• ...I knew it must have taken ten, fifteen seconds at the most, but honestly it felt like some kind of century of not-pain. The first thing that happened was my shirt becoming too tight due to my expanding chest and back, my rips and shoulder plates cracking loudly, then my newly formed claws cleaving it away from my skin. When my head jerked back to accomedate my newly forming spinal cord I caught my first glimpses of the full moon through my wolfen eyes. It was brighter, more comforting in a mysterious way, maybe how moths are attracted to candle light I cannot say for sure...

    I could have been seven or eight feet tall when I was sure my legs had stopped expanding and changing, because for sure the ground was farther from me than normal. All I was wearing at this point was an old pair of beach shorts, torn just so to look like from one of the old wolf-man movies. My fangs glisted and dripped with saliva, the powerful nose at the end of my new muzzle toom in vast amounts of air, only then did I smell my quary. It smelled like...stale sweat, tobacco smoke, and leather. Maybe a construction worker, or maybe even better a high-school football player. At the idea of this, I crouched close to the roof of my apartment building and with an excited spring in my step, I leapt across the 15-foot distance between my building and an old shopping center.

    I landed on one of the second story roof corners over-looking a small alley-way and watched the humans closely. The absolutley stunk of smoke and sweat and what I could guess was cheap...perfume? Maybe they had been sleeping around before they came out here, all the better to end their lives. I centered my focus on the largest one in the center of the bunch, six-foot, powerfully build, and quite drunk from the sound of his ranting. This one was familiar to me...ahh, I remember now. This one wronged me once...a wrong involving the girl I had loved for years and a single one-night stand...this was a wrong I would soon right.

    With one more crouch, I leapt. There was screaming, there was blood, there was broken glass and broken bodies, and I felt nothing more than pure euphoria...

    With one jerk up of my bloody muzzle, I let loose a loud and triumphant howl into the night.


    CONTENT, CONTEXT, IDEA © 2009 Marc Fatherree