There is a rabbit. It’s across the quad; Anna doesn’t see it, but Correy sees it and hears it, and feels its presence like a broken tooth. Across the quad, a few yards from the overly chlorinated fountain and the other students milling about, there is a rabbit with its back to Anna and Correy.
“And the thing is, I just can’t decide if it's worth it, you know? Like it’s pretty, sure, and I do like it! But it’s so expensive.” Anna has a picture of a dress that is supposedly the cola-cherry red she has been seeking open on her cellphone, which she presents like communion wine. Correy can’t bring herself to take a sip or offer an in-depth opinion. She wants to be helpful, but she doesn’t have Anna’s particular eye for color; the nuance between cherry and wine and blood red is lost on her. And there is a rabbit across the courtyard. It has turned its head toward them, lifted onto its haunches like it's on the verge of sprinting. They are walking towards it.
“Uh-huh,” Correy agrees, eyes on the rabbit.
Rabbits become atypically bold when they start to become accustomed to human presence.
In that way, they are like dogs.
A rabbit, however, will never eat out of the palm of your hand. In that way, they are unlike dogs. Correy would know.
“I’m just sick of wasting money, you know?” Anna continues. “So, I don’t want to buy it if I don’t think I’m going to actually wear it because that’s just wasteful.”
“Right.”
It’s not as though Correy thinks that rabbits are somehow more cowardly animals than dogs, domestic or wild. She's not judging them. Correy’s always thought that felt unfair to the rabbit and reductive to the canine. They just have different fears. Rabbits are afraid of all sorts of things that humans and dogs aren’t afraid of: humans, dogs, hawks, all sorts of sounds…
“I asked Derren if he thought I should get it, and he said that I should ‘do whatever I wanted’, which isn’t helpful at all because I don’t know what I want.”
…Cars, Correy adds to her mental list of ‘things rabbits are afraid of. That one’s understandable, she thinks as she opens the passenger door of Anna’s red car; Anna could probably name the exact shade, but all Correy can say is that it’s red and it’s a car.
And that a rabbit would be afraid of it. She’s not afraid of it, or at least, she thinks she isn’t as she climbs into the passenger seat.
“I think you should get it,” Correy says after Anna has turned the ignition. Their destination is technically within walking distance, but Anna prefers to drive. The rabbit sprints out of sight. “I like it.”
“I don’t know,” Anna says, biting her lip in worry. “We’ll see.”
Both dogs (at least the domestic ones) and humans are afraid of doing the wrong thing, Correy would know.
Rabbits probably aren’t afraid of that, and maybe because of it they are braver animals than canines or humans; it would certainly make rabbits braver than Correy, who is both human and canine.
“I’m not buying it,” Anna decides when they stop at a red light.
“Why not? It’s pretty.”
“Too expensive.”
It was pretty, Correy thinks. She wasn’t certain about her reds, but she knew pretty.
At least, she’s pretty sure.
The building that houses Anna and Correy’s shared dorm is one of the newer buildings on campus, so there is no ivy creeping up its side. Its exterior is a cool grey concrete with sharp, perfect corners and clean lines, brutally modern and modernly brutal. Anna, with her sharp eyes for design, loathes it.
“It doesn’t fit with the look of the rest of the school,” She’d explained once. “Everything else has got the warm brick and oak wood style. It just doesn’t work.”
Anna likes everything to fit together, Correy has learned. As an extension, Anna wants everything she likes to fit together.
“Is Jamie gonna be there tonight?” Correy asks as they climb the stairs to their room in the building Anna hates. Correy wants to hate it too, a little, as an act of solidarity. It is ugly. But, one of the benefits of a modern building is a better heating and cooling system, which Correy cannot find in her heart to hate.
“No. Not tonight, it’s not his scene. And he has a chem quiz tomorrow and he wants to study. Lame.”
“Oh...”
“Yeah.”
“Derren will be there though. He’s meeting us there.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
Jamie is Anna’s old friend from high school. Anna can call him lame only because they are friends, and have been for such a long time. Anna and Jamie, it seems, have very little in common. He bites his fingernails and stays up late to work on advanced problem sets; he gets this glazy, frightened look in his eye when he speaks sometimes. Anna keeps her nails painted, is a good driver, and laughs at the right volume for the right amount of time. Correy’s mother would like Anna. Correy likes being Anna’s friend. She thinks Jamie likes being Anna’s friend too, though Correy doesn’t understand why. Jamie and Anna do share a common species, which should count for a lot but counts for very little, and a common history which counts for a lot, apparently. Correy shares neither. It is important to Anna that Correy and Jamie be friends because Anna likes the things she likes to like each other. Correy and Jamie are friends, most likely.
Derren is Anna’s boyfriend and Correy hates him. She knows Anna likes (loves him, even) him, and she wants so badly to not hate him. She wants to not hate most people. She can’t, though. She just can’t. He smells too strongly of a cologne Correy can’t stand, and has a constant knowing smirk that grotesquely twists a mediocre-at-best face. He isn’t nice. Correy has tried liking him; it felt like trying to swallow a wishbone.
“That’s too bad, about Jamie,” Correy says.
“Yeah, I know. But it’ll still be fun.”
Correy alone is granted the privilege of being in the bathroom while Anna gets ready. Derren always meets Anna at the event in question; he never comes to their dorm early. Jamie, on the rare occasion he ventures into the social scene, often joins them ahead of time, riding in Anna’s red car there and back. Anna likes and trusts Jamie, but he is still banished from the bathroom during the sanctified ‘getting ready time’.
It is only Correy.
“It’s a bonding ritual, you know?” Anna had explained, then asked for Correy’s opinion on which of two lipsticks was better. Correy remains proud that her lipstick opinion had evidently been the correct opinion; Anna had applied it, then grinned, bearing all her teeth and asking if she’d gotten pigment on any of them. She hadn’t.
Now, the bonding ritual remains unchanged, Anna plucks between her eyebrows as Correy brushes her teeth and watches her friend out of the corner of her eye. Normally she wouldn’t be so wary, but tonight is a full moon and Correy is a werewolf.
She’d never bothered to explain the whole “lycanthropy” thing to her peers. She wouldn’t even know where to start. Whenever she imagines talking about it, she can’t imagine actually saying the words, “I am a werewolf.”
Her mother says it’s because she’s ashamed. Correy isn’t certain that’s it, she thinks the sentence just sounds clunky. Plus, it’s just odd. Correy often forgets other people don’t just know she’s a werewolf. She’s known since she was born. There is a lot humans get wrong about werewolves. For instance, her wolfishness was inherited; she got it from her mother. Lycanthropy is a recessive gene and Correy very well could’ve just been a human, like her father was. She just got unlucky.
The wolf transformation isn’t immediate, either. It’s gradual, subtle. It starts in her teeth, the aptly named canines, which elongate and ache. She brushes them carefully and watches Anna making sure her friend doesn’t notice her fangs. Her mother so badly wanted her to have human friends, and she didn’t know how Anna would react.
“Shit!” Anna curses suddenly and Correy jumps, the plastic toothbrush nearly slipping through her grip.
But Anna isn’t looking at Correy, she’s staring at her own reflection in the mirror, staring at a little bubble of blood beading between her eyes like a red car in a parking lot. It shines, round and bright in the bathroom's harsh light. Is blood really blood red? Or is it more like cherry? Anna wipes it away with a tissue carefully, sighing.
“Pulled a hair too hard,” she explains, tossing the tissue away. “Pretty hurts!” Then she picks up the tweezers again.
“Pretty hurts,” Correy echoes, smiling without her teeth.
Turning into a wolf is like hunger; by the time she can feel it in her belly she’s already there. But, if she’s careful, she can make an appearance at a frat party per Anna’s request, and still slip away into the cover of stunted desert trees and open desert night before anyone notices, spend the night chasing rabbits and be back in the morning when she’s approximately human again. She can go out tonight, and everything will be okay.
“Thanks again for coming tonight,” Anna says with one last look in the mirror. “These things are always much more fun with you.”
“Oh, of course! Anytime!”
Correy, since she could not truly (permanently) be a person, had settled on being a people-pleaser.
~☽O☾~
The frat house is within walking distance of the dorms, not even Anna could justify driving. That was okay with Correy, it would arguably make sneaking away even easier if Anna wouldn’t be expecting to give Correy a ride home. Everything was going to be okay.
“Plus, it means we can both get drunk!” Anna had added as they walked.
Everyone is drunk on something. Correy, for instance, is drunk on the smell of sweat and heat and closeness, a haze of human pheromones that permeate from every pore of every person crammed into a closed space. She is drunk on camaraderie, on the dim lights which hide her strange teeth, on the fantasy that she will not have to slip out the back very soon. She is drunk on being human, if only for a little longer.
She is also drunk on simple, standard-issue cheap beer.
Next to the drunkenness, starting to stir is that hunger feeling. She can feel it in her throat; it makes her speech even slower than alcohol would. Growly and hungry and a reminder that she has to leave. She should leave now.
“Correy?” She hears Anna call from somewhere in the crowd. It’s not the first time tonight Anna’s called out, not the first time Correy has not responded. She slipped away deliberately earlier; it’s a bad friend thing to do, but it means that Anna won’t follow her, won’t know where to look. Anna will look for her where a human should be, not where a wolf is. That’s how it has to be.
She should leave now.
“I should leave now,” she says, or at least she thinks she says to the strangers she stands by. The music is loud enough to drown out her voice, even as her ears get more sensitive, more animal. She abandons her cup on a table and starts to head for one of the doors that leads outside.
“Hey, hey… Where are you headed off to so early?”
Correy’s path is blocked by a nameless wall of humanness, complete with the smell of sweat and alcohol. Too intense. Humanity is less cute up close. She shoves past, opening the door and forcing her way outside. The human follows her.
“I need to leave.” “Come on, the party’s just gettin’ started,” says another human at her back. They hunt in packs, she knows this.
“I need to leave,” she repeats, continuing further away, hoping they’ll get tired and give up. She doesn’t stop walking but doesn’t start sprinting yet either.
“What? Not having fun?”
“I need to leave,” she says again. It’s all she can think to say.
“No, I don’t think you should leave, not until my friend and I can show you a fun time.”
Then they both laugh.
One grabs her by the waist and pulls her impossibly closer to himself. She yelps and twists and his grip holds. It is not uncommon for a canine caught in a trap to bite off the ensnared limb to escape but there’s no gnawing off the hip bones–
Then, Correy starts to understand the rabbit.
Then, alongside fear and haze and drunk, hunger fully blooms.
~☽O☾~
Growling. No longer in warning. In summoning. From acid, from the lining of the stomach, from the hunger at the heart of the thing. Hunger that is as much in the heart as the rest of the guts. As the brain. No more rabbit. No. Maybe more rabbit. More teeth. More hunger. Love, fear, reverence are in the passenger's seat. Hunger drives. Maybe love and fear and reverence are hunger. Questions are stomached, swallowed, stowed away for the cold season.
For now, there is meat.
Meat that is frozen. Unused, perhaps, to its own fight or flight response. Used perhaps, to be the apex predator.
Not tonight, tonight it is meat. Teeth which ached to do their job are indulged. Muscles bound to pounce are indulged. Emptiness indulged. Hunger indulged. Leporidae indulged. Canidae indulged. The moon watches. Only the moon. There is squealing, but no scattering. She is not joined or interrupted. Distantly, a heartbeat. Steady, then, unaware. No sense in chasing, no sense in running. Focused, then, on the feast. Wet. Warm. Stringy, sweet. Soft, no feathers, no scales, little fur. Rare meat.
Rare meat.
New to the consumer. New to the consumed.
The stomach of the body is satiated. The stomach of the heart is not. The teeth are not. Clamour still then. Urging, rarely met.
Tonight is new, the hunger old.
Only the moon. Only the distant collective heartbeat.
Only the moon. A distant, singular heartbeat.
“Correy?”
“She probably left already. Let’s just go.”
Only the moon. Only silence.
Then the sun.
Addison Fulton
Copyright Addison Fulton. All rights reserved.