User:Griffin/Suddenly Spotty
{{#ifeq: User |User| Suddenly Spotty | Suddenly Spotty}}[[Title::{{#ifeq: User |User| Suddenly Spotty | Suddenly Spotty}}| ]]
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{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| Griff Griffin | Griff Griffin}} | |
{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| griffin | griffin}} | ||
Author: [[User:{{#ifeq: User |User| griffin | griffin}}|{{#ifeq: User |User| griffin | griffin}}]] [[Author::{{#ifeq: User |User| griffin | griffin}}| ]]
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{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| griffin | griffin}} | |
Author: {{#ifeq: User |User| Griff Griffin | Griff Griffin}} |
Author: [[User:{{#ifeq: User |User| griffin | griffin}}|{{#ifeq: User |User| Griff Griffin | Griff Griffin}}]] [[Author::{{#ifeq: User |User| Griff Griffin | Griff Griffin}}| ]]
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{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| Griff Griffin | Griff Griffin}} | |
{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| griffin | griffin}} | | Authors: ' |
Authors: [[User:{{#ifeq: User |User| griffin | griffin}}|{{#ifeq: User |User| griffin | griffin}}]]
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{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| griffin | griffin}} | |
Authors: {{#ifeq: User |User| Griff Griffin | Griff Griffin}} |
Author: [[User:{{#ifeq: User |User| griffin | griffin}}|{{#ifeq: User |User| Griff Griffin | Griff Griffin}}]]
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}} {{#if:| — see [[:Category:{{{category}}}|other works by this author]]}}
Author's note
This is very much a work in progress. I have no intention of going through and correcting for grammar or spelling until I have gotten to what I would consider to be a good "stopping point." I know myself: I would see one sentence in one paragraph I could improve, and then that one minor change would snowball into a large-scale revision of a story I'm not even done with. Therefore, please take any major grammatical goof-ups or serious plot-holes with a grain of salt.
Thank you.
Spots
"Mister Sean Durham, what do you think caused this to happen? Do you believe that a higher power was involved in this miraculous transformation?" The reporter, who had introduced himself as "Marcus," was dressed out like a wannabe Italian papparrazo. It was a little much by my reckoning, and this didn't make me inclined to be charitable. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's someone who has to put on airs. What tore it for me was that the question sniffed of agnostic-baiting, which has never sat well with me. Therefore, I gave him my best cheetah leer, which is a look that can send strong men into fits of panic in the right context, and I began to throw off on his impossibly dumb question in classical style.
"Well," I started out, pausing for a moment to get into my best whiskey-voiced Brooklyn twang. I positioned my paws comfortably out in front of me with the left bent coquettishly and my right turned to the side to aid in my elocution. I continued, "there is a problem with that question, you see. Before I start to answer you, though, let me give you a little backgroud: not long after the universe we know was created, there was this dragon, and he ruled over a little kingdom populated by sundry animals. All animals knew how to talk then because it was still Man's responsibility to try to teach them, and all things lived longer lives and had more time in which to learn. Now, ferrets were known in this time as ferocious debaters--"
"Sir, please," Marcus said, holding up his hands for me to stop. Satisfyingly enough, sweat had begun to pop out on his forehead, and he realized I was jerking him around. Men who are truly full of bologna can't stand it when you serve them top-class salami. "I didn't ask for a bunch of fabrication," he said. "I was just asking if you ever thought--"
I rolled my eyes. "Look; I come from a strict Presbyterian background, and all this stuff I've been struck with over the past eight months flies in the face of everything I was taught. I don't think that a person in my position is obligated to think, and trying my best not to has been keeping my head bolted to my neck lately rather than whirling around somewhere in outer space. I can tell you my story or not, but I'm not here for playing word games or intellectual card tricks."
"Okay! Jeez!" he shouted, putting his hands up defensively. Then, with the air of someone treading on rice paper in hiking boots, Marcus took a breath and started over. "Perhaps you could try sharing your earliest memories of these events."
I dropped my head down and to the left as I thought about that, drawing my right paw up to me and setting my left elbow to take stress off my bone structure. As the memory surged slowly back to me, my eyes drifted up to the ceiling, and then I bent my neck to the right as if in a swallowing motion as I satisfied myself that I had put it together. "Well," I started, using a much friendlier tone this time. I set my posture in a more symmetrical and close-together version of the one I had used earlier when ridiculing him, and I continued, "it was actually a long while before I realized anything was different. You see, it was in the wee hours of the morning, and it was completely dark. I wasn't very lucid at all, so you can imagine I would end up laying there for hours before I realized exactly what was going on. I mean, it's not every day that you wake up and find that you've turned into something that looks like a wild animal.
"Now, my first feelings upon awakening were that my muscles weren't working like they normally did. For example, I had a feeling that my hip flexor muscles had been cranked to a higher amperage than usual, and I had a sense that my quadriceps had become strong and powerful enough that I could kick a good-sized hole in the world."
Marcus interrupted with a politely raised hand, so I paused for a moment to give him room. "Okay, so what you are saying is that you had a distinct sense of change in the way your muscles worked. "
"Yes," I replied. "I also had a sense that I didn't have anything there to hold up my gut, but there was also a sense that I didn't have as much anyway." I thought for a moment about how to describe it. "It was kind of hard to articulate, but think of your insides as being like a noodle, and the noodle rests on a large plate. But then think of realizing first that the plate you have to put it on is a lot smaller, but then you feel kind of relieved because then it occurs to you that there isn't as much noodle there anymore anyhow." I looked up at him to see if he was following me, knowing deep down it was a highly tortured analogy.
Marcus was actually nodding his head as if understanding, though. "I can see that, actually," he said. "I mean, a lot of people don't know it, but I was--do you mind if I interrupt?"
"No," I said.
He went on, "well, this doctor I was interviewing not long ago was telling me about how they use interoception to treat people with panic disorder. I asked him what it was, and he started telling me all this stuff about how," he started gesticulating with his hands, "we get feelings of nausea, thirst or hunger. We don't have it in our list of everyday senses, but we do get these feelings and know what to do with them." He gestured with both hands down at his own belly. "I would think it would have felt cooler around your middle, like that part of your body wasn't pumping out as much heat."
I regretted snapping at the guy earlier. This guy was actually explaining this better than I had, and I was starting to warm up to him. "Yeah, that's about right actually. You know, I would have thought you'd be more curious about my tail."
He shrugged. "Well, I've never had one," he said. "It's kind of hard to think about if you've never had one."
I nodded energetically. "Oh, tell me about it," I said. "That was another reason that it took me so long to get clued in what was going on. Now it's like, when my body is checking itself, it says, 'okay, all five limbs intact' and never says anything about it to the forebrain. I can feel my tail having a kink in it, being stepped on accidentally, but I never actually have the feeling of it being there versus not being there." I chuckled softly. "I didn't find out about it until after I figured out what was going on."
"When was that, actually?" Marcus asked me.
"Well, let me continue just telling everything in order. I mean, I have it here. Basically, that was the first stuff that registered with me, but I didn't make very much of it. I just knew that I was feeling weird, so I just laid there on my side breathing for two hours while my mind wandered. I guess part of me knew something was amiss, and I was a bit afraid to find out what exactly it was. I mean, I think you would be in my situation.
"I guess the first thing that gave me cause for worry was an uncomfortable feeling of my whiskers sticking against the covers." I twirled my whiskers for him illustratively, illiciting a reserved chuckle. "I was once about as smooth as a doll-faced hentai chick," I continued, "so it was quite unnerving. Now, like I said, it's not every day you wake up suddenly in the body of some quadrupedal creature that it's scientifically impossible for you to become, so what I was worried about at the time was that somehow I had suddenly grown a lot of facial hair overnight. It wasn't some attempt to rationalize or anything; it wasn't like it occurred to me to think, "I haven't turned into an animal," because it hadn't occurred to me yet to wonder if I had.
"Now, I'm sure you heard about the shooting incident. Yes, that's how my circumstances ended up being broadcast over the media before my parents could so much as think of trying to cover it up. It was really the most horrifying thing that has ever happened to me, and I still get anxious talking about it. You see, it had just started getting light outside, and that was about the same time my father came to get me out of bed. As the light got good enough for me to see by, I realized I was feeling really thirsty, and I started pulling the bedding material off of me, which was turning out to be an unusually awkward endeavor. When I got my first look at myself, let me put it to you simply: I panicked.
"You panicked?" Marcus asked. His eyebrows moved up and down thoughtfully, and they wove themselves together. He cocked his head to his left with his eyes pulling slightly to his right as if he were trying to form a mental picture of the scene. Using his left hand to carry his speech as if he were using it as a sort of metronome, he said, "So you started screaming, and that's when your father came in with the .22 and famously--"
I waved my paw dismissively. "That's not quite right," I interrupted. I retreated back into my head and tried to pull it up. "It was just light enough for me to see," I said, sounding distant even to my own ears, "and for an instant there...I thought there was something in bed with me." I made pointed eye contact with Marcus, here. "I know it's hard to believe, but I still hadn't really swallowed what was going on. I think I decided I was dreaming or hallucinating, so I just got up and started getting dressed." I chuckled at myself. "Struggling into those old jeans was a comic masterpiece. I mean there I was trying to pretend everything was normal because my brain was just so completely clouded with cognitive dissonance, and then my father came to the door to ask if I was alright. 'I'm fine,' I said. 'Just had a bad dream.' I guess I sounded as freaked-out as I actually was because I think he just lurked around the door and never actually left. He said something to me about breakfast, and he shouted something down at Mom."
I looked up, and my surroundings registered with me. "Okay," I said to Marcus. "Who paints their office wine-red with nicotine-stain-white moulding and trim and then puts in green faux leather upholstry?" I looked around. "I mean, it doesn't look bad, but it's a little distracting for an office, isn't it?"
Marcus looked uncomfortable for a moment, and he made a shrugging gesture with his hands. "Well, this actually isn't my office, really. The guy who is usually here works for Archives and History, as you can see from the books here." He gestured around at the book shelves. "I just don't have room where I usually work," he finished, looking a little chagrined.
"Well, I guess a history type would tend to want more colorful surroundings," I admitted. I respected his honesty, though, because he could have just said he had borrowed it for the low-slung--and highly comfortable--couch I was laying on. "But I don't even know how long I spent in my room trying to dress myself. I just know that my father eventually burst in. He got one look at me, squawked, and after a heart-stopping moment he was back with the .22 trying to blow my head off.
"From there, it's kind of blurry for a while," I lied. "I mean, when you have to beg for your life when it's your own dad, and he doesn't recognize who you are..." I stammered lamely for a moment. "W-well, your mind kind of writes it off as a mistake and tries to throw the memory away," I finished lamely. I trembled gently as a chill flushed over me. The memory really just flashed through my mind so blindingly, when I tried to revisit it, that it hurt. It was like the memory was too glaringly bright for me to look at it directly, and I didn't like the bits of it I caught in sidelong glances. I couldn't believe that I had cursed at him, condemned him and tried to make him feel small. I had just been so scared.
"You don't have to talk about it," Marcus said.
"I have a friend I try to talk about it with," I said, feeling embarrassed with myself. "Anyway," I continued, "the next clear thought I really have is when I was rubbing my bruised head and trying to help my father explain things to a police sergeant. I think he's Lieutenent Hooks now."
"Give him a while, and he'll be Captain Hooks," Marcus quipped.
I chuckled, "Yeah. Anyway, after that awkward, little discussion, I was on the EMS wagon heading toward Duke, and that was the first time I really felt proud to have been born to my father. He held my paw the whole way, and he kept asking if I was okay. I kept telling him I was fine, but I think I was really just so far gone in shock that I didn't care about anything. Once Old Man Endorphin hits, you're just thanking the Good Lord you're alive.
"When we got to where we were going, there was a lot of awkwardness. You see, they didn't want me walking on all fours through the hospital because they were afraid I might pick up an infection, and they didn't want to hurt my back making me walk upright; therefore, they just took me in on a gurney even though I was perfectly capable of getting around on my own.
"And then there was a really funny episode I remember: the UNC grad student who was put in charge of me--I don't know how he got into Duke in one piece--wanted me stripped, but my father threatened to kill him. I just wanted any chance they could give me to get back to normal whatever they had to do, so we hit a three-way compromise by just having a hospital blanket laying over me.
"I learned a whole new compassion toward lab mice during all of that, though. I swear, if you would pardon me please for doing so, I was put through so many different scans over the next few hours that it's amazing I haven't come down with some weird cancer from it; I can't even remember the names of all of them. I remember looking at the results of the Ct scan, though. From what the doctors explained to me, my whole brain mass has somehow been compacted into a smaller space, and they can't quite figure out why there haven't been any cognitive effects from it. One guy even admitted out of sheer frustration he hasn't ruled out magic.
"Anyway, by the time my younger brother came and got us, I was bone tired. All I can remember after getting home was the taste of green Jell-O and chicken boullion, Mom looking worried and then the blissful feeling of my own bed."
Marcus raised his eyebrows again. "Green Jell-O and boullion"?
"Hospital stuff," I explained. "You don't want to know."
"It really wasn't until the next morning that it really came home to me what had happened," I said. "I just sat in front of my bedroom mirror for an hour that morning, making different faces and posing a lot."
"Just trying to come to grips with it?" Marcus asked rhetorically.
I cocked my head to the right as I tried to construct a better explanation. "It's not so much that," I replied slowly. I had to think for a heartbeat or so, and I elected to answer a rhetorical question with a serious one. "I've really tried to think about this because I still do it. Pose and make faces in front of the mirror, I mean. It's just that for years I looked a certain way and moved a certain way, and what terrifies me is losing the person I was before. At the same time, I'm eager for the new person to live, and it's like I'm trying to make peace between one part of me that wants to run away from this and another part of me that wants to embrace it."
He scratched his chin thoughtfully. "You know, I never thought of it that way," he admitted. He scratched down several notes, seeming caught up in his own thoughts momentarily.
I kneaded the couch thoughtfully for a second, reflecting on the memory. I had been fascinated with how I could rotate my ears almost 180 degrees, and I had experimented unsuccessfully with trying to turn one to the front and the other to rear. I had stripped myself naked and spent several minutes taking up various different poses and watching the muscles play and flow over my new body.
"Hey, careful not to rip--" Marcus started.
I held up my paw to remind him I was wearing mitts, and I chuckled softly. "I do have to eat with these paws," I explained. I realized they were making my digits feel cramped at the moment, so I took them off, sticking them into the small side-pocket of my harness. "Anyway, suddenly waking up in the body of a cheetah felt like getting out of a Pocono and hopping into a Veyron Bugatti. You think you were in good shape before, but suddenly you have more power under your foot than you really know what to do with, and you know it without even having to touch the accelerator. You can tell it doesn't jump from 0-60. It glides.
"But after my session in front of the mirror, I had a full day ahead of me. The first big thing of the day was my trip to the hospital, but getting ready was a pain. The biggest hassle was trying to get me into an outfit that actually fit on me. I wasn't born a professional nudist, you know. Fortunately, my mother had thought ahead and hauled down a big box full of my old stuff, and we managed to find a pair of black soccer shorts that I hadn't worn since I was 8."
"But why did you want to wear clothing at all?" Marcus asked. "I would think the fur covers everything."
I almost rolled my eyes, but I remembered my manners and just shook my head in the negative. "The tail does if I have it down all the way," I said. "The fur doesn't have anything to do with it. It's serviceable as protection against the sun, but that's about as good as a mud wallow come to think of it. Humans really insist on wearing clothes because skin that has sweat glands tends to stick to near-about everything except wood, and the only feasible means of keeping it sanitary and not stinking awfully is to spend a lot of time rolling in mud, ash and sand. If your body isn't smeared thoroughly in mud and ash with some of it caked into the sparse hair surrounding your sensitive regions, you have to worry about the god-awful sun bearing down on you. Humans don't wear clothing entirely out of decency, you know. It's just incredibly unpleasant to try doing without it.
"What I found out that day was that clothing doesn't work as well if you have fur. To get an idea as to how unpleasant it was for me, try getting your hair shaved into a buzz-cut, and put on one of those caps that fit to your scalp. Whenever the fabric would catch at my fur the wrong way, it would stab uncomfortably into my flesh. I thought at one point later on of trying dipilation, but fur just grows back far too fast for any of that to work.
"The trip to the hospital was entirely as stressful as you might probably expect. Fortunately, they had to wait for me to fast for a while longer before doing anything substantially unpleasant, but I was nearly anemic by the end of the trip. However, the guy who had analyzed my brain scans from the day before was very nice, and it was very interesting to hear him ramble on about how the procedures worked and how they had been developed.
I started squirming uncomfortably beneath my harness, and I started removing it. "Excuse me," I asked Marcus. "Do you mind if I remove this thing and set it down next to the couch?"
Marcus shrugged. "Sure," he said, looking around the room searchingly. "As long as you wouldn't feel too dressed down or anything." As I started to remove it, he stood up to take the harness from me, and he nicely set it down out of the way between his office chair and the couch. As I stretched out comfortably with my hind-legs out a little bit to the side, he readjusted his suit and sat back down, and I was now wearing just my fancy, customized orthopedic dog shoes.
"Anyway," I continued, "Dr. Joyner tried to explain the scan results to me, and the best I can tell about my brain is that it has somehow compensated for the lower mass by simply having more hook-ups between neurons, and a lower proportion of it is just taking up space. I have less brain in here," I said, tapping myself on my temple, "but what I have simply does more. Kind of how bird brains manage to perform better than a lot of mammalian brains in spite of being a whole lot smaller in terms of absolute size.
"As much of a movie cliche it may sound like, they actually had me run on a treadmill for a while. It didn't have anything to do with what I'd turned into, though. It was a stress test, which is sort of a standard part of the procedure. The catch, though, is that I had to do it once on all fours and once on my hind-legs. Ironically, I could actually move fairly quickly even on my hind-legs compared to a human, but it's highly uncomfortable without that big pelvic bone humans have. If I tried doing it on a regular basis, I'd have a severe hernia within a month."
"However, the stuff I had to do at the hospital was a picnic compared to the press conference I had stupidly agreed to." I shook my head in disgust. "I am sorry, but that whole affair didn't do much for my opinion of journalists."
I flipped over on my back and stared up at the ceiling, laying my head on the soft arm of the couch. Marcus' pen scratched noisily against his notepad as he took down several notes. Marcus struck me as nice as reporters went; he was curious, and he was idealistic. The fiends I had met that day at the press conference had been either bored and disinterested or absolutely insensitive.
"They were like animals," I said.
Marcus' pen stopped scratching for a moment. "Well, I agree that first-line reporters can be a menace," he said. "They almost have to be. People usually don't want to talk when they are just coming out of a trauma, but that's when they have events fresh in their minds."
I chuckled. "Either way," I said, "they didn't get much out of me." I rolled my shoulders against the couch in a sort of shrug. "I tried to answer their questions, but I was never even given a chance to compose myself to respond before someone else wanted to jump in. It was the most disorderly, uncoordinated rabble that I have ever seen.
"For example, at one point someone asked me if I felt any different. I was starting to explain the sense of my muscles being in hyperdrive, but before I could even start somebody usurped the one from before with a question about my tail. But everyone just seemed to be confused when I tried to say it seemed almost like I'd never been without one, and then there were all of these personal questions.
"But I've realized that the kind of question I always hate the most is the kind that ask into my religious beliefs. My religion is boring. It's supposed to be boring. We don't want interesting people. We want the interesting people to go and annoy someone else. We're dour and dull. Most of us are unpleasant, and we like to sit around reading books and doing boring things."
I cranked my head up to make eye contact with Marcus. "This one guy who would not shut up kept making these really stupid allusions to Revelation 13 that demonstrated his total lack of any nuanced understanding of the book. That almost compelled me to leave. I knew he was trying to hoodwink me into drawing attention from the 700 Clubbers and make more news. Thankfully, the others eventually muscled him out of the conversation.
"Anyway," I continued, focusing back on my chosen spot on the ceiling, "I don't need to describe a press conference to you in any detail. Eventually, I was allowed to talk long enough to tell essentially the same story I was telling you earlier about what happened that first morning. I didn't have any funny tingling sensations or feel any of my bones crunching. I didn't feel dazed or confused except for completely ordinary reasons.
"I did get into one interesting exchange with someone who apparently had some background in psychology. He threw some light on why it had taken me so long to realize what had actually happened. It seems like the human brain is geared to either reconcile conflicting information or throw it out as meaningless noise. Apparently, we get hallucinations and delusions that we don't even know about because we forget about them or dismiss them as fantasy so quickly that they don't resolve themselves into what we accept as actual fact. Three different people can literally have three different experiences of the same series of events because their minds throw out different parts of those events as if they had never happened at all."
I looked at my paw in wonder. "Bodily, I am a four-legged animal," I said. "I cannot escape that fact. But you know, Marcus, there are times when I roll out of bed, and I stand up on my hind-legs. I search everywhere for clothing I have packed away. I wrap a towel around myself, and I climb up into the attic to find them. I realize my old clothes don't fit anymore, and I think I've gotten sick. Sometimes it takes only seconds for the fantasy to dissolve. On occasion, it goes on for hours like one weekend when I just crawled out of bed and started doing homework, and then I got hungry and went off looking for something to eat. I went for a tumble down the stairs trying to walk down them on my hind-legs.
"Anyway, the press conference ended with a lot of people yammering at once, and my parents took me out to the local park for some down time. I was really glad to go somewhere I didn't have to deal with people for a while, but I got into some really serious trouble with my parents that evening. I guess I just needed to be alone for a while and have a chance to straighten myself out."
"That was when you disappeared for three days?" Marcus asked.
I nodded. "And I can't tell you how relieved I am to have a chance to tell that story," I said. I turned over on my side and kicked the shoes off of my feet, and then I got down onto the floor and sat back on my haunches. I held my head up straight, and my ears were forward and erect. "It was over the succeeding week," I intoned, "that I became a cheetah."
Wilderness
"What annoys me most about my behavior that day is that it was so utterly prosaic," I said, my ears cocking back symmetrically on a 45 degree slant to each other as I scowled. "I had had a life-altering event, and I was put under too much stress too soon. I was in a hypoglycemic daze because I had gotten nothing of substance to eat that day due to the dietary limitations involved in the prep for endoscopy. The ordeal with the reporters had just left me feeling tired, humiliated and confused."
I curled my tail under my right hind-paw and clenched down on it to try to still it from lashing in agitation, but the lower muscles controlling my tail protested and yanked it back. I sighed, and my ears folded back as hints of a migraine danced in my right temple. "My parents had tried to cobble together a little picnic setting with things I was allowed to eat," I continued. "While they were laying the blanket and everything out, I wandered around in the park trying to clear my head. It was a sunny day in late February, and there were some cherry trees trying to bloom early.
"I was just laying there. Nothing really seemed to be wrong for a few minutes, and I was just enjoying the sun warming my fur against the slight chill left in the air. It was just like I was feeling normal one minute, but then suddenly it was like I had always been looking at everything through distorted, shaded glasses before. I remember a bit of a metallic taste in my mouth for a moment, but then suddenly something else snapped into place for me: it suddenly became very important for me to be careful and quiet.
"I heard my parents calling for me, and for a brief minute I tried to shake myself out of whatever had come over me. I was too far gone, though. My ears had lowered, and my face was distorted into this weird scowl." I tried making the same face I had then, and I crouched down low like I had then. For a moment, I was afraid that I might slip back into it, but I mentally yanked at the tether holding me to the real world. It was firm. "I got very nervous, though," I continued, "and I felt like I had to somehow resist. I mean, to resist being brought to my senses. I felt like there was something out there trying to control me or trick me.
"The freaky thing was that my more rational self was still in there, and I was pleading with myself to just go back to my parents and get into the car. I knew what was happening to me in a way, and the part of me that was scared and disturbed just wasn't listening. I felt a need to make an escape. My heartbeat was very irregular, and it would start beating very very fast every time I thought of going back, and my legs would tense up like they were going to start scurrying out of control until my entire body fell to pieces.
"It was almost like being held hostage in my own body, in a way. I was afraid to try to assert myself because I didn't want my body to shake itself to pieces. It's one thing to know what is rational. It's another to practice it, and I could no more fight down my screaming instincts just then than a heroin addict can fight down his desire to shoot up. It's not that I wanted to do what I was doing. I just felt like I would be mentally and perhaps physically torn apart if I didn't. I was caught in a sort of mental snare.
"Not knowing what else to do, I made a pledge to find a place to turn myself in as soon as I got myself calmed down, and I hunkered down as low as I could. I was shaking with every step I took, and I felt like I was on the verge of crying. I kept myself low to the ground, though, and I scootched along, my cramped muscles moving in slow, pinched motions. My breathing was studied and slow, as if I feared I might suck in the wrong thing or blow out a part of my essense if I breathed too hard or fast. It took what seemed like an eternity, but my parents' shouting, pleading voices soon fell out of hearing. I stood up with a sense of newfound freedom, and I bolted off into the hilly woodland to search for a restful place to rest and try to come back to my senses."
As I lay on my belly in the bushes, my ears flickered tensely as I listened to footsteps going by. I was next to a pedestrian path that wove through the park, and the holly bush I was secluded in stood between it and a broad service road nearby. I had learned to disregard the heavy trundling of the light trucks that occasionally thundered behind me, but somehow I was more wary of the footsteps.
Just the tip of my tail flicked softly in the bushes, and one eye watched as a small black snake wove its way through the brush. I tensed slightly as it slowly extended its neck toward me, and I carefully weighed in my head the potential risk from the snake and the assurity that a sudden movement would give me away to the walkers. My muscles tightened against one another, and I leaned away as its questing tongue ventured close to taste me. As it retreated and sought another branch in the bush, I relaxed again just as quickly.
I had another scare when someone walking a keeshond stopped to sniff at the bush. The panting rang loudly in my ears as it came up, and it stiffened suddenly and began growling. A yank on his leash, though, prompted him to continue on his way, and my nose wrinkled as he left a half-hearted spray of urine in the grass nearby. However, I knew that more of his kind would be coming through, most of them not anywhere near as well-trained.
I rotated my ears to the left and to the right, listening closely for the sounds of anymore people coming by. Hearing nothing, I crept slowly forward on my belly, ducking my head and closing my eyes as I passed through the sharp and prickly leaves of the holly bush, and then I got up and quickly padded across the paved walkway.
The sun was setting, and I felt a cool rush of air pass over me, carrying the scents of compost and the sundry smells of civilization. I had thought that I would be out of the city by this point, having sneaked my way over several miles of variously settled area and been sighted once or twice. In spite of my denials that my old life had ever happened, I was getting nervous that there was a search out for me, and I knew from two different perspectives I would be in serious trouble.
Furthermore, all of the paranoia involved in this sneaking around had only served to addle my wits even further. I was seriously tired, and I was as confused as I had ever been in my life. I had at some point shed the black shorts, and I was feeling increasingly naked from their absence. It had seemed at first like the retreat might give me some time for perspective, so I could figure out what was going on with me. I had hoped that making my getaway would trigger some "aha" moment where I'd suddenly either wake up or figure out what my real identity was. Now, I was just feeling very phony and selfish and stupid.
Reality hurts.
Completely at sixes and sevens, I wandered for a while longer through the area as the dusk settled in. I shivered as a cold, stiff breeze snuck through the trees like a thief in the night, and I knew a front had swept down from the Appalachains, bringing moist, cold air from those misty peaks. It was going to get very cold very quickly, and I felt a sense of terror as it occurred to me that I could find myself wandering through the darkness during a snow storm.
As I crawled up a rise, panting in exhaustion, my body finally put up a protest against taking me any farther, and I sat down on my haunches with ripples of tension cascading all through my body. Cheetahs are very poorly suited for travelling over distances. With a sense of resignation, something broke in me, and I proved that cheetahs can indeed cry.
Through my sobs, I heard two male voices yammering in the background, and I became vaguely aware that they sounded close to my age. Both of them were tenors, one high and one close to baritone, and their light-hearted spirit cut through my misery in a similar manner that a hot knife cut through butter. This caused a flash of annoyance to pass over me as suddenly I started noticing the cold, aches and pains again that had been briefly masked by my despair.
I laid my ears flat against my skull, hoping that they would pass by and leave me alone, but I heard the sound of two matches being struck and realized that the talkers were intent on being there for a while. The higher voice said teasingly, "I saw that drag queen looking at you!" and started giggling.
The other voice chuckled softly. "Yeah, and I'm glad you showed me this. I didn't realize how much that drag thing was all a joke or something."
"Like I told you, the prices for the booze are ridiculous," the first continued, "but it makes sense. I mean, all of these guys seem to own cottages up in the mountains. It's not like the basement place down the street, where they just dance all night."
"You've been there too?" the second voice said, sounding surprised.
"Yeah," the first said. "I met the guy who owns the place. He warned me I should leave before the a.m. unless I wanted to hook up. It didn't smell too bad, and all the guys just stood around talking until 10 o'clock rolled around. Not much to look at, just working-class and some younger dudes."
I paced up to where I heard them going on, and I realized that the one I supposed had the higher voice was dark-haired and aquiline, and he had a slightly pock-marked face. The other was smoother-looking and swarthier-skinned, but he was also tousled-brown in the mane from what I could see. They were standing on a brightly lit back porch, and there was a swimming pool in the foreground that had a large tarp stretched over it at present.
"Well, well, well" the tousled-brown one said archly, "is my buddy Horace thinking of turning?" He struck an endearingly mawkish pose as he said that, clasping his hands together.
The one he had called "Horace" let out a stream of smoke. "Dude, I told you never to call me that. Only my grandmother calls me that. I don't call you Francis now, do I?"
The other put his hands up defensively, grinning. "Okay! I call you Ace, you call me Frank, and we're square." He chuckled again. "I just didn't know what I was signing up for when I agreed to be your room-mate last month."
Ace took a puff off his cigarette and exhaled it just as quickly, continuing, "You know something? I tried going that way. I really tried, but everyone I tried it with kept saying I was 'cold,' so I decided I would stick with people I know how to please."
Frank slapped him a five. "You know man, that's exactly right!" he said. "It's all about doing right by whoever it is you're with." He grunted appreciatively. "I just don't know how you do it. I can't even imagine trying..."
Ace shook his head mirthfully as he took another drag off his cigarette. "It's not as bad as you might think. It's just not very interesting once you're in the ring. You're just there, and you don't really know what to do. If you're with what you like, there isn't any guessing, and even less thinking." He released the rest of his drag, and he wiped his nose. "You know what?" he said rhetorically, looking up at his friend. "I'm getting cold out here. Let's get in before we start seeing snowflakes. It's been a cold winter, and I've seen enough of snow. A blizzard!" he exclaimed incredulously, wrapping his arms around him and shivering. "A warm day like this, and now we're getting at least two feet of snow. Un-stinking-believable." He shook his head to express his disbelief.
They put out their cigarettes and went inside through the sliding door to their house, leaving me by myself in the cold with a concrete bird-bath for company. A shiver started to crawl up my spine, and it kept crawling. I tried suppressing it for a while. I really tried. I tried to keep it down to those little micro-shivers, but then I felt like I was going to start crying again. Then all thought of crying stopped, and I started shaking uncontrollably. I felt sick.
Mysteries
My head hurt. I didn't think I had struck it anywhere, but my head nevertheless throbbed painfully as I treaded through intermittent residential areas, farmland and patches of wood. Paws numb and too tired to shiver anymore, I watched in dismay as stars appeared and disappeared overhead. The first snow-swollen clouds of the storm drifted in on an acridly cold wind, and the starry patches grew smaller and smaller as the sky darkened.
I considered finding a place to turn myself in, so I could have a chance for warmth, but I was fearful that this kind of move would get me shot. I couldn't take the chance that whatever house I approached wouldn't have in it some paranoid wacko. Even if I were to start talking, someone from this part of the Piedmont would be superstitious; it was more likely to get me killed than do me any good to come to someone's door covered in fur and asking for a warm place to sleep. All I knew to do was to keep moving until I found a place where I could keep myself reasonably warm. The question was where.
The first flakes of the coming blizzard blew into my face, and an odd sensation began to creep into my limbs. It wasn't a painful sensation as much as a sense of hollowness. They began to feel like mechanical things that were kept in motion by an invisible puppeteer, and I just moved along like a marrionette on a string. This sensation sent icy claws of fear grasping around my heart. I was shutting down. I was going to die.
As I lost touch with the world around me, I felt a sense of going over a hill, and then I heard the distant sound of a fire crackling. Coming to the bring of death was as simple as that: my brain had been too chilled to process anything beyond my initial realization that I was fading, so the transition from being numb all over to lying next to a crackling fire felt like suddenly waking up in another world. I heard a distant sound of someone humming.
"Who are you?" I said. My eyes hadn't thawed out enough to open fully, but I was getting watery glimpses of a figure in the background puttering about as if working in a familiar kitchen. I had started piecing together the odd noises in the background as the opening and shutting of cabinets and the shuffling of sundry material on the surface of a counter.
"Shush!" the voice said to me. The voice sounded both female and dessicated, and I figured she was either elderly or accustomed to being around the same noxious smoke that was presently wafting into my nostrils. "I knew this pasque would come in handy one day. Hold still." I distantly felt something being rubbed onto my paws. It might have tickled, but I was too tired to react. Besides, it felt like my digits had turned into rocks that were not actually a part of my body but simply some noxious growth that was clinging to me like a foreign fungus. I would rather at the moment they had been sawed off than anything.
"What's going on?" I mumbled. I tried moving my limbs, but all this did was to awaken pains in my limbs that I hadn't previously been aware were there. My limbs felt unpleasantly like some of the pieces of raw steak I had found ocassionally in my mother's freezer. She always told me to leave them, claiming that she had some use in mind for them, but she never missed them when I discarded them to make room for my breakfast stuff. By the time they were thrown out, they were ruined anyway.
"You got lucky," the voice said. My vision danced around for a bit, shifting like a kaleidescope, and my field of vision eventually materialized into what looked like something betwen an abandoned tool shed and a well-kept residence. The floor looked like it might have originally been just dirt; however, it was smooth and clean-looking, and there were some hand-woven rugs laying over it in places. In one corner of the room, there was a counter and a sink, and there was a large reservoir hanging over it, held up by what looked to be bamboo or cane of some sort.
Standing over the sink was a lady, and she was peeling some kind of root over it. It emited a noxious odor, and this did not make me appreciative at the moment of my now hyperattuned olfactory system. I turned my nose away in disgust, and I replied, "Medieval Europe, right?"
She looked up from her work. "Well, close enough," she said. "We're actually in my father's barn. He has periods of poor health, but I occasionally come out here for some privacy. I take a little pleasure in living somewhat independently of civilization." She moved her root to her counter, and she started dicing it up. "Of course," she said, "there is really no separating oneself from civilization. A knowlege of herb lore doesn't materialize in a vacuum, for example." She gestured at a bookshelf that lay against the opposite wall.
I nodded my head. She wasn't even dressed in anything resembling a hand-woven garment, now that I was taking in my surroundings more clearly. She had on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, and she looked to be a lot cleaner on second inspection than I had previously thought. Also, it became clear suddenly what had happened with her voice when I caught sight of her polished teak liquor cabinet. It was stocked with what I understood to be the cheapest rot-gut in Christiandom. "You don't sound all that surprised to hear me talking," I said.
She looked over at me. Now that I saw her face, she looked to be in her thirties, and her features were not as careworn as I had first expected. She looked to be in her thirties. She was dark-haired and pale, but she was handsomely broad-featured. "You talk in your sleep," she said archly, a smirk coming to her lips.
I dropped my head dumbly. At that moment, I remembered all of the plans that I had had for dealing with the moment of revelation. They had been elaborate schemes in which I would have played the dumb animal for a while and eased someone into realizing I was more than just some fugitive from a nearby zoo. I had taken it to be my moment of truth, and I had slept through it. "Okay," I said. I sighed softly and tried to flex my stiff and sore paws, moving my head away from the flame because it had become uncomfortably hot compared to the rest of my frost-bitten body. "So you're about to ask me for an explanation, right?"
"No," she said. Having finished slicing up the root, she picked up her cutting board and carried it over to the kettle that rested over the fire. "I'm going to finish making dinner, pour us both a drink, and then I'll have my explanation."
"I don't drink," I protested. My paws were starting to burn painfully as blood began to circulate back into the damaged tissue. I tried blowing on them, but I quickly found that my hot breath only agitated them. "And what's that smelly stuff?" I asked, raising up my head to look into the pot. "Is that what you eat here?"
"It's your drink," she explained. "You'll need it for the pain." She took the pot off of the hook from which it had rested over the fire, and she set it down on a small desk on which a kerosene lamp flickered and there lay various papers and a couple of books.
"It smells like feet," I said of the mixture. I winced as the blood surging into my paws threatened to make them blister, and I amended hastily, "I'm sure it tastes a lot better than it smells. Ow! OWWWW!"
She quickly knelt down next to me and opened up a small mason jar she had left laying near the sprawl of blankets and towels I was lying on, and she began applying another unguent. It wasn't the same one from before: the mix of odors was hard to place, and it reminded me of something my mother used to get from Mast General Store and applied to sunburns; however, this stuff was stronger and much more astringent. "Yarrow, rosemary and witch-hazel extracts mixed in with some aloe," she explained. "It smells better than gangrene, but I don't suggest licking it. I'm going to get you bandaged up here as quickly as I can, though. Come to think of it, I should start working on your hind-feet before they start thawing. Your forepaws will be usable by the time you wake up in the morning, but you're not going to be walking anywhere for a couple of days."
"Where did you learn all this stuff?" I asked as she began wrapping my paws up snugly but not constrictively in some various bandages, some guazy and some stretchy, others stiff and thick. "Did you take a survival course or something?"
"I was trained as a witch," she said.
"A witch?" I asked, wondering if she was one of those new age wackos.
"Well, 'Shaman' might be a better term," she said apologetically. "And I have never really been sure there was anything of substance to the spiritual aspects of it. I think that some of my Sami forebears found they enjoyed magic mushrooms, but they were no less ingenious at their more legitimate crafts."
As she began doctoring up my hindpaws, I cranked my head back at her and smirked slyly. "I suppose a talking cheetah kind of throws a monkey wrench into that skeptical outlook I'm hearing."
She shrugged as she worked. "I wouldn't call myself a skeptic," she said. "I'm just more observant than most people of the limitations and boundaries of what I know. The unknown is a constant for me, so you, my dear well-hung boy, are just part of the scenery. Jove and Juno! Stop squirming!"
I was blushing hotly and moving to cover myself with my tail. Getting it sandwiched firmly between my thighs, I settled down again, but still I was suddenly extremely exposed due to the lack of any clothing on my body at all. Not only was I completely naked, but I was completely naked in the company of a girl. Maybe she was no where close to my age, but...
The lady delivered a smart and jarring slap to my thigh. "Minerva's kidneys!" she shouted. "Would you get ahold of yourself? I didn't mean to make you so self-conscious all of a sudden!"
I started to relax. "Sorry," I said, though my ears were still burning. I laid my head down, and I let her get back to work, though I was feeling the whole world staring at me now. "Well, I guess that tells you one thing about me," I mumbled.
She leaned over and looked me in the eye, smirking broadly. "Stop there," she said. "You used to be human, right?"
"Yes," I said.
"I had already guessed that," she said blithely. Her hands roughly packed more of the bandages over my feet, and then she wrapped the whole business up tightly. "There!" she said. "That should keep your tootsies from falling off. Excuse me for hobbling you like this, but I have to discourage you from trying to walk somehow. Now, if you would excuse me, I'm going to step off to the house and pull out that casserole. I hope you like chicken!"
I tried moving my feet and groaned. She had trussed me up like a turkey. God