reports always vary

cryptids trying to find love/lunch on tinder. i don't think i'll ever write more of this it was just a dumb idea

Callum waits in an uncomfortable chair, jiggling his knee by force of habit, nerves thrumming through his body. The professional’s smile is unnerving, bared teeth. She calls him in and the room is dimly lit. “Just a little prick,” she says. The needle passes into a vein, and with a press of her thumb on the Trigger, he shudders and tries not to hold his breath. It rushes through him, electric. He thinks of himself, of the hair that will sprout where it wasn’t before, the curves that will be delineated, the jaw that will strengthen, the breasts that will be subdued, the body that will transform. His mind spins and he grows pale; he has forgotten to breathe, despite his best efforts. He remembers, and his body shakes with the force of new oxygen. He sputters, an engine coming to life; his eyes stretch wide, and he smiles, and he bares his teeth at her. Her eyes flicker like the light over their heads.

He walks out. The adrenaline, dopamine, thrum next to the new hormones coursing beneath his skin. He can’t stop his mad grinning, like a contagion, feeling something new, something raw. It’s turning to evening, twilight approaching; the moon, round and full and white as milk, climbs into the waning colors of the sky.

He arrives home by foot, so hungry that saliva draws to the corners of his mouth. He’s feeling slightly nauseous, somehow, but wants badly to eat. A headache is drawing at his temples. He rifles through the barren cupboards for stale cereal. He pours it in a bowl and retrieves the milk from the fluorescent brightness of the fridge. Before opening it, the smell of it reaches him, and he is shuddering with the rancid scent of it, and before he can stop he is stumbling and bent over the sink and trembling and retching as he the cheap burger he’d gotten at the drive-thru a few hours before spatters on the cracked porcelain walls of the sink. The acid stink makes his eyes water, the burning in his throat makes him cough. 

He is worried his eyes are melting. His skin. He crumples to the floor, banging his face a bit on the ledge of the counter as he falls. His breath is coming faster and faster, and everything is hot and tightening around him as he chokes and sputters on saliva mixed with stomach acid and bile. He wheezes, and he can’t see through the cracks of his eyelids, filled with liquid not quite spilling over. His blood is hot; his skin, his eyes, the fluids in his body, his muscles are all hot and boiling. He doesn’t have the strength to lift his hand in front of his face.

He starts to make sounds, whimpers. Every bone in his body is breaking and his skin becomes liquid-like around his mutating muscles. He loses consciousness from the pain.

When he is awake, his vision is different. The kitchen is pitch black. His face is throbbing. His body feels heavy and bulky and unfamiliar; his heartbeat leaps in his throat. He notices, in his peripheral, what looks like the semblance of an animal. When he jumps to his feet, the animal jumps too. He is staring himself down; an animal’s haunches black and covered in thick, strange-smelling fur and trembling just as violently as he can feel himself trembling; he realizes that moving feels very distinctly different. He looks down to see the lanky legs of a canine and huge paws, the color of soot. He wants to go to the bathroom, find a mirror, because this definitely must be a side effect of the hormones mixing with his meds somehow, some sort of delusion, but he only passes out again.

When he is awake the second time, he crawls to the bathroom, hardly able to form a thought. He has to heft himself up onto the counter to see himself in the mirror. Not human; distinctly not human. He tries to hold a hand in front of him but moving a paw from the countertop causes him to stumble back onto the dirty tile, claws scrabbling. His heightened senses amplify his panic. He runs, without much attention paid to how much he bangs his head into any obstacle on his way, denting the screen door as he hurls himself into the woods behind his house.

When Kyla is awake the first time, she is in a stranger’s bathtub, and the water has gone cold. Her head is throbbing, because she drank too much, because someone put something in her drink. She can barely open her eyes. A college party. Maybe some sort of hazing. An older girl named Victoire had kissed her without warning in front of everyone, offered her a red plastic cup cup, and took her hand. She can’t recall anything further. Midday sun is creeping through the bathroom window, casting a mocking rectangle of yellow on the wall in front of her. She goes to lift herself from the bathtub, and screams, folding in on herself, joints curling and violently convulsing and cramping; she stumbles on barely functional legs out of the bathtub, like a newborn animal tumbling from the womb, new and saturated and feeble.

It is full of blood. Goat’s blood, to be specific, although she should have no way of knowing the difference; she does, she can tell, but she doesn’t know how; yes, she can tell by the stink of it on her. She is covered in it, and it drips from the ends of her hair onto the bathroom rug. She is not naked, at least; she’s wearing a drenched old t-shirt that isn’t hers and her underwear is vibrant from it. She catches herself in the mirror; her eyes are bloodshot, she is red all over; it runs down her jaw, taints her skin pinkish. She falls to the stained carpet and starts to sob, wrapping her knees against her chest.

So shocked was she to see herself dyed an unfamiliar color, coated in animal blood, she didn’t notice that she is bleeding herself, several small but present open wounds circling her neck and throat.

Callum goes to the gas station several months later. He is taller and leaner; he looks more masculine than he has before. There are dark circles under his eyes. Once a month, when the moon turns round and white, an all-seeing marble, he chases his own tail and snaps other thing’s necks so he can rake at their entrails. 

He goes to the counter and asks for a pack of Newports. The middle-aged, unfriendly-looking woman behind the counter points at a note taped to the register and doesn’t bother with eye contact. She retreats to the back of the store. NO DOGS.

He meets university students through dating apps, goes on dates regardless of his attraction to the other. Often they question his lack of appetite at restaurants; they ask if he’s OK when his face goes lax and his eyes go glassy. He just smiles and nods. Bares his teeth. He has never met the same person for lunch twice. He doesn’t have what it takes to make anyone stay.

Kyla swipes right on him; he looks small, scrawny, and weak. Ideal. She is tiring of goat’s blood, and the reek of it only reminds her of the first panic. Of the puncture wounds that have completely vanished from her throat. She is angry. She is so angry, and she’s sure he’ll accept her anger. 

When they meet in person, she can see the loneliness in his eyes. He is desolate on the inside, and outside looks nearly as bad. He reeks of cigarettes and smells sort of like a dog. He dresses like he’s homeless. She kisses him out of pity once she has him alone. He’s a sloppy kisser, detached, but he puts his hand on hers. He trembles. She does pity him for a moment, but not enough. He will be able to stop, very soon, and she will keep going forever, and she hates him for daring to look so pathetically vulnerable and empty when it is her that will be empty, her that will rely on others, her that needs this. She terribly wants to kill him. She puts her hands on his neck. It is warm there; his pulse beats feebly in her grasp.

Her eyes were big and black, and Callum wanted to climb into them. No one had kissed him on one of these before, in an empty parking garage, later into the night, cold biting at him through his clothes. She was cold too, cold to the touch. He left his eyes half open. He had missed being touched; he hadn’t realized it, but it was such a relief, her hands on his neck, gripping him. He felt like maybe she could keep him from blowing away in the wind if she kept holding him like that, so he wouldn’t end up like the torn-up grocery bag he could see rolling aimlessly across a few empty parking spaces over her shoulder. He hoped she would leave him anyways.

Reviews

[DAH]

Excellent writing, smooth and clean. I don't know much about critiquing fiction,
and this piece is clearly engaging.

Nicely played!

Cheers,
DAH