, because it reminded him of how long he had locked himself in his room, and when the last time he had used the restroom had been.

Hayaikawa got back to his feet, crawled over the piles of things on the floor and pressed one ear up to the door. When he heard nothing on the other side, he turned off the light, and carefully unlocked the door and went out.

When he got out of the restroom, it occurred to him that there was probably some leftover pizza in the refrigerator. He went down to the kitchen and got it out on a plate, then set it microwaving. By this time he was starving, but he was worried about the noise he was making, which seemed loud to his ears.

Finally, the microwave dinged, and he took the pizza out of it. Some of the cheese on top had charred, but it smelled and looked delicious, with tiny pools of hot grease amid deep-fried vegetables. Hayaikawa was about to start eating when he heard a door open elsewhere in the house, and his heart stopped.

He held his breath. He felt nothing but fear. His mind went blank. And the footsteps were almost there.

Hayaikawa dropped the dish next to the microwave, then dove behind the counter and cried "Stop!"

The footsteps stopped. Whomever it was said nothing.

Hayaikawa’s mind raced. He tried to think of something to say. "I … you … you can’t look at me right now!"

"What’s wrong?" It was his father’s voice, quiet as always.

Sweat poured down Hayaikawa’s sides. "I don’t know!" he cried. "It just happened!"

"What happened?"

"I can’t tell you!" Now he wanted to cry.

The footsteps came closer, and Hayaikawa panicked. "Please, stop!" he cried.

"I got up to make sure that I locked the car. I will not look at you."

His father walked past him, opened the front door and went outside. There was the sound of a horn honking for a split-second, and the locks on the car cycling. Then his father came inside and closed and locked the door with his eyes closed.

He went back into the hallway without looking at Hayaikawa. And then he stopped there, as if waiting for something.

Hayaikawa let out his breath. "I’m sorry," he said.

"I know."

"I’ll tell you what happened tomorrow," he said, without even thinking about it. "Okay?"

"Okay."

There was a pause. Then, finally, "Good night, Hayaikawa." His father went back to the bedroom, and Hayaikawa exhaled.

He sat down on the kitchen floor, his shirt soaked with sweat, too exhausted to do anything else. His eyes flicked up to the clock on the microwave; it was late, much later than he was used to staying up.

He microwaved another slice of pizza, then ate it and got out another. A little while after that he went to bed, so tired that he couldn’t think straight. His last thought before falling asleep was that he’d committed to showing himself. But somehow, the thought no longer held much fear for him.

That night, he had control of his dreams again, and imagined himself becoming a human. The next morning, the start of the weekend, he woke up to find that it’d come true. This made explaining things to his parents a bit awkward. But he made french toast for them, and helped clean the house, and got all of his homework done early so that they could go watch a movie together. They all had a good time, and his parents soon forgot about the whole incident (or at least acted like they did).

Hayaikawa, however, did not. He still had those pics, and when he logged on to check his email he found that he had quite a following. But as the months went on, and turned into years, they forgot about what they’d seen, and explained it away in ways that made sense to him. Later on he was amused to hear people tell him about "the guy who put uploaded vids of himself as a fox," and to see how many hits those videos had.

He never gave any sign of recognizing his fox self, except for a knowing grin. But later on, when he’d moved out to live on his own, more videos started to circulate on the Internet, from the mysterious real anthro fox. Who knew how to mask his IP address, just in case.

And that real anthro fox was soon joined by others …

Adele sat upright in bed, going into a sneezing fit. She’d dreamed that something had been tickling her nose, and now she felt like something was stuck in it. She knew it was still nighttime because it was cold, and the freezing air made her sneeze all the more.

Finally she finished, sniffled, sneezed again and rubbed her nose on the shoulder of her nightdress, when all of a sudden she stopped.

Something was wrong with her nose.

Adele brought both hands to her nose, sniffling again, and felt the tip of it. What she felt was protruded and leathery, like the nose of one of her father’s hounds. Her mouth, too, jutted out just beneath it. She felt at her face for some time, unafraid but unsure of what this meant.

She patted the bed beside herself until she found her plush rabbit, and held it close. “What do you think, Mr. Thomas?” she asked. “Is this just part of growing up? I don’t recall mum’s face feeling like this … ”

Adele thought for a moment. “I sound like I have a cold,” she said.

She attempted to purse her lips, then tried out a few faces, just to see how they felt. The activity made her sneeze again, and she sniffled.

The cold air was getting to her. She shivered and held her bare arms for a second, trying to warm up. Then she threw off the covers and swung her feet onto the cold floorboards, before feeling her way to the door. “Come on,” she told Mr. Thomas, holding him in one arm. “Let’s see if mum’s still awake.”

The hallway outside Adele’s room was just as cold. She walked slowly, keeping one hand on the wall until she reached the stairwell. Then she held tight to the railing as she descended the staircase. The steps were huge to her tiny feet, and she did not want to fall down.

She heard the wind whistling outside the front door when she reached the landing. But she also heard the fire going in the sitting room, and hurried to the door.

Adele put her hands on the freezing brass doorknob and turned it, then pushed the door open and stepped inside. The warmth of the fire tickled her nose, and she bit her lip to keep from sneezing. It tasted strange. “Mum?” she asked.

No one replied, so she tried again, before she heard the crinkling of paper from a magazine. “Adele?” came her mother’s voice. “What are you doing still up? Didn’t Miss Winslow put you to bed already?”

“Mum, I’m sorry, it’s-”

“You’ll have to speak up, dear. I can barely hear you.”

Adele tried to speak up. “Mum, I need you to look at something for me!”

“Well, alright, then. Bring it over here.” Porcelain scraped against porcelain, from behind the back of her mother’s favorite chair, as Adele hurried around to the other side of it. “Whatever’s the matter with your voice? You aren’t coming down with something, I-”

She screamed. And Adele screamed too, as the cup that her mother had been holding shattered onto the floor and splashed her feet with hot tea. She jumped, and backed away from the shards.

“Mum! What’s wrong?” Adele asked.

Her mother only kept screaming.

Now Adele was starting to cry. “Mum, please tell me what’s wrong!”

A door opened, out in the hallway. Adele ran, leaping over the spill and bumping into the wall along the way, then wrenched the door open and collided with her nurse, Miss Winslow, out in the hall. Adele buried her face in her nurse’s nightgown, sobbing in terror.

The nurse guided her back towards the doorway. “What’s wrong with ye, child? Have ye broke somethin’ of yer mum’s?”

“Her face!” Adele’s mother cried. “Look at her face!”

Miss Winslow tried to tilt Adele’s head up towards her, and Adele obligingly looked upward, tears still streaming from her eyes. As soon as she did so the nurse stepped away and uttered an oath, leaving Adele clutching the folds of her dress.

Adele let go, overcome with despair. “Please, tell me what’s wrong!” she cried. “I don’t know what I did wrong! I … ”

She started sneezing again. And she kept sneezing as Miss Winslow hurried her up to her bedroom, shoved her inside, and then shut and locked the door. She could still hear her mother sobbing downstairs.

Adele crumpled to the cold, hard floor, crying and sneezing and shivering, holding her stuffed rabbit tight. Finally, when there were no more tears left to shed, she climbed up into her bed, then crawled under the sheets and lay still until she fell asleep.

The next morning Adele lay in bed for a few minutes, examining her nose again. She wasn’t sure, but she thought it felt a bit different from last night. And when she held her arms, she thought that the hairs on them seemed fuzzier somehow.

Miss Winslow came by to take Adele out and help her attend to her toilet, then locked her back in her room afterwards. A few minutes later she came back and set a dish with her breakfast on it on the table in the corner. Adele checked it, and found toast with jam and egg, and a basket of fruit. She quietly ate her breakfast, then sat in the chair underneath the window, leaning against the windowsill.

After awhile, she heard the sounds of a motorcar pulling up into the driveway. Adele pressed her face up against the cold window, trying to hear what was going on outside. She heard someone climb out of it, and exchange words with her mother, but he did not sound like her dad.

Afterwards the front door opened, and they stepped into the sitting room. Adele got up from her chair, and quietly went over to her bedroom door. The door to the sitting room was closed, so she could only hear the tone of their conversation, and not any actual words. But her mother sounded distressed. The man she could barely hear, but she thought he was trying to reassure her.

Finally the door opened. She heard them bid each other goodbye; then the front door opened, and the man left. She heard her mother shut and lock the front door, then start to pace up the stairs.

Adele ran back up to her window seat, hands in front of her face. When they touched the chair she pulled herself up to it, and sat down and clasped her hands in her lap as her mother unlocked and opened the door.

Adele waited for her mother to say something, but she did not. A shiver ran down Adele’s spine.

“Mother?” she asked, polite but scared.

“Yes, child?”

“W-what’s wrong with me?”

A sigh. “You’ve come down with a serious disease, Adele.”

“Is it serious like the mumps?”

“More serious.”

Adele squirmed. “I don’t feel sick … ”

“You’ll have to take cod liver oil again.” Her mother’s voice was shaky. “And Doctor Swan has written you out a prescription, which you will have to take as well.”

“Is it my face, mother?” Adele felt at her face again. “Is that what the illness is doing?”

For a moment there was no sound. Then Adele heard her mother choke back a sob, and it froze her heart inside of her. “Mum, don’t cry!” she pleaded. But then the door was shut and locked, and Adele broke down into tears again as her mother’s footsteps went down the stairs.

She heard Miss Winslow say something to her mother, and strained to hear what it was. But all she could hear was her mother yelling: “First blindness, and now this!”

Miss Winslow said something more quietly.

“Calm down?” her mother exclaimed. “How can you say such a thing? She could die from this, and there’s nothing that we can do!”

They said some more things after that, but Adele could not hear them. She felt like her whole body had frozen, and the only things that could move were her beating heart and the tears that were left on her cheeks. Everything else in her room was still and quiet, and the shouting she heard coming from downstairs no longer made sense anymore.

The rest of that day was a blur.

After that, the days started to blend into each other. Adele stayed locked in her room the whole day, except for trips to the bathroom, and no one ever came up to her room except to serve her meals or make her take medicine.

The medicine was sharp and foul-tasting, and Adele hated it. It left her whole mouth and her throat burning. She thought it might be because of the medicine that her food was starting to taste bland … the corned beef tasted like mud, and the toast tasted like shingles. But the fruit that they left her was sweeter than ever, and she found herself devouring it.

The dogs were her only entertainment. No one let them into her room, but she sat by the window whenever they were let out and listened to them play in the yard. She thought she could hear where each one was, and she remembered their warm noses and happy, affectionate natures. Adele wished they would let her play outside again, but knew it would do her no good to ask. So she just imagined herself running barefoot on the wet grass, holding onto a dog’s collar, then being nuzzled from behind and falling over and laughing before getting her face licked.

Every morning Adele checked herself all over to see what had changed. Her nose and mouth weren’t doing anything anymore, but her ears had started to move, and they felt more floppy and rounder. Her whole body was furry, and her feet and lower legs felt sort of like a dog’s back legs, but with fingers on the ends. Adele could feel them, and could just barely manage to do things like take hold of the sheet covers with them.

She wondered if she was becoming a dog, and if that was what had everyone worried. The thought struck her as strange, but she didn’t see why everyone had to be so upset about it. There were plenty of other dogs in the house, and it wasn’t as though she had stopped being herself. Adele knew that she looked different on the outside, but she still felt the same on the inside. Just worried and bored and frustrated.

Maybe they were afraid that they’d catch it from her, she thought. Adele wasn’t sure why they’d be so upset about that, either. She imagined her mother taking Doctor Swan’s medicine, and giggled. Didn’t the whole house come down with the flu earlier? What was so diferent about this? Adele remembered her mother saying that she was afraid that Adele would die from this, but by now it didn’t seem real to her.

Then, one day, the pain started.

It started one night when she was tossing and turning in bed, trying to get to sleep and realizing she couldn’t because her back was sore. Adele turned over and lay on her side and forgot about it, but the next morning she tried to stand up and her back was so stiff that she fell over. She spent that whole day leaning forward in her stiff wooden chair, wanting to get up and move around but still too sore to do so.

That night wasn’t any better. And the next morning when she tried to feel around to see what had changed, she cried out in pain when she prodded her back.

It brought both of her parents up to her room. Her dad had long since come back, and she stood at attention as he took charge of the situation. “Show me where it hurts,” he told her.

“M-my back,” Adele said.

The ears on top of her head perked, and swiveled to face him as he walked around her. Then she heard him stop, and the breath caught in his throat. “Clarissa,” he said, “do you see this? What’s happened to her?”

Now she heard her mother walk around and kneel down in behind her. She unbuttoned the back of Adele’s nightdress and put a hand on her back, and Adele could feel her mother’s cold hand, and her back bulging and swollen behind her.

“What do you suppose this is?” she heard her father say, as he leaned in a bit closer. “Is this where … ” Then he poked at her back, and the pain shot all the way through her. She cried out, and collapsed.

When Adele woke up, she was laying flat on her stomach on top of her bed. Her mouth was dry and tasted like cotton, and her arms and legs were splayed out to either side.

Indistinct voices sounded around her. Her head was still ringing, and it hurt when she tried to move it. As soon as she did so she heard footsteps coming towards her, and her mother’s voice saying something. But she couldn’t tell what it was.

She heard Doctor Swan’s voice, and it was clear and distinct because it was so unexpected. “We need to lance it to let them out.”

Adele heard her mother sound taken aback, and call her father’s name as though she were asking him to agree with her. But she did not hear her father’s voice.

Then she felt something on the bed next to her. A second later there was a cold hand on her back, and she realized that it was still bare.

Then there was a sharp pain, firey and jarring and making her wake up partway. Adele was still just barely conscious, and she gritted her teeth and clenched her hands as the pain traced its way down her back, unable to do anything else.

Then her back exploded, a horrible pain that lasted a split-second and was followed by blessed relief. She heard her mother’s oath, and she felt something warm and sticky around her, especially on her back. But what she mostly felt was the things that had been inside her back, that felt like two tiny, warm, sticky arms. Adele could feel them attached to her, and she stretched them out luxuriantly, not caring what had just happened and just glad that the pain was over.

She heard her parents and Doctor Swan talking, and felt warm, damp rags washing her back and running over the bed. Parts of her back still felt sore and raw, and she winced when they were touched. She also winced as the rags went over her new “arms,” because whoever was doing it didn’t seem to know how to handle them, and kept squishing and twisting them in ways they did not want to go.

Adele tried to pull her “arms” back, but the hands holding the rags were insistent, and she heard her mother’s voice chiding her. Her mother took her time cleaning her off, and Adele muttered something to her. Then finally, everyone left, and Adele let her wings settle next to her as she blissfully fell back asleep.

When Adele woke up, it was nighttime.

She knew it was nighttime because it was cold. The cold had woken her up. She was still laying on her stomach without her nightdress, and her fur was thick but not thick enough. She shivered, and rolled onto her side.

When she did so, she felt her folded wings like a blanket behind her, and felt one of them press into the bed. It was uncomfortable, so she sat up. One hand pressed onto a dry, crusty spot on the bed beside her, and Adele realized what had happened. It was still strange to her, but she did not question it. She didn’t have any reason to do so.

Outside her window she heard an owl’s hoot, and her ears perked towards it. Then she heard the chittering of bats, and something about them sounded familiar … like a voice that she’d heard but forgotten.

Adele grabbed her stuffed rabbit and ran over to the window seat, hands in front of her, before leaping on top and perching on it, hands and foot-fingers splayed out. She pressed her nose up to the cold glass and listened. The bats’ chirping sounded melodious; more musical than anything she’d ever heard.

She tried to mimic them, just like she’d playfully barked at the dogs before her mother had told her to stop. And the same song came out of her throat …

… and bounced back into her face.

The bats outside seemed to pause for a moment, and so did Adele, blinking in confusion. She’d felt the song on the tiny furs on her face and neck, and inside her large, rounded ears. And it’d felt like there was something in front of her. She wasn’t sure what that meant.

Adele tried it again. And this time she felt a picture in her mind, the same way that she had imagined the feelings and sounds of the stories her mother had read to her, before she had become ill. It was like feeling without touching; knowing that there was a flat pane in front of her just by singing at it.

The window.

She turned around and sang a short, clicking song at her bed. Now she could feel all of its lumpy textures, and even the backboard and the wall in behind it, and the nightstand which had things set up on it still. She knew how far away it was, and could even tell that she’d left the covers a mess.

Adele had to catch her breath when she realized that. A grin slowly spread over her face, and deep in her throat her voice box started vibrating, a happy song that was even higher-pitched. As she did that she found that she could feel everything in front of her, everywhere that she looked, and could even turn her head and feel what was in front of it.

She jumped down from her chair and did that for as long as she could, marveling at the sensation, amazed that she could now walk without having to hold out her arms in front of her. Was this what it was like to see? Adele got dizzy just from turning around every which way, feeling the whole inside of her room including the ceiling. Then she took a deep breath, and the feeling stopped until she started her song again.

Adele jumped up and down, clapping her hands and flapping her wings happily. The air currents swept her off her feet, and a second later she found herself on the floor across the room, rubbing her sore elbows. “What was that, Mr. Thomas?” she asked, and turned her head to face the chair where her stuffed rabbit was. “Did I … ”

Her hands reached out and felt the leathery wings on her back, as she realized what they were. And as she heard the chirping of other bats outside, she knew what she had become, as well.

“So that was why mother was so afraid,” she said, elbows and knees still smarting. Every time she’d heard bats described, she’d been told they were ugly creatures that got caught in people’s hair. And when she’d first recognized the chirping outside, and been told that it was because of bats, she’d always imagined them being like wasps or mosquitoes.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Adele protested, and screwed up her face in dismay as she stood up and tried to reason things through. “Mosquitoes aren’t furry,” she said, and walked over to Mr. Thomas and picked him up. “And they don’t have faces like dogs. I feel more like a dog than a mosquito, so I can’t be as ugly as one of them, can I?”

She held her stuffed rabbit so that he could see outside, and pressed her face to the glass. All of a sudden she wished that she were on the other side of it, or at least that she knew what it felt like. She wanted to be let out of her room, to play outside again, to have fun wrestling with the dogs and to actually be able to run …

To run. Without holding her arms out in front of her, running smack into trees and tripping on roots.

To fly.

Adele grinned again. “If this is because of my illness, I do hope that I never get better.” One hand went to her mouth. “But what if I am better now, and this is what I’ll be like from now on?”

She turned her head to “look” down at her stuffed rabbit. It said nothing. Then Adele looked back out into the room, and recognized something she hadn’t before: The door had been left open.

She walked through it confidently, feeling excited and happy and extremely hungry. On the landing she could hear the fire going in the sitting room downstairs, and she did not even have to hold on to the handrails. “Come on, Mr. Thomas,” she whispered. “Let’s go ask mum and dad if it’s okay to go outside again.”

The world was a comforting mass of darkness, which was slowly becoming lighter. Sasha knew he’d been having dreams inside of it, because he was still worried that he wouldn’t be able to find enough platypus eggs to make an omelet. Somewhere in his muddled head he knew that that’d been a dream, but it seemed more real to him than the strange lights and colors outside.

He could tell, just barely, that there were people moving about him. People in white uniforms moving around him, writing things down on a clipboard, crouching next to him and doing something he couldn’t see. He saw one of them pull a needle out of his arm, and stick in a new one. And he couldn’t feel pinching of his skin, but he felt the icy coldness, and it made him shiver.

Everything was numb. His mouth felt like it was crammed full of cotton. He couldn’t feel his tongue, and he didn’t think he’d be able to speak. He saw strange, colored lights in the distance, and realized that they were the picture on a TV screen, up on the wall. He made himself focus on it ’till his eyes watered, and afterwards he was finally able to see the newscaster. But there was something else in front of his eyes, something large and oblong which took up a lot of his field of vision.

Sasha looked down gingerly and tried to see what it was, but could not. Then something occurred to him, and he looked up.

There, above his hospital bed, was the mirror that’d been there before he’d been wheeled into the operating room. And in the mirror was a pale white, hairless face, with pointed ears and a long wolf’s muzzle. It was swollen, and there were bandages on it.

Sasha grinned drowsily, baring his teeth, and his tongue lolled out the side.

One of the nurses took his muzzle in her hands and held it open, before placing something on his tongue and making him swallow it. He barely felt anything, and didn’t put up a struggle. He just kept looking at his face in the mirror.

A few minutes later he was back asleep again.

The hospital had a separate room for people who were recovering from or preparing to undergo a trans-species procedure. It was kept dimly lit throughout the day, although Sasha could see the bright daylight outside in the cracks between the curtains. The nurses kept him on painkillers and made him take sleeping pills at odd hours, so that was the only way that he knew what time of day it was.

That, and the curtain. At night it separated him from the room’s only other occupant: A sickly-looking boy with almond eyes and dark brown features, who couldn’t be more than 10. His head had been shaved, just as Sasha’s had been, and he got even more attention from the nurses than Sasha did. When they came to take care of him during the daytime he smiled at them and asked them questions, and they smiled back and told each other how cute he was. Because of him, they had the TV tuned to educational shows for most of the day, but whenever he got the remote he put on anime instead.

One day, Sasha was feeling coherent enough to turn his head and ask the boy a question during the commercials. "Hey … " he tried to say, although it came out more like "Hrh … "

The boy looked up. He was sitting up in bed, playing with toys.

Sasha moistened the inside of his dry muzzle, and tried again. This time he only slurred a little. "Whuush your name?"

"Aiden," he said. "What’s yours?"

It took Sasha three tries to get his own name right. The boy giggled. "That’s a girl’s name!" he said.

"Yesh," Sasha said, and tried to smile.

"I saw you before you came in here," Aiden said. "How come you’re an anthropomorphic wolf?" He did not trip over the word.

"Well," Sasha said, "there’s two waysh to become one … either you’re born that way, or you pay the doctorsh to make you into one. Guesh which one I chose."

He grinned, and Aiden grinned back. "How come?" he asked.

"Alwaysh wanted to be one." Sasha looked up at the mirror again, one arm behind his head and the other hooked up to the IVs. The bandages were off of his head now, and he could see the scars clearly. They’d be visible until his fur grew out.

"Aren’t you worried that people will look at you funny?"

"Hey." Sasha turned to look at him again. "I don’ look at them funny for bein’ ugly, hairless apes."

Aiden giggled again.

"So how come you’re … uh … " Sasha’s mind went blank all of a sudden, as the IV’s timed painkillers were released into his system. " … y’know?"

"Trans-species?" The boy perked up. "It was my parents’ idea."

"Your mom and dad want you to … "

"Yup."

"Seriously?" Sasha tried to sit up, and his stiff muscles protested.

"Uh-huh." Aiden watched.

"And you’re okay with that?"

"Yup." He nodded, then looked back up at the TV. The commercials were over.

Sasha sat there a moment and thought about what it must be like to have a family that was supportive of his decision. His had disowned him when he’d told them about it; there had been a huge argument, and he hadn’t heard from his parents or sister since. At least he still had his friends, he thought, as he started to become drowsy and laid back down … at least he still had his friends.

They came to visit him one day two weeks later, during his physical therapy. Sasha was happy to see them, and showed off. He’d opted to have synthetic muscles installed, to replace the mass that he’d lost during pre-op chemotherapy and retroviral infusion, and even with only a thin coat of fur he thought that he looked rather handsome. He suspected his friends thought as much, too, even though they were laughing and being sarcastic.

After they left, he found that he’d pulled every one of those muscles, since their nerve endings hadn’t been formed yet and he hadn’t been able to tell how far he was pushing himself. He spent the next week trying to lay still, unable to feel his aching muscles but knowing that if he moved them too far he might tear them apart, and have to have them surgically replaced. One time he reached for a cup of water on the nightstand, but his arm had simply refused to work and he’d knocked it over. Aiden had pressed the button to call for a nurse.

A week or two after that, almost his date of discharge, his friends snuck him out of the hospital. He still had trouble pronouncing some words, and they had to help him walk sometimes. But he felt alive and full of energy, and was tired of just doing exercises. The people at the front desk had looked surprised, but they waved to him and wished him good luck.

He couldn’t remember what’d happened next. He remembered that there had been drinks, and pizza, and more pizza and drinks. He remembered making wild boasts to his friends, and pointedly calling a moustached man in a Stetson an "ugly, hairless ape." Sasha had been taller than him, and had been itching to start a fight. But to his surprise, the man had mumbled something and backed down, and he and his family had left the restaurant.

He remembered staggering back into the hospital, the nurses intercepting him and shooing his friends away. He remembered being helped back up the elevator, into his room next to Aiden, and collapsing into his bed. Now he was wide awake looking up at the ceiling, darkness outside the crack in the curtain, and realizing that something was wrong. What was it?

His stomach lurched. Oh yes, he thought … that was what.

Sasha threw up, over and over again, and the noise woke Aiden up. He said something, panicked, but Sasha couldn’t hear him because he was busy throwing up. Pretty soon after that the nurses came in, and by this time Sasha was glad they were there, because his stomach was twisting itself into knots but all that would come up was blood.

The nurses said lots of things to each other, and Sasha couldn’t hear what they were saying because all he could do was feel pain. They pulled at his arm, but his arms were wrapped tight around himself and his hands were clutching his sides, digging in with his claws, trying to make the pain stop. But they kept pulling, and he finally lashed out, and the nurse fell and knocked something big and expensive over.

After that they forced a mask onto his muzzle, and he started to cough blood into it, too. But a few seconds later, that did not seem to matter. The world became black, and quiet.

Sasha’s release was postponed by a month. He barely knew what had happened; could barely think, could barely sit up. He was pretty sure that they’d operated on him, because his midsection stung like razors every time he coughed. And for the first few days he had to cough a lot, so the pain would become unbearable.

At one point, after a violent coughing fit, he started whimpering uncontrollably, tears running down his face. And Aiden had come over and watched for a moment, before placing one of his toy cars on the sheets next to him.

Things hadn’t seemed so bad after that.

Sasha began to get better, to be able to sit up again, to have the bandages on his stomach removed. He began to talk to the nurses, to ask for things to read, to use his phone to respond to messages from his friends. He began to look at the light coming from between the curtain and the windowsill, and to think what it would be like once he finally stepped outside as his now-finely furred self.

And he began to look over at the opposite bed with concern. Because while he was getting progressively better, Aiden was getting progressively worse. The boy was taking all sorts of medicines and was barely coherent anymore, only lifting his eyes when his favorite anime came on. He didn’t talk to the nurses anymore, and he didn’t reply to Sasha when he talked to him. He just lay there, looking up at the wolf with a glazed-over look on his face.

Sasha felt terrible for him, and decided to keep talking to Aiden anyway … partly to try to get a response out of him, and partly because he was feeling lonely and needed someone to talk to, even if they didn’t respond. He told him what it was like working for one of the country’s largest banks, and how his boss had been totally against his decision but would have to hire him back, thanks to the anti-discrimination laws. He told him what it’d been like seeing a natural-born anthropomorph, and reaching out and touching his fur and realizing he was alive, and how that had affected him and had changed his whole life.

He talked about befriending the anthropomorph. About going to the conventions together and meeting his current friends, who’d been supportive of his dream to become an anthropomorph himself. And he told Aiden how much he would like life as an anthropomorph … how he’d be able to see, and hear, and smell things that he couldn’t before, and out-wrestle anyone, and how awesome his friends would think he was. And he thought Aiden smiled at him, but he couldn’t be sure.

Towards the end of Sasha’s stay they let him get up sometimes, and walk around the hospital. He had an idea for where he wanted to go, and he told the nurses about it and they thought it was wonderful. That was how he got to visit the children’s ward.

Sasha remembered what it’d been like to see people dressed up in costume like they were anthropomorphic animals, smiling and waving and hugging each other and little kids. He remembered hearing the people who did things like that talking about going to hospitals, and visiting children who’d come down with terminal illnesses, and putting smiles on their faces.

He wanted to do it too, as long as he was in a position to. And make them smile, and laugh, and ask weird questions he did. Some of the children could barely look up, or had to start coughing in mid-sentence, and those were the sad ones because he knew there was nothing he could do for them. But others were more cheerful, and would wave or even run up and hug him as soon as he entered the room. It made Sasha’s heart melt.

Suddenly he no longer cared who was ugly and hairless and who wasn’t. He was just happy to be alive, both because he’d come so close to dying and because he got to be around the greatest people ever. And he would look in the mirror and see someone else, and realize he liked being this someone else. He was acting the way that he’d wanted to act, but had never allowed himself to. And it was the most fun that he’d had in his life.

Every day before he went out to visit the kids downstairs, he would try to get a smile out of Aiden. Today, though, he was still asleep. Sasha just tiptoed around him, and went down the hall towards the elevator.

When he came back, there were nurses rushing into and out of the room. They were bringing a crash cart inside, and giving each other orders.

Sasha watched, in shock, unable to realize what’d happened. He tapped a nurse on the shoulder and asked "What’s going on in there?"

"We’re trying to save that boy’s life." Her face was grim.

Sasha wanted to step inside and see what was going on, but there were too many people in there. All he could do was stand in the hallway and watch, and try not to get in anyone’s way. Sasha had never thought of himself as religious, but he couldn’t help but pray that someone would save Aiden.

Finally he heard what sounded like Aiden choking and coughing. His ears perked, and he looked up. Then he heard the boy gasp, and let out the most horrible, anguished sound that he’d ever heard, trailing off into nothing. And the activity inside stopped.

For a second, Sasha did not know what that meant. Then he saw one of the nurses hang her head, and another begin crying, and he felt like his insides had frozen up.

He didn’t cry at first, because he couldn’t believe what had just happened. Then he remembered the pain that he’d had, of his insides tearing apart the night that his friends took him out; and, later, after the operation, the pain like his coughing would burst himself open. And he imagined that ten-year-old feeling that pain, and that pain getting worse and worse, and Aiden begging it to go away until finally something just gave.

That did it. Sasha began to cry too. And he remembered how morose Aiden had been the night before, and wished he’d said something to the nurses about it. He should have seen! He should have said something. He should have gotten one last smile out of him. He wished that he had.

He stood there in the hallway numbly watching people file out of the room … doctors muttering something about malpractice insurance, nurses hugging and reassuring each other. They hugged Sasha, too, and let him know that they did their best and that it was okay to cry. And he did, all over again.

Finally there was just one nurse left, when Sasha went back in the room. She was standing over Aiden, and the way the curtains were drawn Sasha could not see his face. All he could see was the lifeless lump under the covers.

"I’m sorry," Sasha said.

"We all are." She didn’t look up.

"He didn’t even get to find out what it’s like … "

"What what’s like?"

"What it’s like to … " Sasha coughed, and tried not to cry. He couldn’t talk about that. "What happened to him?"

"His body rejected the human organs." The nurse’s voice was a monotone. "We tried all kinds of therapy, but nothing was working on him. And so his organs stopped working on him, and he just gave out and died."

"Wait … " Something about that didn’t sound right. "His body rejected the human organs?"

"This boy was hatched as an anthropomorphic dragon." The nurse looked up at Sasha. "His parents were bred to fight in the People’s Golden Army. When they moved here, they asked their son if he wanted to become a human. And he said yes."

The nurse finished writing something down on her clipboard. And Sasha could only stare, down at the lump on the bed that had once been a dragon.

"We’re going to move you to another room," the nurse said, as another one entered the room. "Almost time for your discharge anyway. Come on, come with me."

She walked out, and Sasha walked out with her, looking over his shoulder until the door was out of sight.

The world was a blur.

Lawrence blinked the tears out of his eyes and kept pedaling. The trees swept past him, the branches whipped at him and slid over his helmet, the wind rushed past his ears and the speed — the flying sensation of riding a bike — told him he was going way too fast for this narrow path, and he was going to get himself killed.

He didn’t care. He vaulted a short hill and splashed into a puddle, and brown water soaked the front of his pants legs and splashed the lens of his welder’s goggles. And he just kept going, as it trickled down the lens and across the backs of his hands, rippling in the wind and then flying off to splash onto the leaves behind him.

He didn’t stop until he saw the wolf just down the path.

Lawrence pulled on one of the handbrakes. He realized too late that he’d forgotten which was which, on this new mountain bike, and sent himself flying as the front wheel locked up. He tumbled over the ground, splashed into another mud puddle and cut his leg on a sharp rock, so fast that he didn’t have time to cry out. His bicycle bounced off the ground and landed right next to him in a heap, the back wheel still spinning and chain still rattling, and the only thing left of the wolf was the sound it made crashing through brush to escape.

Lawrence jumped back to his feet, scared and confused, a jumble of emotions and impulses. He checked himself over and didn’t see anything wrong; the cut was on the back of his lower leg, and the pain hadn’t registered yet. He stood there, hands on his knees, gasping for breath and trying to reassure himself that he wasn’t dead. And he looked at his bike, at the metal contraption sprawled out beside him, and could only think “I am so glad it didn’t land on me.”

Then he remembered the wolf, and all of a sudden he held his breath, for fear that it was still nearby and he’d drive it away even further. His heart was still racing from the accident, and he tried to take slow measured breaths, to get enough air without making noise. The wheel of his bike was still spinning, and he reached out and stopped it. Now the world was quiet, and wind rustled the forest as birds sang above him.

He took his helmet and goggles off, wiped sweat from his brow and looked out into the woods, having trouble controlling his breathing. He wanted to see if the wolf was still there. He had to know if it was still there. He wasn’t afraid it would eat him. He was afraid that he’d scared it off. He could still remember the look on its face, eyes wide and ears swept back, as it’d seen him barrelling down at it on his mountain bike.

Lawrence had seen coyotes before, down in the hills; small dog-like things, not much bigger than a housecat. They were skittish, and ran off when he got near them. This had been a wolf, almost as long as the trail was wide. And if his eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on him, it had not been a common gray wolf. It had been a red wolf, a member of an endangered species that had been hunted down and nearly killed off by humans. A creature rarer than hen’s teeth, that he’d never come across in a zoo and had known he would never see in the wild.

A creature that he was in awe of. That he personally identified with. And that he had just frightened away.

Long seconds passed, as squirrels peeked out of their hiding places and bees crawled over weeds on the path. And Lawrence found himself fighting back tears again. Because he could imagine them standing next to him and mocking him again. Making fun of how pathetic he was. Laughing at how he drew pictures of animals instead of plowing them over in Hummers.

The last time he’d gone riding with them, out on the country roads, they’d hit the brakes and backed up to run over a turtle. A little girl had been standing on the side of the road watching it, and he still remembered the hurt look on her face as they laughed at her and took off.

They would have charged ahead whooping and hollering, as the wolf took off into the woods. Maybe they would’ve shot at it, with BB guns … or .22s. And they would have laughed at Laurence’s wipeout, because it wasn’t something a real man would have done. Only a dumb furry.

They wouldn’t have even known what it meant if he hadn’t told them.

He couldn’t believe that he’d told them.

Lawrence sat there in the dirt, letting the tears out and shuddering. After about a minute he noticed his leg was cut, and while it didn’t look life-threatening it was long, and bleeding, and stung like crazy — a fact that he’d just now noticed.

The pain brought him back to reality. He didn’t have any water to wash it with, or anything with which to bandage it. He stood up to examine his bike, and as he did so his leg stung sharply, making him wince. His bike looked intact, but there was no way he was stretching his leg out to pedal it. And he was at least a mile from home, across the muddy trails behind the house.

He gingerly began to stand up his bike, trying not to pull any muscles in his hurt leg, knowing that he’d need something to lean on for the long walk home. But it was harder than he’d thought, because it’d gotten stuck on something and its center of gravity was towards the other end. He tried to move around it, but pulled on his hurt leg by accident and fell on top of his bike, in a crash of metal and pain.

Sprawled out on top of it, hearing the sounds of the forest around him, feeling the bike press into his organs — and the firey cut in his leg that was going to get infected — he wondered if it would be such a bad idea to just lay there and wait for something to eat him.

He imagined what the others would’ve said; bitter, hurtful and mocking. Those were the sort of words that were supposed to make you get up and fight, just to spite them. But somehow, he couldn’t find the energy.

Then he imagined what his friend would have said. His real friend, his best friend, his friend who’d always been there for him. Who’d expressed her doubts about his latest “friends.” Who’d gotten into arguments with him over whether or not it was a good idea to try to impress them. Who’d never gotten mad with him, even when he’d told her what he thought of her, and the words had been not his but theirs.

He imagined her standing there right now, looking down at him, a look of concern behind her glasses. “What are you doing?” she asked.

He mutterred something incoherent.

“You need to get up,” she said. “Come on, I’ll help you.”

Lawrence stood up. He did it under his own power, even though it hurt, because he didn’t want her to strain herself.

“That’s good,” she said, and brushed her long hair out of her eyes. “Now pick up your bike. I can’t carry you the rest of the way to your house.”

He limped around to the other side of it, and pulled it back upright. Then he situated himself so that he was leaning on it, holding onto the handlebar, facing the way he had come.

“Is there anything you’d like to talk about?” his friend asked.

She kept him company for the next hour or so, as he limped over the trail. He told her everything; his doubts, his misgivings, his pain. And she was forgiving and patient, but she asked him a lot of hard questions, that he spent a long time thinking about. When he said something that did not seem to work, he pretended that he hadn’t, and tried it a different way. And somehow he felt that she knew he was doing that, but was playing along for his benefit.

After a while Lawrence wasn’t sure what else he could say to her, and she politely bid him farewell, letting him know that she looked forward to hearing from him. He looked down at the wheels of his bike, now caked with mud and debris, and realized that it was slowing him down more than helping him now.

He walked another ten feet with it, until he got to a fallen branch about an inch or two across. Then he leaned his bike up against a tree, and picked up the stick, testing its ability to support his weight before breaking the twigs off and leaning on it.

His younger brother ran up to tag along with him, in his mind’s eye. “Your friend told me you aren’t hanging out with those kids anymore,” he said.

They weren’t exactly kids, but Lawrence nodded, gritting his teeth as his staff slipped on a rock.

“How come you wanted to hang out with them to begin with?”

“Sometimes,” he took a breath and staggered forward, “when you’re surrounded by people who act a certain way,” he staggered again, “it starts to make sense after awhile.”

“So it’s sorta like peer pressure, huh?”

“Yeah.” The sun was setting behind the trees, and he knew that he’d have to hurry to get home before dark. Lawrence braced himself, then tried to walk normally with his staff, on a level stretch of the path. It worked … his leg did not seem to hurt as much now.

“What happened to your leg?” His brother peered at it, with the morbid fascination that little kids have with blood and injuries.

“Wipeout,” Lawrence told him. “Major wipeout.”

“Awesome.” His brother grinned.

“Yeah.” Lawrence winced. He couldn’t talk much while he was trying to walk on his hurt leg.

“Did you hit a rock or something?”

“No. I saw a wolf in the middle of the path. So I braked to avoid hitting it.”

“You saw a real wolf out there?” His brother was wide-eyed with fascination.

Lawrence told his brother what it’d looked like; the scared look on its face, the gray-red fur of its pelt. The way that it’d taken off when he’d wiped out. And, cautiously, he began to explain why he was so interested in them.

“So you pretend you’re a wolf, on the Internet?”

“Pretty much.” He stepped around a thick root, which was snaking out into the path. “Sometimes we play pretend. Sometimes we write stories, or draw pictures. Maybe someday I’ll have a fursuit — it’s like a big costume.”

They walked in silence for a moment, before his brother said “I wanna be a wolf too.”

Lawrence grinned.

The two of them walked and lost all track of time, the injured red wolf who leaned on his staff and the energetic young pup, who pounced on anything that moved. The walking had long since become rhythm, and Lawrence could imagine himself as his fursona — as a living, breathing, anthropomorphic red wolf, whose face looked just like the one that he’d seen for a second. He could imagine the way that his ears would move, and his tail would swish, and his fur would ripple in the breeze. And he could imagine the way that it’d feel, to be so alive and so strong and so confident.

He clenched his free hand into a determined fist, and felt not fingers but thick pads and claws. His wolf-self would be able to handle a scrape like what he’d had. And would know how to apologize and set things right, with his family and with his real friends. And so would he.

By the time he got within sight of the edge of the forest path, and bid his brother farewell, he felt like he’d been transformed, in a very real sense. He felt that he could stand up to those people, who were cruel to both people and animals and who’d mocked him for things they did not understand. And as soon as he got his leg treated, he wanted to spend some time with his brother, and call his best friend on the phone. He had a pretty good idea of what he would say to them. And, hopefully, how they would respond, as well.

He inhaled deeply through his muzzle, nose wet with perspiration and breath billowy in the cold, and looked out across the last twenty feet of the path. The illusion was partly dispersed as he stopped to think about it, but it came back to him as soon as he started walking again. He was almost there-

Something rustled, along the path to his right.

Lawrence turned and looked. And there, not ten feet from him, was the red wolf he had seen down the path.

It had a squirrel in its jaws, its bushy tail hanging limply from them. And it had the most shocked look on its face, like it’d been caught with its paw in the cookie jar. Lawrence froze, as his heart leapt into his throat.

Slowly he reached for his pocket. Carefully he pulled out his camera, hoping against hope that it hadn’t been damaged. He turned it on with a beep, and the wolf’s ears went back and its tail stiffened, as it stared up at him in fear.

He lined up the wolf in the viewfinder, and pressed the button. His digital camera made a noise like a real camera’s shutter, and the flash went off and lit up the whole trail. The wolf bolted, crashing through brush and running away from him. And Lawrence pumped his fist. “Yes!” he exclaimed.

His mood could not get any better.

Hastily, Lawrence cycled back through the camera’s options menu, to review the picture he’d taken. His hands were shaking, with the cold and with excitement, and it took him a few tries to press the right button. But when he got it to the right picture, he stopped.

There on the camera’s screen was a tall boy in a green jacket, with a pair of goggles around his neck. Holding a squirrel in his mouth.

Lawrence began to sweat. Then his skin started to itch, and he suddenly felt dizzy …

May 10th

Mood: Okay

Location: Home

LS keeps saying I should try this whole online journal thing. So here I am. Let the friends list requests begin! Gotta friend ‘em all, right? I kid, I kid …

Edit: Wow, srsly? I didn’t even know some of you had online journals! I’m flattered.

May 19th

Mood: Impatient

Location: Still at home

Apparently if you have one of these online journaling whatnots, you’re supposed to write about yourself in them. I’m not sure I see the point, because I lead the most boring life ever and you don’t want to read about it. But LS keeps bothering me, so here goes …

Today I read library books. All day. And tomorrow I’m taking them back. Or maybe the day after. Who knows. I’m lazy.

Exciting, huh?

May 22nd

Mood: Bored

Location: Still at home

My last entry didn’t satisfy LS. So today I’m going to write until I hit the word count she gave me. Here goes …

bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored

… okay fine.

I live in a fourth-story apartment in the City of Gray. That’s not what it’s called (no kidding), it’s just what I like to think of it as. It’s shinier downtown, but it’s just a shinier shade of gray. Even the buildings with glass sides just reflect the gray sky and the gray buildings and streets. There was a tornado near here a few days ago, and I was wondering if it would sweep me off to the Land of Oz.

My apartment, which I would think of as "My rockin’ bachelor pad" if it were, in fact, rockin’, has four walls and a ceiling. This sets it apart from some of the other units in the building. The mice and cockroaches know this, which is why I spend lots of time with them. Of course, it helps that I don’t do the dishes often enough.

I make a living by doing odd jobs online and collecting unemployment insurance. This is a rare skill, as they’ve made it so hard that only people who are able to read can apply. Did I mention I like reading? I hate going to the library, though — I’d buy from Amazon, but I like being able to read while eating. And for some reason, you need money to eat. Imagine that! I also hate going to the store, but it’s another prerequisite to eating.

I’m still about a thousand words short of the word count she gave me. But a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a picture I snapped of the view outside my window:

Error: Picture not found.

Edit: Rats, I still can’t get it to upload. Any ideas? What am I doing wrong?

May 30th

Mood: Scared, nervous and frustrated

Location: Heck

I am never using a public library terminal to look something up ever again.

June 3rd

Mood: Sarcastic

Location: Not heck

LS keeps needling me to write. So here goes.

Let’s see … today’s writing prompt, up on the online journal website, says "Have you ever hugged somebody you didn’t know in person? Has anyone you didn’t know ever hugged you?"

Answer … yes. When I was active in the furry fandom. And I will never do so again for as long as I live. >_<

Edit: Both.

Edit 2: A close personal friend has informed me that she happens to be in the furry fandom, and doesn’t like hearing people make fun of it. So the comments thread for this entry is now closed. Sorry.

June 5th

Mood: Wry amusement

Location: Dry apartment

My refrigerator just gave up and died on me. This morning. While I was still asleep.

I am so glad I didn’t have any meat or animal products in there, or I wouldn’t be eating for the rest of the week. *munches on celery and carrot sticks*

June 6th

Mood: Bemused

Location: The place with four walls and a ceiling

Remember our talk about furries, earlier on? That’s what our talk about vegans the other night reminded me of. Apparently, in order to be a good ol’ red-blooded American one must eat steak from a Texas longhorn every night, just toasted enough so that it’s still raw and squidgy in between the gray parts.

FYI, I have dietary restrictions that keep me from eating animal products. Any of them. At all. I’ve been this way for a year now, for reasons that are, frankly, none of your business. Sometimes I feel like I’d kill for a hamburger, but the last time I went to McDonald’s (for a salad, mind you) the smell drove me away. It’s like death warmed over, and deep-fried in lard. And I can remember liking that smell, but now it just makes me sick. It’s like my body knows that it can’t digest it, and it’s keeping me from making a serious mistake.

How serious? To the wise guy who talked about sneaking an egg into my "soymilk smoothie:" That would’ve killed me. I mean it. One night I woke up with the worst stomach cramps, and not a clue what had caused it. So the next day I checked the ingredient label on the expired bread that I’d bought, and it turns out it had milk and eggs in it. Now I always check the ingredients, even at fast-food restaurants, and if it’s not vegan I don’t eat it.

And to the other wise guy, who went on about "rabbit food:" Shut up. SHUT. UP.

June 12th

Mood: Furious

Location: Barricaded inside my apartment

I hate dogs.

I don’t mean I dislike dogs in general. I mean I hate dogs. I hate every one of them individually, from Great Danes and little yippers to Chihuahuas that work for Taco Bell. I hate them all.

I live down the hall from a couple that keeps two German Shepherds. And they take them out for walks at least four times a day. Every morning, I get jolted out of my sleep by barking and whining and claws scratching their door. Then I lay there as I hear the door open and these claws, tons of them, clicking across the hallway. Coming closer. And I’m tired, I don’t want it to scare me, I’ve been through this a million times, but I have to stave off this feeling of terror every single time.

Sometimes I see them in the hallway or on the stairs, and I have to duck out of the way really fast. Because when those dogs see me, they start barking. And they have the loudest bark, that hurts my eardrums and just pierces right through whatever mood that I’m in and sends me into a panic. Yes, I know I’m a wimp. I don’t care.

You know what happened today? I was walking back up the stairs, clutching my MP3 player, trying to restore my shattered nerves after this confrontation I’d had at the Post Office. And I was so absorbed in what I was listening to, and in wanting to get home, that I bumped into the German Shepherds coming down the stairs. They started barking right next to me, and I threw myself up against the wall, staring at them, unable to think, unable to realize that I’d just flung my MP3 player down two flights of stairs. And the guy apologized to me, but I barely heard him over the sound of my heart beating and those dogs barking like crazy.

I don’t know how long I stood there hyperventilating. And when I finally managed to calm down, I realized what had just happened and ran downstairs, to find an MP3 player with a cracked screen. That thing was my lifeline, on my trips outside my apartment, and now it won’t even turn on anymore.

At least my headset still works. My stupid, custom-rigged headset. With a broken microphone, and tape holding the two parts together. I hate it I hate it I hate it.

And I hate dogs.

June 14th

Mood: …

Location: maybe this is heck after all

sometimes, i really wish i could just curl up and die.

June 21st

Mood: Shaken

Location: The place where I spend my whole life

I apologize for my last entry. I’ve been under a lot of stress this past year. And I try to hide it, but sometimes it shows.

To those of you who suggested that I seek counseling: Maybe it’d help, but I can’t afford it. I’m not a student, and I don’t have any insurance.

LS has been trying to talk me through some of my issues. I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about all of them, and I feel bad about imposing on her anyway. But she insists, and I’m kind of glad that she does, because as stressful as talking about it has been it’s also been a relief.

I’ll let you all know how things turn out.

June 29th

Mood: Nervous

Location: Here

Okay … this post is friends-only. I don’t want to do this, but I stayed up late last night talking to LS and she really thinks that I should. It doesn’t seem like such a great idea now that I’m here and awake, but she made me promise to tell you all so I guess that I have to.

…

I keep distracting myself with other websites. This … this is really uncomfortable to talk about! And I mean, it’s almost funny how nervous I am, and I can laugh at it if I think about it, but then I get ready to type and I start to sweat and I … I …

… I have Zooanthropy.

Permanent. Not cyclical.

I’ve avoided talking about it, because I try not to think about it. I don’t want to think about it. I spend so much time on the computer because it’s easier to pretend that I’m normal. But I’m not. I’m not even human.

The doctors say I’m a Sylvilagus Floridanus Sapiens, which is what you say when you don’t want to tell your patient he’s a half-human half-rabbit freak. Here in the city I get weird looks, but if one of you people saw me out in the real world you’d cross to the other side of the street, or cover your kids’ eyes and pull them away from me. I wouldn’t blame you. I don’t want to see me, either.

The worst part is, I’ve always wanted this. Back when I was in grade school, I read about the loup-garou of medieval France. And they were these sick people who were killing and eating their neighbors’ livestock, but I saw that and thought "That’s so cool." And then we were taught all about how the Native Americans were like lycanthropes and such, and how some of their tribes would deliberately eat diseased animals so that their saliva would carry the disease. And it was savage and inhuman, but I just thought "Why wouldn’t anyone want to be part animal?"

I knew that … that it was a terrible disease that scarred people for life, and could kill you if it wasn’t treated. But it just had this hold on me that I couldn’t explain. And I’d look at pictures and photographs of infected people, and I don’t know why I was so interested but I had to stare at them. I just had this feeling of wonder, like there’s more to life than … than four walls and a ceiling. And like there are things that are still possible that we haven’t dreamed of.

Maybe part of it was my upbringing. I went to an elite private school, had next to no friends, and spent all of my free time in front of the computer.

But my parents did alow pets. For my birthday one year they bought me a rabbit. He was black and inquisitive and full of energy, and he kept me company while I was doing homework and playing on the computer. He was one of my only friends. And I’d look at him curled up in the cage every night, and I couldn’t help but feel that he was better off than I was.

And for some reason, that idea took hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I wanted to be a rabbit. So I read Watership Down, and wrote these stories based on it, and roleplayed being a rabbit with these people I met online. I even got into furry, and the people there aren’t as crazy as the media makes them out to be …

Well, most of them aren’t. I was one of the crazy ones. I hung out on DA, on the normal messageboards, on the mainstream furry hangouts where they’re all talking about art and things. But I also hung out on a zooanthrophile website. Where it was all like "You must be 18 or over" and "For educational purposes only," and other disclaimers that should have scared me off but didn’t. And you wouldn’t believe the things that they had there.

I was on the edge of my seat reading this long series of diary entries on their messageboard, by a person who was being transformed by the infection. He posted photos. He took a (low-quality) video, and showed how his voice was changing, and I could barely bring myself to click on it I was so scared. I’d never seen an infected person before, and thought that I never would. And when you spend that much time dreaming about something, to be faced with it for real is terrifying.

He wasn’t taking any medicine for it at all … he was just letting the disease run its course. I read all the posts in between his, and the other zooanthrophiles were cheering him on, and congratulating him for documenting the whole thing for everyone to see.

Then he stopped posting, and I read where people had been speculating as to what had happened. Then I read a post by his sister. He’d gone feral and attacked someone, and the both of them had died. After that and a couple of shocked responses, a mod reminded everyone that their website did not condone this type of experimentation, and closed the thread.

My heart was in my throat, and my sides were plastered with sweat. I felt like I’d been through the whole thing with him, and I hadn’t been able to stop reading because I’d had to know what had happened. After finding out, I swore off my interest in that kind of thing altogether, and resolved never to even think about it again.

You may be surprised that I only mentioned one person who had done this, when everyone there wanted to. The reason they didn’t was because it’s hard, like … like killing yourself is hard. The kind of thing that you think about doing, but for one reason or another you can’t follow through with it. And that’d take a lot of effort and planning. I mean, getting bitten by a wild animal is easy, but the animal might not be a carrier, so you’d have to go through multiple animal bites to be sure of getting infected. The animals would all have to be killed to be tested. And in the process, you’d probably come down with all kinds of other diseases.

That’s not something you can explain to others. You put your life at risk on purpose, and your family and friends are right to think that you’re messed up in the head.

Messed up in the head …

What was I thinking?

They wanted us to do volunteer work at the college I studied at. And I could’ve done all sorts of things, but my friend was working at the raptor center so I decided to join him. They take care of the city’s peregrine falcons, that nest up on the sides of the buildings. The ones out in the country got killed off by DDT and scared farmers, and we’ve got one of the only surviving populations in the world. Some people want to get rid of them and the pigeons, because they’re afraid that they’ll spread disease. But crazy people like me wanted to keep them alive, so we did crazy things like keep track of each nest, and take care of their young when the parents get killed. And when an adult falcon got injured, we had to care for it personally, until it could be reintroduced into the wild.

Did I mention that this was volunteer work? As in, they didn’t get paid for it? Any bird they had there could be a carrier, could infect them with this life-threatening disease if they made a mistake, and they took care of those birds anyway. I thought the people who worked there were heroes, but knew I was too scared to do the most dangerous things that they did. Then all of a sudden they needed my help, and I had no time to argue.

We were trying to tag one of the falcons, before letting it go. And I tried to hold the bird down, but I made a mistake and it sliced the side of my wrist below the glove. Then I made another mistake — I let go.

You wouldn’t believe how quickly we got out of there. And the lady I worked with and I exchanged this look, like "Did we just survive that?" Then she looked down at my hand, and her eyes went wide. And she told me to hurry and wash it off, while she got the disinfectant.

The bird was no longer an issue. It’d have to be killed to be tested. Now we had a medical emergency on our hands, with a potentially life-threatening condition. And I was in shock, because I was scared from the attack and my heart was beating so fast that I couldn’t think straight. It was like that cut on my arm was the most fascinating thing in the world. And then there was this voice in my head that told me "Wouldn’t it be neat to find out what it’s like?" And I let that voice keep talking, because it meant that I didn’t have to move or do anything except watch blood run down my forearm. I was so scared.

The lady I worked with — it wouldn’t be right to call her by name — came back with the disinfectant, and she started to apologize for taking so long but then she stopped in midsentence, and stared down at my wound. And she was like "Why didn’t you wash that off? Do you want to get infected?"

And I didn’t know what to tell her.

She dragged me to the sink, and made me scrub down for a whole minute while she got the bandages ready. Then she dried my wrist off with some paper towels, smeared disinfectant all over the cut and wrapped gauze around it. And then she made me go back on campus and report to the infirmary, because my tuition only covered their medical care.

And then I waited. They let me take the next few days off from class. I could’ve asked my roommate what they covered, but I didn’t. All I did was sit there in the dorm and wait for the test results to come back. Every time the phone rang, I jumped. At one point I thought about letting my furry friends know, but how could I tell them how I felt about it when I didn’t even know? I wanted to get up and pace, and I probably could have walked circles around campus. But I’d given them my dorm room’s phone number instead of my cell, so instead I practically dug a hole into the room below. I don’t know if I ate anything that whole day.

The phone finally rang on the second day. And the person on the other end told me that that falcon had been a carrier of Zooanthropomorphosis Virulens, and I needed to go in for treatment right away. And I was sweating, and my hand was shaking, and I kept stuttering as I asked her to repeat herself because the line was so quiet. But when I finally hung up, I felt relieved. And I just sort of slid down the wall to the floor and let out my breath, still shaking but laughing at how silly I was, now that the tension was over.

Now that I’d had a whole day to think about it, and to realize how serious it was, I knew that I didn’t want to let the infection manifest. I wanted to go in for treatment, and get it all taken care of so that I could go back to my classes. I knew that it’d take at least a few days just to take hold, though, so I didn’t like run right back to the infirmary or anything. Instead, the first thing I did was I went on my favorite (sane) furry messageboard, and let them know what had happened.

I told them all of my feelings about it. I told them about the crazy site that I’d been to, and I admitted to having an unhealthy fascination with this kind of thing. But I ended by letting them know that I wasn’t going to put my life in danger or make my family nervous. I was going to do the responsible thing, and get myself treated.

Then I ran straight to the infirmary. They made me take this liquid medicine that was like a chalk milkshake. And they gave me this huge bottle of it, and said that I had to take it three times a day until it was empty. It was nasty, but I did as I was told. And I was nauseous the whole rest of that week, but I "chalked" it up to the awful medicine.

Then my hair started to fall out.

I sprinted to the infirmary. They did all kinds of tests on me, and drew blood samples and everything. And then they told me the awful news. My infection wasn’t responding to the treatment, because the disease had become resistant.

They put me on chemo. Retroviral therapy. All of it. It lasted for months. All of my hair fell out. I missed all my classes that whole semester. I could barely eat anything, and I eventually had to be hospitalized and put on an IV drip. There, I was in and out of consciousness, and they had a TV on the whole time but I couldn’t tell what was on. I’d just have these weird dreams, then not even wake up but realize I was watching the television.

They finally contained the infection. But the damage had already been done. And I remember I was drugged up and incoherent, but I was screaming and waving my arms at the nurse — the arms that were still hooked up to IVs — and demanding that they cure me. And I hadn’t even looked in a mirror or noticed a change or anything, I was so incoherent. They’d just told me that the disease had taken effect partway, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to be better again. I wanted everything to go back to normal and for this stupid nightmare to be over, and I couldn’t accept that it wasn’t.

They told me all sorts of things trying to get me to calm down, everything from "It’s barely noticeable" to "People with your condition can still live long, healthy lives." But none of it prepared me for what was to come.

When they discharged me I was still incoherent, and I just sort of sprawled there in the backseat of my roommate’s car while he drove me back to the dorms. He told me that he was glad to see me again, everyone wished me well, so on and so forth … oh, and someone had found this thing online where I’d said that I’d gotten infected on purpose, and people were talking about that. And the insurance company had gotten wind of it, and they were denying my claim, which he’d found out because he had "accidentally" opened a letter they’d sent.

I just sorta bobbed my head and looked out the window, and thought it was funny how this reflection of a rabbit’s face was looking back at me. Then we got there, and my roommate helped me upstairs, and I crashed.

The next day I woke up. And for precisely two seconds, I was glad to be home. Then I realized what’d happened and had a panic attack, right there. My thoughts were like "AAAHHHH my face is messed up my hands my arms everything! I’m not cured! They sent me home and I’m not cured! But I can’t be cured but I have to be but I can’t but this isn’t right! This is not supposed to happen!" And I don’t know if I was screaming or what, but my roommate heard something and opened the door, and I dove under the covers and shouted at him to go away.

I spent the next half-hour there, sweating and breathing fast, unable to move and unwilling to get up. I’d finally remembered what my roommate had said, and I knew right then that my life was over. All the feelings I’d kept private, all the dreams and secret longings, and now my whole family if not the whole world knew. And I would be paying for it ’till I died.

I didn’t want to be a rabbit in real life.

College was over, my friendships were over, everything I had was gone. And when I remembered seeing my face in the car window, and realized what I had become, it was like being physically socked in the gut. I contorted with the impact, and held that position until it hurt. Because it was the cruelest thing that’d ever happened to me.

Finally I got up, looked in the mirror, and cried.

Thus began my education.

My first lesson? Nothing in all of modern society is designed for people who have fur. Here are a few examples: Zippers. Clothes. Showers. I used half a bottle of shampoo on my first attempt at cleaning myself, and I looked like a disheveled wreck afterwards. Nowadays I just use bar soap, and I look even worse.

As for clothes, I practically killed myself trying to get dressed, only to find out that everything was too tight … like putting your belt on around a fur coat. My pants wouldn’t fit because my legs bent in different ways now. I looked ridiculous, and felt like an idiot. Then I almost passed out from heatstroke before I finally got the clothes off. And maybe it wasn’t that bad, but it sure felt like it at the time. I’ve never worn a fursuit before or since being infected, but I can’t imagine it being that much more uncomfortable.

So clothes were out. I couldn’t register for classes without them, and I couldn’t go out to the dining hall, either. But I had to do something, because I couldn’t eat anything that we had in the room. What I ended up doing was wrapping a sheet around myself while I sat in front of the computer, trying to adjust to typing with claws and looking around a muzzle with eyes on the sides of my head.

The first place I went to was that furry messageboard that I’d posted on. I read the replies to the thread that I’d posted, and they were all congratulating me, but then I got to this one where he called me out for being a zooanthrophile. He said that I was a sorry excuse for a fur, an example of why one should never do things like what I did, and a waste of medical treatment that could’ve gone to someone who needed it. And he hoped that I got what I deserved.

I closed the browser right there, but I’d already begun to cry. I’ve never gone back to that messageboard.

My roommate finally brought back a salad after his classes, but by then I wanted to starve myself and just let the pain blend in with everything else. I ended up scarfing it down after he’d gone to bed, then staying up late that night and crashing the whole of the next day.

You may be thinking that this was not a sustainable lifestyle. You would be right. Pretty soon the college kicked me out and sent me back home to live with my parents. And you can’t imagine how awkward that first meeting was.

I don’t remember half the things that they said to me on the long drive home. My dad kept addressing the person he thought I was, the irresponsible freak who had done this to himself, and barking about how a man had to own up to his responsibilities. And my mom was trying to calm him down and reassure me, but she had no idea how to do either.

I didn’t respond to either of them. I was so scared. I didn’t know how to cope with any of this, and I wanted to curl into a ball and wait for it all to go away. So that’s what I did. The whole ride home I was curled up in the back seat of the car, sandwiched in between my boxes of books and the door, trying to hide myself and knowing I couldn’t. And the few short weeks I spent at home — which seemed like an eternity — I hid as best as I could, sleeping during the day and reading and going online at night.

The whole time I felt nervous, terrified, trapped … I felt like I had been tossed in a sack, and had no idea when the hunters were going to skin me and eat me. I could barely leave my room without quaking in fear. Slowly, I began to realize that I wasn’t even thinking like a human anymore, that the rabbit part of my brain was telling me that everything was dangerous and everyone was a predator and that I should be afraid all the time. And the human part of me knew that was irrational, but I couldn’t help it. The most I could do was try to distract myself, between episodes where I’d curl up and shake and wish that the world would leave me alone.

I had one of those when my dad finally decided to have a "talk" with me, a stern talking-to about "independence." He said he didn’t care what kind of foolish mistakes I had made, but whatever I looked like I was still a man, and that meant that I had to get out there and work. And I just nodded to whatever he said, still curled up in my sheet, barely comprehending the ramifications of what he was talking about.

Long story short — he found me a position here that lasted just long enough to qualify me for unemployment insurance, after I cracked under the pressure. And I tried, I honestly did, but one never knows what kinds of monsters are hiding behind office file cabinets to eat little bunnies like me. *rolls eyes*

So that’s it. That’s why my life is heck, and why I stay indoors all the time. I can’t deal with going outside, and even when I have to go out there I come back feeling like I barely survived. I’ve got these baggy clothes I can wear now, but … it’s just too much. It’s like all of the feelings I used to have are intensified. Every sound out there is like listening to headphones with the volume turned up too loud. The sun is too bright, the air is too humid, and dark alleys have sharp, pointy teeth. And everyone on the sidewalk is either staring at me or trying to ignore me, and not succeeding. No matter how confident (or even resentful) I feel when I walk out the door, I’m reduced to a quivering wreck inside of five minutes.

I hate having these stupid instincts, and I hate having this stupid body. And I know that I’d always wanted this, but frankly, I don’t care anymore. You couldn’t have done more to disillusion me if you’d walked up to my ten-year-old self and slapped him.

Maybe someday things will get better. But I doubt it. I don’t have a job, I don’t have a car, and I have no way to get either of them as long as I’m living like this.

And now that I’ve given you all Too Much Information, I’m going to logout and never come back to this website again. >.>

June 30th

Mood: Nervous

Location: In front of my PC

You have no idea how hard it was to log back on and see what comments you people left.

And you have no idea how much they mean to me. <.<; This is the only place I can go to talk to other people where I actually feel like a person. And to be able to … to tell you what this is like, what I’m like, it’s just …

Thank you.

I don’t know how you’d act if you met me in person. And you probably don’t either. But I know you’d at least try, and for that I am grateful. Most people don’t even try; they don’t want to think about who and what I am any more than I do. But I have to be around them, and see the looks on their faces, and it hurts because I feel like I don’t matter. And then I feel like they’re going to eat me. And my brain tries to protest, but my instincts remind it about what people used to do to people who look like me, and … and I just turn into a wreck.

The black lady behind the counter at the store that I go to is more sympathetic than most. Maybe she understands what it’s like to be stared at.

"Hello, Mister *my last name*," she says, when I get up there with my handbasket, in my long wool coat and the pants and hat that are too big for me. "How are you today?" And I cringe as soon as I hear her voice, but I force myself to reply.

"Fine," I say in a near-whisper, unconsciously scanning the room for hiding places.

"Some weather we’re having, isn’t it?"

I nod, too quickly, to whatever she says, looking away nervously. She’s the nicest lady in the world, but it scares me out of my mind to talk to her. It’s like … like I said, it feels like everyone I’m around could eat me, if they wanted, and they’re likely to do so at any moment. And there’s nothing I can do except hide, and try not to be noticed. Then if somebody talks to me, it’s like being a deer in a semi’s headlights. Because rabbits do the same thing. When a car is heading right for them, they … we’re too scared to move, so we just freeze right there in the middle of the road. And that’s what I do when somebody tries to talk to me.

I don’t know if any of you would have the patience to try to talk to me. Because I’d have to fight off that panic as soon as you said anything, and I don’t know how long it would take me. You’d probably get bored, or frustrated, or even nervous, and awkwardly excuse yourself. I’ve seen it happen before. That’s why that lady stands out — I know she can sense how afraid I am. She tries her best to put me at ease, and she doesn’t act like there’s anything out of the ordinary about me or the way that I’m not responding to her. By the time that she’s done checking me out, I’m shaking so bad I can barely grab the receipt. But when I finally leave the store and she waves a cheerful goodbye, I feel both relieved and grateful.

The people who work at the library aren’t half as nice. They look at me suspiciously, and they handle the books I pick out like they’re contaminated. (I thought everyone knew you couldn’t get infected from other people … ) Do you remember that time I posted about the library here? That was because I had decided to look something up on their computers, and I hadn’t known you were supposed to fill out a time card.

The librarian got mad. She came over and gave me a talking-to, and it sounded like she’d been waiting for a chance to do so. And if you thought I sounded like a mess just trying to talk to normal people, you have no idea how bad it got when I was talking to someone who hated my guts.

I had no coherent thought whatsoever. I didn’t feel even a little bit like a person anymore, I felt like a scared rabbit. Everything was BRIGHT LIGHTS! SCARY NOISES! BIG THINGS TRYING TO EAT ME! I curled up in a ball underneath the table, scratching at the edge of it with my hind legs like I was digging a burrow. And they tried to pull me out, but I clung to whatever I could because I just knew that I would die if they got me out of there.

I don’t know how long I stayed there. Long enough for people to come by and stare at me. I couldn’t see them, because of the way I was curled up, but I knew that they were there. I’d just about convinced myself that this was ridiculous, and it was time for me to come out, when someone else who worked at the library came over and tried to coax me into coming out, and it was like my brain locked up again. I had to fight to ignore her and pretend that she wasn’t there, and that I was coming out of there and standing up all of my own volition.

I filled out the timecard and sat down in front of the computer, acting like everything was normal and I hadn’t just been curled up trying to hide from a predator. Like I was an ordinary human being, and I was just doing what I came there to do. Then I broke down and cried as soon as she left, and buried my face in my coat until it was over.

After that, I wrote that one entry.

You think you know what fear is? You don’t. You have no idea. You’re human. You eat scared little animals every day.

When I became part rabbit, I didn’t just get long ears and a poofy tail. I got Fear. The kind that takes over your mind, body, and soul. The kind that makes you forget you were ever a human being and just makes you want to escape, to hide, to do anything in order to get away from the thing that is chasing you.

When I’m having a good day, and I’m all cozy in front of my computer, I like to pretend that I’m still an intelligent being, and that it’s okay to live in a human world. Then I meet actual humans … and even though I’ve forgotten my place on the food chain, my instincts remember.

*takes a few deep breaths; tries to calm down*

Okay. I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that. I guess it just sounded like some of you really don’t get what this is like, so I’m trying to help you all understand.

I’m not sure you can understand … but I really appreciate the fact that you’re trying. Thank you all, so much, especially the ones who took the time to listen to me on IM. I’ll try not to be so depressing in my next entry, I promise.

July 4th

Mood: A little frustrated

Location: Standing in front of the computer

Computer users and Internet addicts everywhere will be able to sympathize with today’s post.

Yes, I’m talking to you, with the dirty dishes stacked next to soda can pyramids. I’ve got those too, just like everyone else who’s too lazy to clean up after themselves. But you know what else I have?

Fur. Everywhere.

It’s all over my chair. It’s all over my bed. It’s stuck to the sides of the shower, and I think that it’s merged with the threads of the carpet. The dust on my shelves is furry, and my library books are starting to sprout hairs in between all the pages.

I thought of it now because the sun just shone in through the window, and I spent about five minutes mesmerized by all the glowing fur in its rays. Then I realized where it had come from, and groaned.

That would be the morning sun, incidentally. Which reminds me of something else I need to do. Good morning night!

July 4th, 2:08 PM

Mood: !

Location: theplacethatilive

im going to die im going to die im going to die im going to die someone help me please

July 4th, 6:32 PM

Mood: In awe

Location: Home, sweet home

I’m sorry to leave you all hanging like that! I’m glad that I posted that, though, because … well, just let me explain what happened.

Today the repairmen were scheduled to come and finally fix my refrigerator. But I didn’t find out about it until half an hour before they were supposed to show up. Because I kinda slept in late, if you’ll recall.

I had a panic attack. A full-blown, cold sweat, lump-builds-up-in-your-throat-and-you-scream-’till-the-neighbors-beat-on-the-walls panic attack. My house was a mess (a furry mess), I was a mess, I didn’t know how long they would be there and I had noplace to hide.

I went online and posted that last entry. Then I still didn’t know what to do, so I jumped on the IMing client. I told the first person I found, who just happened to be Ell Ess, that I didn’t know what to do and I thought I was going to die. And right there and then, she offered to call me on the phone and talk me through what was happening.

On any other day I would’ve panicked at the thought of that, but today I was willing to do anything. So I agreed, hastily. She was on dial-up, so she had to logout before she would call me. And I was crying and shivering still, but as soon as she signed off I held my breath.

Then the phone rang, and my heart jumped into my throat. It stayed there for the second ring, and the third. Then I closed my eyes, and picked up the phone.

"This is *her name*," said a muffled-sounding female voice.

"H-hi," I said, and sniffled.

"What did you want to talk about?" she asked.

"I, I, I don’t know … "

There was a pause. Then she said "If you don’t want to talk about this, that’s okay," and started telling me about what was happening in the furry fandom. About the art that she drew, and the conventions she goes to to sell it. I didn’t know if I wanted to hear about it at first, but I just kept listening, because I didn’t know what would happen if I told her to stop. And then she told me about these furry webcomics that I can just barely remember, but some of them were so funny that I had to start laughing, even though I was still taking shuddering breaths and trying to settle down.

Then I heard footsteps creaking up the stairs, and I froze. And she seemed to sense what was wrong, and asked "Are they there?"

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

"*My name*," she said, "you need to go answer the door for them."

The footsteps came closer. I was pouring sweat under the clothes I’d thrown on.

I heard LS take a deep breath. Then she said "I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told any of my online friends yet. But when I do, you have to promise to get up and answer the door."

Someone knocked.

"Okay?"

I swallowed. "Okay … "

"Are you going to answer the door?"

I made myself stand. "Yes," I said, and started walking towards my front door, willing myself to believe that there was nothing on the other side.

"Okay," she said, and was silent for a few seconds. Then, "I’m a dog right now."

"What?"

"I have cyclical zooanthropy."

I opened the door, and I didn’t even look at whomever was out there. I smelled human beings, and I heard their voices, but whatever they said I just nodded to. I watched out of the corner of my eye as they took apart my refrigerator and started doing things to it, and listened as LS explained.

Apparently she’s a Cocker Spaniel like four times out of the year, for a week each time and then a few weeks on either side growing and shedding her canine features. She’s been that way since she was little, and she’s really shy about it. You’d think that she wouldn’t be, since she’s a furry artist and all! But apparently she’s been hiding it for years. Her fursona isn’t even a dog; she says it’s not her fault that she is one in real life, and that she likes wolves a lot better.

She missed last year’s furry convention in her area because she was only partway human at the time, and she didn’t want them to see her like that. But there’s one coming up in a few months that she thinks is going to be when she’ll be a full anthro. And she didn’t want to go, and couldn’t even remember the last time she’d gone out in public like that, but she agreed to go this time … on the condition that I join her. So if you’re a fan of her art, you’d better start trying to talk me into it like right now. ^.^;

To be honest, though … the idea of a convention still scares me. A lot. But to be around people as supportive as some of the furs that I’ve known, and to even be there with another anthro, and for that anthro to actually be LS there in person, well … I’m definitely considering it!

"So do you still hate dogs?" she asked, right before she hung up.

I just laughed, because I couldn’t believe I was talking to one. And I still can’t believe it! I don’t know how she got me to do any of this. I don’t know how I survived having people inside my house and even talking to one on the phone, let alone one who could literally eat me. But I have, and I feel so exhausted and relieved at the same time.

Maybe for you, this would be no big deal. But I feel like I just climbed a mountain. Or ran a marathon, or fought off a wild animal. And I know that going outside again, let alone to that furry convention of hers, is going to be very hard. But right now I feel like I can do anything, and I want to stay feeling like that for as long as I can.

You know what? I’m going to go down to the store and restock my refrigerator. And I’m going to thank that nice lady for all the times she’s been patient with me.

After that, I’m going to come back and clean house a bit. Then I’m going to go watch the fireworks.

Happy Independence Day, everyone!

It was 12:00 AM on a Friday night, and if you stopped outside a white house in the country you could hear a guitar singing. “Magic” Mark Duncan was playing, his sixteen-year-old hands already callused and comfortable with the strings. And he wasn’t playing from memory either, but was lost in his own endless world.

He was all black jeans and metal band t-shirt, loose and way too big for him, with hair that touched his shoulders and got in his eyes and his face. He paused for a second and leaned back in his chair, stretching, and it spilled out onto the computer keyboard behind him. Then he sat back up, shook his head real fast to clear it, and got back to hearing this world that he’s in. His amp was plugged into the PC, and he strummed each chord into Audacity, recording his explorations for the rest of the world to see.

Feet brushed against cards and discarded clothes. Elbow nudged his top hat, upended right next to his keyboard. It was why his friends gave him the nickname. Sometimes he pretended to pull things out of it, and sometimes he actually did. But tonight, his friends were all on dates with each other, and he was stuck here playing the-

Blues? Forget those. Symphonic metal, soul-wrenching lows and soaring heights of dreaming and fantasy, reminding him that magic can happen. Distracting him, delaying discouragement, until he forgot it was there to begin with and was wrapped up in where the music could take him.

By the time he flopped down on his sheets, next to guitar magazines and sweatpants, he remembered nothing but music. The magical world was still with him, and as the GNOME desktop faded his PC’s screen into black, he knew that magic could happen.

Magic can happen …

He felt dead when he woke up. His body was completely limp, no energy left in it at all, and he wanted to fall back asleep before it persuaded him to get up anyway. What had gotten him up to begin with?

“Mark!” His sister pounded on the door again. “Mark, it’s 11:30 already. Get up so I can take you to get your hair cut.”

His hair … he didn’t want his hair cut. Sadly, his parents had scheduled it, and his sis wouldn’t let him sleep through it. She didn’t like that it was longer than hers.

He shifted around, trying to reach up and feel it, and something tugged at his behind. But he didn’t notice, because he was staring at his hands all of a sudden. They were wrinkled and gnarled, and he thought “How long was I playing guitar last night?” Then he blinked, and cleared his eyes, and saw something else in the light of the window above his bed. Something very Not Right.

He jumped up and leaned up against the windowsill, looking not at the garage but at his arms. They were covered in gray fur all the way down to his hands, and wrinkled unnaturally at the fingertips. They didn’t feel hurt or stiff. But claws curled out of his fingertips as he flexed his hands, and he stared at them.

A cat’s face stared back at him from the window, with green eyes and long, black hair. And his heart leaped into his feline throat and got stuck there.

“Mark! Come on, wake up!”

More pounding on the door. He tried to say something, but it came out as complete gibberish. The shape of his mouth was all wrong.

“Mark, what is wrong with you? Get up now!”

He flexed his mouth, wrapping his sandpaper tongue around it, coughing and swallowing and trying again. “Alrrright, one second … ”

“Did I just say that?” he thought. Mark stood up from his bed and stepped towards the door on reverse-jointed paws, and they felt strange and looked like they couldn’t hold him up. He held out his arms to step over the junk on the floor, but found that he didn’t need to, because his tail reflexively balanced him out. He could feel the new limb where there was none, but he was still too shocked to do more than just feel it, and let it do its own thing.

He looked down at his guitar laying across his chair, and at his desk and the upended top hat. “Maybe this was meant to happen.”

“Mark, come on!”

There was no time to question it. Given the choice between freaking out, not knowing what just happened, and acting as though he did know, he chose the latter. On a whim, he grabbed up the top hat and put it over his head, wriggling his feline ears and feeling the inside felt. Then he opened the door and looked up at his sister, who was now a bit taller than he was.

She jumped back, dropping the laundry basket that she’d been carrying and making a sound like he’d grabbed her by the throat.

“Good morrrning, Sara.”

The wrinkled sweats from the laundry basket were warm on Mark’s bare feet. He could see his sister’s black t-shirt and blue jeans, but the rim of his hat blocked out her face. He heard her struggling to form words. “Wh … wh … what happened to you?”

He tilted his head upwards, to look at her dark hair and makeup, and grinned at her. “Magic,” he said.

And from the look in her eyes, he could tell she believed him.

“I’ve canceled your appointment at the salon.”

Mark sat in a high-backed chair, hands clasped in his lap, tail swishing out lazily behind him between the chair’s wooden slats. Try as he might, he could not keep from grinning, even though he was scared.

“I called mom and dad. But I didn’t get a chance to tell them what happened, because they started telling me about this hurricane that just hit where they’re at. They’re stuck in Florida at least for the weekend. So we’ve got until Monday to decide what to do.”

He watched Sara pace, in front of the tapestry that hung on the wall segment that divided the kitchen from the dining room. Light shone in through the window, muted by the thick curtains. His sister had run all through the house, covering the windows and locking the doors.

She covered her face with her hands, and pulled downwards. “Oh man oh man oh man. What are we gonna do?”

“Let’s hold a cookout, and invite all our frrriends.” Mark’s grin widened.

Sara gave him a disdainful look. “Oh, sure. And maybe we’ll invite the MI5 over for mouse kabobs, too!” She threw her hands up in the air, and stomped off into the kitchen. “I can’t deal with this!”

But she could, Mark knew, and she was handling it better than he was. It occured to him that it was fun watching her panic. And it was a lot better than doing it himself. He decided to let her worry about everything, until he stopped being scared and was able to think.

He heard the kitchen cabinets squeaking open and shut. This went on for a minute or so, and he finally decided to see what Sara was up to. He hopped upright, amazed at how fast he felt and how quickly he regained his balance, his tail swishing out behind him. Then he padded out into the kitchen. The linoleum tiles were cool under his paws.

He saw her rummaging through the canned goods inside the cabinet next to the fridge. “What arrre you doing?” he asked.

“Seeing how long we can last.” She closed the door and stood up. “I’m going to try to convince mom and dad to stay there in Florida another week. It’s not likely to work, but it’s worth a shot.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll have to skip school … ” She opened the refrigerator and looked inside. “I’ll make up an excuse and cover for you.”

Sara looked over at him. “You’ll make it through this somehow. I know you will.”

Mark wanted to cry all of a sudden, and he had no idea why.

Sara went out to buy groceries, and Mark spent two hours trying to shower himself. When he came out all his fur was matted, and his clothes felt wet and limp.

He woke his computer from sleep mode and sat down to it, but typing and using the mouse was a chore. His hand would not fit his optical laser mouse the right way, and he had to hold it two-handed just to get it to do anything. With his fingertips gnarled, he could barely type. And his leather chair wasn’t comfortable anymore, because his tail kept getting in the way. He tried to sit on his knees, but that way just pressed his reverse-jointed feet into the back.

Mark finally gave up and sat down on his bed, as the screensaver took over his flat screen. He stayed there for a long moment, thinking without words, letting his subconscious mind churn. It occurred to him that he was still in shock, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

He looked over at his guitar, where he’d set it on one of the piles on the floor. And he knew what was going to happen, but he had to try anyway. Numbly he picked the guitar up, made sure it was connected to the amp and turned everything on. Then he found his pick, and began to strum.

It felt like he had gloves on. He couldn’t carry a tune in these hands, not without learning all over again. Not without more years of practice. On a whim, Mark set the pick aside and tried to play using his claws. But then he snapped one of the strings, and the tune he was picking out SPROINGed to a halt.

He set the guitar aside and looked at it, overtaken by a strange feeling. He was still in shock, so he didn’t know why he felt this way … this strange mixture of fear and homesickness. But tears were starting to well in his slitted eyes.

The front door opened.

Mark wiped his face on his sleeve, and hurried downstairs to help put up groceries.

“I don’t know what you can eat, so I just bought whatever. Hope you like Spam.”

Mark picked one of the cans up and looked at it. All he could see was canned cat food.

Sara went back out to the car to get the rest of the bags. It occurred to Mark that he was hungry, and he thought about how he could open this can. His claws wouldn’t work, so he needed something to flip the pull-tab with, like a spoon or a fork or-

A knife.

He slid a long, sharp one out of the block and looked at it, fascinated by its gleam. He imagined himself actually trying to open the can with it, and slipping and cutting himself up, and the thought did not make him squeamish at all.

When his sister came back inside she saw him holding the tip of the knife towards his heart, a blank look on his face. “No!” she cried, and dropped all the bags and came running at him.

“She shouldn’t do that,” he thought. “What if I slipped and hurt myself?” But then she was wresting the knife from his hands, and he let go but his claws sliced her. Sara dropped the knife, and it clattered to the floor, and she clutched her hands as blood seeped through her fingers.

She looked up at him, and he looked back. Then she began to cry, and that set him off too. And in a second they were both kneeling there on the kitchen floor, holding each other and crying. Mark saw where she’d kicked the knife to, when she’d dropped to her knees, and he couldn’t believe what he’d been about to do with it.

“Don’t you ever do that again. Do you hear me?”

The blood on her hands was sticking to his hair. He nodded quickly.

“Promise me you won’t do that again!”

He nodded even more vigorously.

They sat there for he didn’t know how long, crying and holding each other, and he clung to her as though to life itself. Then she finally unstuck her hands from his hair and stood up, and he stood up after her. “Come with me while I lock up the car,” she said.

“What if somebody sees me?”

“I don’t care. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

He stepped out into the world and looked around at it, at the overcast sky and the fields and hedgerows and the house across the street. There was no one there, and there were no cars in sight. But he felt a rush of adrenalin at the thought of danger, and the thought that it was okay to be there.

There was a CLUNK of mechanical car locks, and then Sara shut the door. “Okay … let’s go back inside now.” She offered him her hand, and he clasped it in his, this time careful not to extend his claws.

“We’ll make it through this,” she said. “I know we will.”

His tail swished happily.

They stayed up that night playing Dance Dance Revolution, because neither of them could hold a controller. Then they played board games, and talked, and ate expensive cheeses and snacks while they watched movies. Sara’s friends called to ask why she wasn’t out with them, and she proudly told them she was spending time with her brother.

Mark grinned.

He went to bed that night feeling utterly dead, but glad to be alive. Glowing directional arrows danced in front of his eyes, and it occurred to him he’d been great at that game. “Maybe it’s the tail,” he thought. “I should do that more often.”

“We should do that more often.”

He closed his eyes, and was out like a light.

The next day he woke up slowly, still feeling tired, remembering what’d happened the day before. Daylight came in through the window, and was just starting to shine in his face. Mark winced, and put up an arm to block it-

His arm was human again.

He sat up and looked at his hands. Then he reached up to feel his face. It was the one he remembered having, with a bit of fuzz on the chin from not having shaved in two days.

Mark pumped his arm in the air triumphantly, and did an air guitar solo as he jumped back to his feet.

“Yesterday was fun,” he thought, as he came down the stairs a few minutes later. “Who would’ve thought that I’d know what it’s like to be a furry? Who would’ve thought that my sister was actually a nice person?” He grinned. “I think that I’m better off for all that.”

“I wonder if I could make it happen again?”

It was two minutes to the curtain call, and Three Layer Steak was running behind. Axel pounded on Kayleigh’s door, his keytar already slung over his shoulder. “Kay, hurry up!” he shouted. “We have to be there right now!”

Then she opened the door, and he gasped.

Neko Neko was a good kitty. And she knew she was because her parents told her so. They didn’t look anything like her, but their hands petted and fed her, and their laps were warm to curl up in.

Sometimes they put tail-stompers on their feet, and a lot of the time they wouldn’t feed her when she asked. But she always forgot about it when it was time to eat. And then she would lay down in the sun, and laze until it was time to eat again.

One day Neko Neko’s parents both went Outside. This had happened a few times before, but Neko Neko could not remember any of them. She ate the food that they’d left her, and then lazed in the sun for awhile. But pretty soon she was hungry again, and her tail thumped agitatedly on the floor mat beside her. She wanted food, but she couldn’t ask anyone right now.

Then something happened to her. And while she didn’t quite understand it, she wondered if it had anything to do with her dinner …

* * *

Every day, I went off to school and memorized words, that seemed to have nothing to do with each other. And every night, I took the crowded subway home and wrote even more words about the words I was learning, on a tiny desk piled high with clutter in an apartment shared with four people.

I couldn’t see what sense it all made. I barely remembered what I’d learned the day before. When it came time to write answers on tests, my brain usually knew what to say. But sometimes it wouldn’t co-operate, and I had to fight it and make it give up the answers. I had to get perfect grades, or there way no way I was getting into Tokyo University.

My dad was gone most of the time, either working late at the office or hanging out at the bars, and my mom was busy taking care of the twins. I knew how much of a handful they were, and so I refused to burden her with the stresses of my days. Instead I listened to music on my iPod, and occasionally played PS2, when my brain could take no more cramming.

I thought I was doing a good job of hiding the stress I was under. I really did. Then one day, I snapped. Something that somebody did set me off – I still can’t remember what. But I climbed to the top of the tallest building I could find and screamed at him, at the top of my lungs. I called that kid every name I could think of, in English and Japanese. I made faces at him, when he replied in like manner. And I ignored my friends, who were pleading with me to climb down.

Pretty soon the GMs appeared. They warped me into Mordion Gaol, and explained why I was being given time to reflect on my misdeeds. Then they left, and I turned off my PS2 and stared at the bookshelves on the wall, my whole body covered in sweat from my outburst.

I’d just gotten a week-long ban from Final Fantasy XI Online.

* * *

The trip to the country was my mother’s idea. My aunt and uncle owned a house about two hours out of town, built in contemporary style. She volunteered me to watch it for them, while they went on vacation in Hawaii.

I refused to go, at first. I needed to keep up with summer school, in order to get into Tokyo University. I knew three other boys from high school who were still taking classes, trying year after year to pass the exam. I didn’t want to end up like them, and I didn’t care what it took, or how many times I broke down. But she arranged with my tutors to let me submit my assignments by email, while I was away. And while I felt guilty for imposing on everyone, I was secretly glad to get away from it all.

No more hearing the twins fight over the DDR mats. No more hearing the rice cooker beep, or the TV hosts babble, or the door swing open and shut. No more feeling the pressure build up until I was ready to kill someone. All I had to do was keep up with my studies, and feed my aunt’s cat. Besides that, I could do anything that I liked. It would practically be a vacation.

I imagined that it would be peaceful and quiet outside the city. No pressure, no distractions, and certainly nothing weird happening.

My uncle was a gaijin who taught English at a school outside of town. He’d married my mom’s sister a few years back, and bought a house near the school where he taught at. I half-expected that it’d be a western design, a huge mansion with twenty rooms and an indoor swimming pool. But no; it just looked like any other house in its generic suburban neighborhood, with a ceramic tiled roof and dull pastel paint on the walls.

Their house was next to a rice field, and across from a baseball lot. There were mountains in the distance, but the ground nearby was flat. Several other houses were nearby, but it was a ways to the center of the nearest town, and I hadn’t brought my bicycle. I looked down the road, and wondered if I’d be able to walk. Probably not, in this heat … sweat was forming on my brow already.

“Are you sure you’ve got everything, Hiro?” My mom was getting my things out of the car.

“Yes, mother.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, mother.”

She carried my suitcase up to the front doorstep. I remembered when she was talking about my uncle’s courtship, how he’d carried things for my aunt and opened doors for her, and I wondered if she was wishing that I’d taken care of the packing. Then I wondered if she’d try to hug me farewell. But no; she bowed respectfully, and I bowed back.

“I’ll see you next week, Hiro.”

“I’ll see you too, mother.”

She got into the car and drove off, with a last look over her shoulder, and I found the right key on the keyring. Then I got the front door open, and stepped into the house of a foreigner.

I set down my suitcase and took off my shoes in the entryway. It looked fairly normal, with a pair of guest slippers right there on the step. I could see the living area just beyond, with mats lined up next to floor-to-ceiling windows.

The place smelled different, with hints of bamboo and straw instead of cooking rice and fast-food wrappers. I kept an eye out to see what kind of strange things this foreigner kept in his house, but the weirdest thing that I saw on the way to my room was an Xbox 360 hooked up to the television. Pretty soon I was in my new room, which was about as large as the living space back at home. I checked the closet to make sure that they had a futon I could use, then opened my suitcase and got out my laptop.

It was warm in there, but I could manage. And they didn’t have high-speed Internet out here, so that was another distraction gone. It would just be me and my schoolwork. For the first time since leaving home, I allowed myself a smile.

Then I heard a loud THUMP somewhere in the house. What was that? I wondered.

More THUMPs, coming down the hallway towards me. Is that their cat? I thought. That has to be their cat. But it sounds too heavy to be a-

Into the room ran a live catgirl.

I know what you’re thinking that she must have looked like. You’re wrong. She had the ears and the tail, but those were the only things “catgirl” about her. She was a lot shorter than I was, and looked to be about twelve or thirteen. And she had extremely long hair. But it was frazzly and matted, and her jeans and t-shirt were worn out. And she was very overweight. She had to stop and catch her breath, after running into the room.

I stared. Is that a catgirl? I thought. That can’t be a catgirl. She looks too-

She looked up at me, and our eyes met. I had no idea what she was thinking about.

As it turned out, she was thinking about less than I’d thought she was. She sat down on the floor with another THUMP, and looked up at me again. “Feed me!” she yelled, and gave me an expectant look.

It was a while before I could say anything in return. “What are you?” I finally asked.

“Feed me!” she yelled again, and her tail swished.

I slowly walked over to where she was sitting, but she did not move or get up. She just sat there and watched.

Her ears looked like a real cat’s. I could see the cartilage inside. I reached out and touched the fur on the outside, and her ear twitched and flattened. “Don’t do that,” she said.

“Sorry, I-”

“Feed me!” she cried.

I stared into her face, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on behind her eyes. She just stared back, still wide-eyed and expectant. And that’s when my shocked brain finally realized it. This girl was dumb as a brick, just like a real cat.

She nuzzled the side of my leg.

“Okay, okay, I’ll feed you,” I said, jumping back a step and trying to get past her into the hallway. She wouldn’t move, and I had to step around her. “Where do they keep your … uh … ”

“Feed me!” she yelled.

I got to their kitchen, sweating profusely. Why me?

I tried three different cans of cat food, but she turned up her nose at them. “These are yucky!” she said. Finally I opened a can of tuna, the girl practically hanging onto my arm as I did so, then dumped it onto a plate.

She picked up the plate in her hands, and gobbled the tuna in only a couple of bites, licking her lips afterwards. Then she gave me that expectant look again. We went through another two cans of tuna before she cried “I want something to drink!”

I gave her a glass of milk, and she guzzled it. Then she set it down on the table, and ran out into the hall. I stepped out of the kitchen in time to see the door to the toilet room close.

I just stood there, for at least a minute or two. This is impossible, I thought to myself.

The toilet flushed, and I heard the sink running. This is also ridiculous.

When she came out she didn’t even look at me, but just went farther on down the hall. I followed her into my room, where she flopped down onto my open suitcase and curled up on the clothes that I’d brought. She yawned, and fell asleep with a smile.

She’s acting just like a real cat, I thought, because my brain was taking a while to catch up. What has that foreigner done to her?

What’s going to happen to me if I stay here?

It took me a minute to get up the courage, but I slowly reached around her to grab my cellphone out of the suitcase. She barely seemed to notice. Then I ran outside, and I mean ran, just barely remembering to kick off my slippers and put my shoes back on. I tore out the front door, down the driveway that wrapped all the way around the house, and started gasping for breath right next to the street. A car drove past, but I didn’t see who was in it.

I looked down at my cell, and fumbled with the controls and the tiny display until I’d found the number for my aunt’s mobile phone. Then I punched the “call” button, and held the phone up to my ear.

It rang three times. Then it said “Hello! You have reached the voice mailbox of-”

I pressed “end,” and facepalmed. Of course. They were still on their flight to Hawaii.

I tried to think. Who else could I call? Finally I dialed one of my friends’ numbers, the oldest one who was still going to school.

It rang a few times. Then “Hello?” came my friend’s voice. I could hear battle music from Final Fantasy XI Online in the background.

“Daisuke?” I asked.

“Yep,” he told me, then yelled “It’s Hiro!” to someone else. I heard a clatter, and footsteps running up to the phone. “Hey!” two people said at once.

“Hey, Daisuke. Kenjiro. Um, I just got to my uncle’s house … ”

“The NA? Doesn’t he play on Sylph?” Daisuke asked.

I looked back at the house nervously. To my horror, I saw her peering around the corner. “Yeah. Um … ”

“What?”

She trotted up to me, and I panicked. “There’s a catgirl living in their house and she’s coming right at me!”

They both laughed. “Lucky you, huh?”

“No I’m serious there’s this girl and she’s like twelve or thirteen and she’s got ears and a tail and the brain of a refrigerator!” She stopped right next to me, I mean uncomfortably close, and gave me a blank look. I stepped back a bit. “Go on, say something!” I told her, and held the phone up to her.

“Huh?” she said.

There was a pause. Then I heard swearing on the other end of the line. “Dude, are you serious?” Daisuke asked. “And she’s like … they’re … ”

“Yes, her ears and tail are real.” I looked down at her, and saw that her tail was swishing. She was giving me a confused look.

“Take a picture!”

I barely knew how to use this phone, but I got it to take a few pictures and email them to my friends. By this time, the catgirl – whatever her name was – had sat down on the ground, and was pulling up clumps of grass and eating them. I’d had no idea that cats did that.

“I don’t believe it!” Kenjiro exclaimed, and he sounded ecstatic. “An actual Mithra!”

“A Mithra kitten,” Daisuke replied. They were talking about the playable catgirl characters from our online game. I was still watching the thing, afraid that it might touch me or something.

“Look!” I yelled into the phone. “She’s not a Mithra! She’s a … I have no idea what she is! I have no idea what kind of sick things they did to her. Maybe they fed her genetically-modified cat food. Maybe the radiation from their Xbox’s power supply caused a freak accident! But she’s here, and she’s alive, and we’ve got to do something about it!”

“Like what?” Daisuke asked.

“Like … like … I don’t know! But we can’t just leave her like this. She’s a menace to society! Or society’s a menace to her! Or something! I have no idea what I’m saying!” I shouted into the phone.

“Dude, chill out!” Kenjiro said. “You’re panicking over there!”

“Panicking? Who’s panicking? I just AAAAGH!”

Somewhere back in their Tokyo apartment, I just know that Daisuke and Kenjiro were giving each other a look that said “He’s losing it.”

“Bad kitty!” I shouted. “Bad!”

I’d been waving my hand in the air, as I’d been talking, and I hadn’t noticed her watching intently. Finally she’d leaped up and grabbed it, pulling me down to the ground and wrapping herself around my arm, biting and scratching. I’d freaked out, and tussled with her for a moment before throwing her off, jumping back to my feet and scrambling up to the house.

I stood there next to the wall, trying to catch my breath. She just sat there, a hurt look on her face, her ear smarting from where I had smacked her. “You’re mean!” she yelled. “I don’t like you!”

“I don’t like you either!” I shouted, wide-eyed with terror.

A tiny voice cried out. “What’s going on-”

I pressed “End.”

I ran inside, closed and locked the front door, then called my mom and begged her to take me back home. Then I ran back to the guest room and tried to get all the cat hairs out of my suitcase, before sitting there in a daze and desperately hoping that nothing else would jump out at me. My phone rang twice, but I didn’t answer it.

Finally I heard a car pull up in the driveway. I put my laptop back inside and snapped my suitcase back up, before I realized that thing was still out there. Once again I tore back outside, this time still wearing my shoes. “Mom!” I cried out. “Mom!”

There she was, all 4’10” of her, getting out of the car and giving me a strange look. “Hiro? What’s wrong? You sounded so worried on the phone.”

“Mom, we need to get out of here now!” I thrust my suitcase into her hands. “There’s this strange … cat … ”

My voice trailed off, as I looked down at her feet. There on the ground was a calico cat, an extremely fluffy and fat one. It narrowed its eyes at me, before rubbing up against my mom’s leg.

She reached down to pet it. “Is there something wrong with the cat?” she asked, a look of concern on her face.

“No, I … just … ” I sighed. “Please take me home, mother.”

I kept my eyes on the cat until we’d rounded the corner and pulled out of the driveway.

My mom decided to go back and take care of the cat herself. She felt that she owed it to her sister. I begged her not to go, but she did anyway, and left me at home to take care of the twins. Every day I waited for her to call and tell me that something bizarre had happened, but she never did.

The twins actually behaved themselves for once. Somehow, I was able to get along with them, even though they were on summer vacation. I think it helped that they went outside a lot. We played against each other a few times in Super Smash Bros. Melee, and I actually had fun with them.

As for my exams? I don’t know how, but I managed to study enough that I was able to pass them. Kenjiro and Daisuke congratulated me, even though neither of them had passed. I promised that I’d email them every day while I was at school.

They tried to get me to come back to the game. But I didn’t need an MMO in my life … I had bigger priorities now.

Like being active in our local kemono fangroup, and studying paranormal genetics.

The air was chill. The stars were bright. Toads qwerk-ed down by the pond; bats rustled and clicked overhead. And the forest was abuzz with a chorus of crickets, a soft and melodious din that almost drowned the other noises out.

But the only things Christopher Lander could hear were the pounding of his heart, and the rustling he made as he fumbled for his flashlight in the dark. Grabbing it in his teeth, still balancing the heated bag with the pizzas in one arm, he twisted it into the "on" position and then shone it onto his bare arm.

Brown fur. Just for a second. Brown fur. It receded into his skin, half of it turning back to his lighter hairs and half of it drifting away in the breeze. Then it was gone, and all that was left were his goosebumps.

Lander realized that he had been holding his breath, and gasped. Then he sniffled, and fumbled with his pockets again, trying to turn his flashlight off and put it away and get out a handkerchief. He brought it to his face, trying not to knock his thick glasses aside, blowing his nose and sniffling against the cold. Then he gasped for breath again, shuddering and scared, his heart still pounding fast.

He looked behind him, and waited for his eyes to adjust. There it was, fifteen feet down the road — the tree branch that he had just jumped over. And he remembered flying, flying for two seconds, then landing and realizing he couldn’t do that. And stopping, and feeling itchy all over, and hurrying to grab his flashlight …

He felt a draft. Then he whirled around to see what had happened, and his bare feet pressed onto rough pavement and loose pebbles. There was a hole in the seat of his pants. And he wasn’t wearing any shoes.

Lander knew what had happened. That was why his heart was still pounding. He was so scared he couldn’t think straight. But it had happened, and it wasn’t happening anymore, and the pizza was going to get cold!

The crickets chirped. And a gust of cold wind picked up, and reminded him that he had bigger things to worry about right now. He shivered convulsively, and straightened his glasses back out.

How? That was all he could think. What had made it happen? A latent mental disorder? The spoiled mushrooms he’d eaten on a coworker’s dare? Those had given him a stomachache, but he hadn’t thought they’d caused any lasting damage. And they couldn’t explain why he was barefoot, and why he was going to feel very awkward if someone suddenly drove up behind him.

He carefully went to the side of the road, afraid that he’d step on a bug or a nail, and faced away from the woods. Then he looked up at the sky. The moon was bright, and it lit up the logo on his pizza tote. But it wasn’t full, and even if it had been it was shining right on him, right now, and he didn’t feel any different. Not even the fact that it was Halloween night explained things, although it did make him feel nervous about standing around in the dark.

Lander’s stomach was tying itself into knots. He felt like he couldn’t move, couldn’t go anywhere or do anything until he figured out what had just happened, and then just as suddenly un-happened. Part of him was scared that it’d happen again, and wanted to know what had triggered it. But another part was scared that it’d never happen again, and that part was even more desperate.

He remembered the car engine had died, on the old, rusty station wagon with the parlor’s sign on the roof. He remembered nervously calling his boss, and being yelled at to do whatever it took to get that pizza there on time. And he remembered thinking it out in his head, and deciding that he could maybe get there if he hurried …

And then he remembered jogging. He remembered it being hard at first, because he was slightly overweight and spent his whole day sitting down. He remembered sniffling, and feeling like his ears were going to freeze right off in the cold, and speeding up so he would get warm faster.

And then he remembered how easy it’d been, and how alive and full of energy he’d felt. And he remembered seeing the fallen branch up ahead, and thinking I’m going to jump it. And then he had vaulted six feet into the air …

His breath caught. He knew now what had caused his change, and he knew what he had become. Of course he’d become that, he thought; that’d been his fursona for ages.

But why?

Another cold breeze. Lander was shivering constantly now, and was covered in goosebumps. And he realized that why wasn’t important right now. Because he was between his car and the house, and he was going to catch hypothermia. Because whether he came back as a kangaroo or sat in a broken-down car all night, sans shoes and with a hole in the seat of his pants, he was going to have some explaining to do. And because as afraid as he was of what might happen, the one thing that scared him the most was that it might never happen again.

He stood there for another few moments, building up his resolve. He looked down the road in the direction that he’d been going, and closed his eyes. He counted to three, his voice barely a whisper. And then he took off.

Cold wind rushed past his ears. Cold feet pressed into a rough surface, and stung as loose pebbles pressed into his soles, and into his bones. He jumped and came right back down, and his feet stung even more. But he kept jumping, holding the tote tight against him, holding his other arm out to balance. And each jump was longer, and each landing hurt less, until he was bounding over the road, his clothes rustling in the breeze.

Two seconds of freefall. Jump. Two seconds of flight. Jump. A low-hanging branch got in his face, and he tasted bark, and he sputtered and reached up to brush off his mouth but felt a muzzle instead, and laughed.

He didn’t stop. He kept jumping, all the way around the road that wound its way past the pond. He didn’t feel tired, or cold. He felt great. And he was still scared, but was giddy, with an intoxicating mix of adrenaline and runner’s high.

A car wound its way through the trees, somewhere ahead of him, somewhere down the same road. He saw it coming long before it saw him, and for second he thought What to do? Then it was coming towards him, and he was going towards it, and he thought: Jump. And then he did.

For a second he felt real fear, and as he flew at the car he thought I messed up, I’m so dead. Then he was on the other side, and the car had screeched to a halt, and he looked back after two more jumps to see the door open and somebody looking back towards him.

Lander had to slow down a little, because his heart was pounding and his lungs were burning, and he was going uphill and thinking He’s going to turn around and come after me. This is it. I’m so dead. And he wanted to keep going, but couldn’t. So he slowed to a jog, and then stopped all the way, and he looked back down the road from a bend on the side of the hill. Nothing was coming. The air was full of night sounds.

Moonlight shone directly on him, and on the pizza box and the guardrail and the grass at the edge of the slope. And way out past him were hills, and the countryside, and the lights of the cars on the main road. He looked out at them for a second, amazed at how real it all looked when he wasn’t inside of a car himself.

Then he looked down at himself, and his brown furry arms, and around at his huge swishing tail. He looked down at his feet, and pressed one into the grass and felt cold and wet, on reverse-jointed shapes that belonged to him. He reached up and felt his muzzle again, and his tall ears, and his glasses that were now awkwardly positioned. He adjusted them, and it took him a second to get them on straight.

This was it, he thought. This was real; this was him. And there was no mirror, no heart monitor, no scientist with a transformation gun asking him how he felt. Just wet grass, and cool air, and him standing there as an anthro kangaroo. And somehow, it all felt perfectly natural. He didn’t feel anything changing back, and he didn’t feel disoriented or like parts of him were out of place.

Lander grinned like an idiot, thrusting his fist skyward in triumph. He didn’t care what happened next. It was worth it. It was all worth it. Who said you couldn’t live your dreams? The world was such a great place, he thought. And he had such a great life.

And his boss was going to kill him if he didn’t deliver that pizza on time.

Lander took a deep breath, and took off down the road again.

It took him a few minutes to get to the house, during which he thought about everything. It didn’t even seem possible that anything bad could ever happen to him again. He settled into a steady rhythm, freefall and jump and flying and jump, and he almost missed the turnoff but for the Halloween decorations.

There they were, all over the lawn … glowing pumpkins, and friendly-looking ghosts and black cats. Lander didn’t need to check the address. He’d been past this house before, delivering to other places nearby, and they were decked out like this every year.

He looked down the road at their gravel driveway, imagined it on his bare paws, and decided against it. Then he looked down the grassy slope out at their lawn, and at the house more than a hundred feet away, and thought how small and far away it all looked.

Then he jumped.

He soared, for two … three … four seconds. Then he saw something dark on the ground, a row of small dark things, and for a split-second he wondered What are these? Then his feet smashed into the uncarved pumpkins, and raw pumpkin jammed up his toenails, and he yelped and flailed into the air for a bit before falling face-first onto the grass. The pizza tote slid away from him.

Lander lay there for a moment, arms in front of his face, wondering if any bones were broken. Then his toes started to hurt, and his toenails started to sting, and both his feet turned into masses of pain. He curled them towards him, reached down and tried to get the pumpkins off of his feet, and the fragments were jagged and more painful than he’d thought they would be. Wet pumpkin innards slid over his stinging toes, and wet pumpkin smell reached his sensitive nose.

He got the pumpkins off and stood up, and had to keep from crying out. Both his feet hurt so bad, especially his big toes. And what was that dark shape on the ground in front of him?

It was the pizza tote. He limped over to it, and tried for a second to reach it without bending over. Then he finally knelt down next to it, and cried out and winced as he got it and stood back up. Then he looked up at the house, still halfway across the yard, and at all the cars in the driveway. And he didn’t know what was going to happen once he knocked on that door, but he didn’t think it was going to be good.

Maybe if I hold this in front of my face … no.

I could tell them that it’s a Halloween costume! Nuh-uh.

Maybe no one will notice … No way.

Lander remembered a commercial he’d seen, where a cartoon character on a bottle of juice drink had come to life. The kids had both screamed, and the mom had cried "Run!" and the thing had chased them through the house. It hadn’t been an ad for the juice drink. And he wasn’t a cartoon character. But he was pretty sure that that was how this was going to play out … without the chasing, he thought, and looked down at his feet in the dark and winced.

He imagined being shot at by a desperate homeowner, or causing a panic and getting the party guests hurt. He imagined kids screaming, and horrified looks on people’s faces, and someone rushing to the phone to dial 911. And he could see himself spending the rest of his life in a government research lab, or even a mental hospital, and never jumping again. Never flying again …

A terrible thought struck him, and he got out his flashlight and shone it down on his feet. He had trouble telling the orange from the red, but he was pretty sure that there was a lot of blood on them.

Lander looked over his shoulder, up at the road, and at the miles between him and his broken-down car. Cold air blew across his wet nose, and the crickets seemed far away now.

He sighed, and looked back at the house. Then he limped towards the door, one step at a time, trying to think of what he could say. "This is not what it looks like … " Ow. "I’m really not going to hurt you." Ow. "Please don’t hurt me." Ow. "Please don’t h-ARGH!"

He stumbled the last couple of paces and put out his free hand to stop himself on the wall. Slimy footprints followed him across the patio, streaked with pumpkin innards and trickles of red liquid.

He tried to catch his breath. Inside the house he could hear music, and talking, and people playing a video game. Excited voices called out to each other, and somebody shouted above the din. People laughed in response.

Lander cringed. Then he closed his eyes, counted to three silently, and got up and knocked on the door.

There was no response for a second. Then he heard light footsteps clicking towards him, like high-heels on a hardwood floor, and held his breath.

The door opened. Lander squinted in at the light. And then he gasped.

On the other side was an anthropomorphic bird, with fluffy white underfeathers and brilliant royal blue backfeathers and wings. He didn’t wear (and didn’t need) any clothes besides a many-pocketed belt, and he looked cheerful and pleasant.

Past him, inside the house, was a whole menagerie. A gray tabby cat-boy played DDR against a human girl, holding onto his top hat with one hand. Two red wolves and two foxes, one red and one pink, were crowded around a game console hooked up to a large-screen TV, and the red fox was shouting triumphantly and waving a Wiimote while standing up on the couch. And a young girl with pudgy looks and a cat’s ears and tail stopped in the middle of the room, a bowl of ice cream in her hands, and looked up at the newcomer.

"Hello!" the bird said. "We were wondering when you would get here."

"Uh … " Lander blinked.

The bird looked down at the doorstep, and jumped in surprise. He ruffled his feathers, and stared. "What’s happened to your feet?"

Mark let out his breath in a puff of white, used the sleeve of his coat to wipe the fog off the scope, and squinted through it again. It wasn’t electronic, so all he could see were thin black crosshairs, and the target board through the snow-covered forest.

He fired, controlling the recoil with practiced hands. Twenty yards into the trees he saw wood splinter, and a tiny black mark where his shell had hit. He leaned his rifle on the sanded armrest, brushed his dark brown hair out of his face, and looked up … and up … and up, at the pile of furs and hides beside him.

At the top, two feet over his head, a white tiger’s face grinned a cocky grin down at him. The tiger unshouldered an enormous rifle, then brought his snow boots apart and took aim at the target board, not even using the armrest down at his waist. His ears folded back; his tail went taut. Then he fired, and Mark jumped at the ear-cracking sound. When Mark looked up, he saw half of the target board still standing up, and a cloud of splinters slowly settling down to the snow behind it.

Mark gave the tiger a disgusted look. “How’d you get so big when you have to drink your kills through a straw? If that’d been a deer, you would’ve turned it to chunky salsa.” He pointed out at the target board.

The tiger just laughed. “You think this is a hunting rifle?” He held it out for Mark to examine. “This thing’s anti-tank. Russian-made.”

Mark looked it over, trying not to show how envious he was. “Yeah, I bet those Russian tanks made really good eating.”

“No.” The tiger grinned. “Just the people inside.”

“Oh you did not.”

He laughed. “I came close a couple of times! Crazy mercs guarding those Russian oilfields. They’ve still got oil out there, you know.”

“That why you ran off to Siberia?” Mark leaned up against the armrest, curling his toes inside his boots and trying to unfreeze them. “More gasoline for the truck’s engine?”

“Naw. I signed up to impress women.” He flexed his arms, still covered thickly in furs. “You think the girls’ll go for me now?”

“Yeah, if they like carpet salesmen.”

The tiger gave him an unamused look, then broke off a tree limb and swung it playfully at him. Mark ducked underneath, then picked up a fallen branch and swung in fast, smacking his furs and hides twice before he could parry. The two of them “fought” for almost a minute, Mark swinging fast and the tiger blocking half of his hits, before the tiger caught Mark’s stick in mid-swing and swung him into a snowdrift.

Mark crawled out, spitting snow out of his mouth and brushing it off of his coat and pants. “I’ll have you know you used to be the smaller one!”

The tiger just smiled.

Mark walked back over to where he had dropped his rifle, and shouldered it. “You just wait. I’m gonna sign up for an Expeditionary Force-”

“Don’t.” The smile vanished. “I’m serious.”

“Fine, I’ll just walk to Siberia on my lonesome then. Or Greenland. Heck, I could make it to Africa if I wanted to. I’ll find some mad, killer animal out there, and I’ll come back nine feet tall and kick your sorry tail into next week.”

One massive paw ruffled the hair on Mark’s head and nearly pushed him into the snow, before he shoved it off. “You can try, bro, you can try.” He smacked him on the back, and walked past him. “C’mon, it’s time for dinner.”

Mark didn’t come, straightening himself out and giving the tiger’s back a disgusted look until he was almost out of sight. Then he got out a clear jewel from his pocket, and looked through it at his brother. The tiger shone an intense royal blue, wisps of energy radiating off of him and brushing the thin green strands inside each tree.

Mark put the gem away, and sighed before heading back towards home.

That night’s dinner was sparse. The hunting expeditions had come back empty-handed, and the supply from last year’s harvest was running low. Matilda insisted on making sure there was dinner for Mark’s brother, though, and so he ate rich, warmed, salted venison, while Mark chewed on dry jerky and ignored the growl in his stomach.

It wasn’t easy. No one else had come out to dinner because there wasn’t any, so it was just Mark, his brother, and Matilda around the campfire, surrounded by canvas tents and RVs with missing hoods and wheels. And Mark listened to the two of them talk, while watching flakes of bark and old newspapers peel off of the pile of burning logs, and drift up into the tree shadows and the stars.

Matilda was a bison. Somehow, she’d managed to find one. Mark could still remember the diminutive girl she’d once been, almost as much shorter than him as he was compared to his brother now. And he remembered he’d used to tease her a lot.

Now she was even larger than his brother, with hooves and thick hand-paws, and a warm smile that went with her homemade calico dress. Mark had used to make fun of her “arts and crafts.” But ever since she’d taken charge of the camp, they’d all learned how practical it was to make their own things and grow their own food. Instead of just hunting and foraging.

Mark still remembered the year before that … the dry wolf meat, worn-out old blankets and leaky tents. Those had been some long nights.

Matilda had really changed since those days. And so had Mark’s brother, he thought. He watched the two of them, sitting next to each other, but he wasn’t listening to their words. He was watching their facial expressions. The way Matilda laughed, rocking back on the log and waving a hand as though to ward off his brother. And the way that he watched her intently, and smiled before saying something that set her off again. The two of them just seemed so … confident. So full of life. Mark bet that they’d be glowing brighter than the fire if he looked at them both through the gem.

Enough waiting, Mark thought, and looked out at the trees in the distance. Tomorrow it’s my turn.

But what to become? he wondered. There was no way he could outdo either of them.

Something tricky, he thought with a grin. Like a fox. A vicious, savage fox-

Somebody stepped out from behind one an RV decked out in solar panels, and yawned before heading inside of it. It was Alvin, their tech support, and he was a red fox. Just like half the people in this camp. Everyone wants to be a fox. So foxes are out.

But Mark still wanted something tricky. What could out-trick a trickster?

He sat there for another few minutes, thinking. And when he finally decided, he laughed, and made the other two look over at him.

Mark waved them aside, and went off to his own tent.

The next morning, Mark waited outside of Al’s camper, for the fox to come out and unlock the steel case on the side. There inside it were everyone’s phones, freshly charged and ready to use.

Al nodded greetings to Mark, and Mark got his phone out while Al typed intently on his. From there Mark didn’t wait for anyone else, but headed straight for the road into the suburbs.

It was a long walk, but the road was clear for miles. The cars has been cleared off already, so there was no place to hide. Mark didn’t mind, and began whistling as he walked, making good time as the sun moistened the frost on the grass.

He turned on his phone and checked the GPS, for Google Maps’ species markers. The one that he wanted was still there, and had last been checked just a week ago. There should be a healthy den.

Mark didn’t need a whole den, he thought, and felt the weight of the rifle on his back. He just needed one of them.

It took him a couple of hours to get into town. Finally, Mark hopped down from the offramp and headed past the old restaurants, with smashed-in glass windows and posters of Ronald McDonald’s face, and hiked down the forest road that led to the gated communities.

He looked out into the forest as he walked, at the dry leaves and dead branches covered with snow. Some deer were spooked by his approach, and he snapped his fingers and watched them go, stomach rumbling. Oh well, he thought. I’ve still got plenty of beef jerky.

The place he arrived at was an upscale gated community, with the kind of houses that had a bathroom for every person and a garage door for every car. Mark stepped over the broken, wooden board that had once been lowered next to the guardhouse, and checked his phone to make sure of his destination. He thought he could see it from where he was at; it had an octagonal upper window, and blue walls.

Mark didn’t go inside. Instead, he went to the house across the street, and tossed a few rocks in the door to make sure there was nothing inside. After that he pulled out a plastic chair from the dining room and set it up at the living room’s picture window, where he had a good view of the blue house. Then he went through the rooms to see if there was anything else. The kitchen had already been cleaned out, but there was a stash of comic books in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He brought them downstairs, and leafed through them while waiting for movement outside.

It took longer than he had expected. Hours longer. Mark turned on his phone again, and checked Wikipedia. It said they were mostly nocturnal, and he had been hoping. Mark sighed, and snacked on some fruit leather while reading about Spider-man’s second marriage.

When it was getting close to suppertime he saw a buck deer, walking across the road. Then another, and pretty soon there was a whole family of them. Mark gave them a weird look. This close to the den? he thought. Can’t they, like, smell it? He wondered if the marker had been correct, and thought of bagging one of them just so he didn’t come back empty-handed. Mark’s stomach gnawed at him, and he remembered what his brother’s meal had smelled like.

Then he saw it. Like a miniature gray-and-red wolf, the coyote leaned inside the open doorway of the house across the street, crouched low and waiting for them to come closer. Mark slowly got up, standing inside the shadows, and unshouldered his rifle and aimed at it.

He would only get one shot. He just hoped that the glass didn’t deflect the bullet too much.

Mark had just gotten the coyote lined up in the crosshairs, when his phone rang. Immediately the coyote’s ears perked, as did the tails and ears of the deer outside.

Mark froze, in the seconds of silence afterwards. Then his phone rang again, and he found himself inwardly cursing whoever’d decided to call him.

It rang a third time. The deer finally bolted, and the coyote leaped out and chased after them. Disgusted, Mark got out his phone and pushed Send. “What?”

It was Matilda’s voice. “Mark, where are you? We’re getting an expedition ready to go out hunting again.”

“I’m in the suburbs. Okay? And I was this close to bagging my prize.” He heard squealing, and snarling, and loud bellows outside. “And a whole herd of deer, while I was at it.”

She said something, but he couldn’t hear it. The bellows had gotten louder. “Look, I’ll call you back. Okay?”

He couldn’t hear what she said.

“Okay?”

“Okay!” he finally heard her exclaim.

He pushed Cancel, and stepped outside the front door. The herd was long-gone, but the coyote had downed one of the deer. It was snarling and tearing at it, and even at this distance Mark could hear the buck bellow in agony. It hurt his ears.

Mark unshouldered his rifle, took careful aim, and fired. The coyote dropped. A second shot, and the bellows stopped.

Mark ran over to where the two lay, only stopping ten feet away from them to smack himself on the forehead. “Argh!” he exclaimed, and followed it up with a few choice words. “What in the heck was I thinking?” He looked down at the two entwined bodies, then got out his gem and looked at it. It’d already begun to absorb the stray wisps of energy, the ones escaping from their husks. And he thought that it felt a bit heavier, too.

For a moment, Mark stood there, weighing the options in his mind as the gem slowly changed colors. He thought of getting a new gem, however long that might take. Then he looked down at the buck deer and its antlers, and a thought came to Mark’s mind.

He held the gem out over the animals, until it glowed and practically dripped with energy. Then he held it close to his chest … and let it drop, to smash open on the pavement.

That evening whole families ate around the campfire. Human children sat on logs and kicked their feet, waiting anxiously, while their parents moved around getting plates set up on the wooden tables. Matilda wore a warm green dress and earmuffs, and carried a salad bowl to the table where two venison roasts already lay.

She nearly dropped it when she saw Mark come into camp. He was wearing the same coat, but he had the face of a coyote … and the antlers of a buck deer.

Mark unshouldered a sack with two legs sticking out of it, and dropped it next to his hooves. He looked over at the cooked roasts on the table; then looked up at Matilda, and grinned. “What, did they go on without me?”

Matilda stared. “I … ”

“All the more for me, then.” Mark picked back up his bag, and went to go get his cooking utensils.