Grinning Cracks

by K W Taylor

  Free.

  Someday, maybe, a hunter will kill me, she hoped. Put me out of my misery, even as he’s putting me out of my joy, exhilaration. Or someday, maybe, something else will happen.

  But she dared not dream, and she dared not hope. She just eked out an existence. Afternoons and coffee spoons and files and cubicles, answering calls and emails and living a life full of dead ends and snow.

  So much snow, with the moon its only caress.

  The girl in the break room looked at Mark, smiled, then looked away. It was one more day he’d had no nerve, no gumption. He slung his messenger bag over his shoulder and trundled out into the crystalline flurries swirling about the late November sky.

  As he waited for the number three—late, as usual—Mark noticed the odd pressure at the base of his spine. He frowned and placed a hand there, as politely as he could amongst casual acquaintances and coworkers, and could almost discern something not quite right. Not quite a bump, but more like the bristles of a paintbrush poking at the inside of his clothing. He wondered if he somehow caught a burr in his tee shirt, or dropped a smattering of crumbs somewhere uncomfortable.

  The bus pulled up with a wheeze and cough, and he forgot about it, thinking instead of pretty Gwen and her pretty eyes and how he couldn’t do anything about those pretty things because he was too damn shy and not at all good enough for her.

  Home, run-down rental house in a not-quite-awful neighborhood. Key, lock, slump into the living room, television droning on. “What up, bud?” Blake’s eyes were already bloodshot when he looked up at Mark through a haze of smoke. The room smelled of stale bread, head sweat, and cigarettes.

  “Long day,” Mark muttered. “And it’s snowing. I hate snow.”

  “Hey, don’t harsh on snow! Snow’s pretty!” Blake chuckled as if thinking of a dirty joke. “Heh. Snow.”

  “What the hell’s funny about snow?”

  Blake’s eyebrows bunched up. “Um...eh.” He shrugged. “Hey, my sister brought us some of that mulled wine you liked. It’s in the crock pot already.”

  Mark had been about to refuse, but then the thought of something both alcoholic and warm sounded appealing. “Sounds good.” He trundled out to the kitchen, where every countertop was usually just the faintest bit sticky and no dishes matched.

  As he ladled a bit of wine from the pot to a mug, Mark realized he was standing on the backs of his pant legs. He looked down. The hems were clearly too long and floated past his shoelaces in the front and were squarely under his heels in the back. He put his mug down and reached thumbs beneath waistband. No, his belt was on, intact, and on the same notch it always was; he hadn’t lost weight. The legs...how had the legs grown shorter?

  He shook his head and plucked up his mug, taking a long, satisfied slug of the spicy beverage. Cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg wafted from the steam. His already-curly moustache grew all the curlier from the warmth.

  Later, while getting ready for bed, Mark felt the strange notch on his spine again. This time, he angled his backside toward the mirror above his dresser and studied the spot. There, just at the apex of each wide, pale buttock, was a tiny copse of something dark, something—

  “The fuck, is that hair all up in your ass?”

  Mark spun around and yanked his boxers off the corner of his bed. “Dude, boundaries, for God’s sake!”

  Blake was giggling and holding his sides. “You got like a little soul patch on your keister, bud!”

  “I do not!”

  “Well, then, what the hell is that?”

  Mark raised an eyebrow, and Blake abruptly stopped laughing.

  “Aw, Jesus, dude, that is nasty!” Blake shook his head in disapproval and wandered off down the hall to his own room.

  Mark couldn’t decide if he preferred Blake to think he had a weird growth of hair on his ass or a rogue piece of shit, and while neither was good, at least the shit wasn’t permanent. He shut his door and pulled his shorts back off. As they sank to the floor, he happened to catch sight of his ankles. Was it just his imagination, or did they seem more slender somehow, more defined at the bone and higher, narrower? He sat on the floor, feeling that, yes, that was indeed a tuft of hair back there, no denying it now, and lifted one ankle closer for inspection.

  But it wasn’t just the ankle. The arch of his foot was higher, vaguely resembling the molded plastic of a doll permanently at the ready for tiny pairs of high heels. Even when he deliberately flexed and stretched his foot, it still returned to the higher-arched position. The ball of his foot, too, appeared altered. The skin there was rougher, calloused, and along each toe knuckle was a thicker growth of curly, pubic-like hair than there had ever been before.

  Panicked, Mark let go of his foot, pulled his boxers and a sweatshirt on quickly, and scooted under piles of blankets, where he spent an hour sweaty and nervous before the wine finally took hold and gave him a fitful, restless sleep until dawn.

  The moon rose, and she began to cry.

  Years and years of this, and yet still. She’d known all day the clear circle on the calendar was here. She’d known the weather report. She’d felt the flakes on her cheeks and seen the light of day wane and fade, and yet even with all this foreknowledge, she still wept.

  Hands into paws, eyes into slits.

  She padded out into the snow and waited.

  The scent was sudden and piquant. She raced across yards and leapt over fences. At last she was upon the thing—a squirrel, a chipmunk, it didn’t matter out of human form. The cat cared only for smallness, for bones to break and blood to taste, and sweet tiny meat to devour, warm and raw and pulsing.

  Deep swallows. Tiny bones stuck on the cat’s wide, purple tongue. She gagged and spat them to the ground.

  Her front paws were big and soft, and they kneaded the ground as she pushed her tail to the sky, stretching languorously, feeling her feline shoulder blades creak and separate, preparing her graceful body for fight or flight, whatever she next needed.

  Or perhaps something else.

  Another scent hung in the air. Familiar. Heavy with sweat and something else, something new.

  She pawed the ground again, sniffed. Her pink nose was outlined in black, and the nostrils shifted and twitched at the heady aroma carried on the early winter winds.

  The cat skulked under brush and shrub. The smell was near enough that she could reach it, but far enough that it might not be until near dawn. By then...what might happen?

  He was awoken by a snorting sound. It was the snuffling of something wet through nostrils, a guttural snore of phlegm. As a few more snorts sounded, Mark was dragged from dozing and not only heard but felt the next splutter of breath. It was definitely coming from his own nose. He groaned, initially assuming he’d gotten a cold on top of everything else. But when he staggered, almost limping, to the mirror, he shrieked.

  Or he meant to. In point of fact, Mark whinnied. Full-blown, equine whinnied, in an almost cartoonish manner. But that was not what caused the whinny. No, that was in reaction to his sudden flatness of nose, the cartilage that usually made up the long, almost elegant and vaguely Grecian proboscis seemingly gone, flattened, his nostrils reduced to oblong, not-quite-slit-like ovals much closer to the philtrum. He snuffled again and shook his head, his hair shivering in a little cascade down his back. At the sight of so much motion, Mark peered closer to the mirror while touching the hair that grazed the back of his neck. Yes, it was longer, and yes, it was slightly less curly than usual.

  He tried to speak, tried to pass air through throat, but only another whinny emerged.

  I have to be dreaming, he thought. He looked down at his clothes, still the shorts and shirt he’d donned the previous night, but there was...yes, there was a cascade of long, straight, nearly-black hair now flowing distinctly between his legs. A quick pat-down revealed this was the brush-like spot Mark first noticed the day before, now fully blossomed into a sleek...tail.

  I have a tail, he tried to sputter. Instead, a breathy snort
and a cough. Panicked thoughts raced through Mark’s head. IhaveatailIhaveatailIhaveatail! He tried to walk, run, move, anything, but his feet failed to cooperate and down he went to the carpet.

  These same feet which had started to appear odd already were now not so much feet as not-quite-proper hooves. The human toes were still there, but they were beginning to fuse together, a kind of loose webbing holding them against each other. The balls of his feet were now completely covered in a thick, gelatinous membrane, not unlike a particularly thick and semi-hard blister. Fortunately, they didn’t hurt when he applied pressure to them, these paw-pad things, but Mark found he could no longer unclench his feet from their new, arched position. His footprint was decidedly smaller than usual, and he would simply need to learn to navigate things more slowly, that was all.

  That was all?! He felt like screaming at himself. This was insanity, this was a dream, this wasn’t life! Men didn’t simply turn into half-horse creatures overnight! Men didn’t—

  You were no man, a small part of himself accused. If you were a man, Gwen would’ve known months ago how you felt. And Blake wouldn’t be able to get away with paying his half of the rent only when he feels like it.

  He squashed this voice down and trotted out to the kitchen, suddenly ravenous and parched. The crock pot was still out on the counter, unplugged, and a quick whiff of the air revealed that the remains of the mulled wine were still swirling about the ceramic basin of the slow cooker. Without a second thought, Mark plucked the heavy bowl out of the confines of the electric ring surrounding it, tipped it to his lips, and gulped the spiced beverage down in only a few swallows. It was unappetizing, certainly, stale and room-temperature and with a thin film of congealment that frothed and slipped down Mark’s throat in a fizzy, salty film. But there was enough left to still intoxicate a man, and that appeared to be what mattered now to Mark’s physiology.

  He rubbed the back of one hand across his lips, smacking them in uncouth satisfaction, and proceeded to raid the refrigerator of the rest of its alcohol.

  Cheap, domestic beer in brown-tinted bottles. A half-empty bottle of off-label white wine. In the freezer, an unopened bottle of German liqueur, high-proof. Mark clutched at it, the contents of his stomach roiling in protest, and scrabbled at the cap. “Open, fucker!” he grunted. When the bottle still failed to cooperate, he bashed the neck on the side of the countertop. Green glass shattered, sending the cap to spin across the room and leave a black dent in the wall. He grasped the container with both hands and, heedless of the jagged edges of the makeshift opening, thrust the neck between his lips and took heaping slugs. His throat bobbled up and down as he swallowed, and thick rivulets of blood from the cuts he incurred on his mouth ran down to his chin, rolling to his chest where they were sopped up by his shirt.

  “More!” His stomach heaved, and Mark vomited into the sink. He turned back to the fridge and rifled through cans and bottles and containers of leftovers.

  There was no more alcohol to be found, but there was food. And apparently food was good, too. Very good.

  Nearly rotten fruit, cold pizza, rubbery celery, and cheese of every type and nation...all of it shoved into his bleeding mouth. Mark chipped teeth, bashed his nose, and nearly choked in the process of the rabid feeding. When he was done, his belly was almost visibly rounded, and there was nothing left in the Frigidaire save a few drops of shrimp cocktail sauce.

  He was sitting in a pool of crumbs, dribbled condiments, and vomit, and Mark suddenly felt another wave of hunger swell over him. He seemed to separate from himself, watching at a distance in horror as he crawled on all fours to lick the floor clean of every last morsel, scrap, and tidbit of anything edible. Once his immediate area was empty, he leapt upon the kitchen counter and ran his tongue in and around every dirty dish and glass, catching peanut butter and catsup and the last few drops of milk in the cereal bowls. He ran his fingers and teeth over knives, forks, spoons, more blood being spilt, more grease finding its way onto his face and hair. And all the while, his long, flowing tail twitched and swished.

  Then there was Blake. First Blake-smell, then Blake, shrieking and dropping a full glass of water from his hand to the floor. He was wearing only pajama bottoms, which went from bright blue to dark blue at the crotch as his bladder released at the sight of Mark scrabbling around in the sink.

  “Wait, it’s okay! It’s me!” But Mark’s words were mangled by a bleeding tongue and a lower timbre of voice that made all efforts at discernible speech impossible. He sounded like a horse, a monkey, anything but a man.

  Blake, heedless of the shards of glass on the floor, raced barefoot from the base of the stairs, through the kitchen, and out toward the back door, all the while screaming. A trail of piss followed him out.

  The back door open, Mark could now smell all sorts of other interesting things. Dead grass, snow, moss, trees, squirrels. And...something else. Something else entirely. Something very, very interesting.

  He leapt from the counter and raced outside. The urge struck him as he went to tear his clothes from his body. As his feet hit the snow of the backyard, Mark first felt a bolt of chill but then it quickly subsided. Whether it was the alcohol, the food, or perhaps his skin had simply thickened, he couldn’t tell. But somewhere, somewhere nearby, there was a creature he had to find.

  A female. He didn’t even register what species it was, but the scent was musky, succulent. Mark had to find her, whoever and whatever she was, and he had to find her now.

  Multiple blood trails tore through the snow both at the front and back of the house now. One set was Blake, racing back through neighbors’ yards with cuts on his feet. One was his own, and though it wasn’t ideal that he should leave a scent on the icy fluff for other animals to track, he couldn’t help it.

  Suddenly, mid-sprint, Mark stopped and fell to his knees, bones hitting iced-over sidewalk beneath the snowdrifts. Other animals. It had just been a fleeting thought, not particularly concrete, and yet . . .

  I’m an animal now, he realized. He didn’t even try to vocalize anymore; he knew without attempting it that his voice was no longer capable of forming human words. And yet his torso, his body, his upper legs, his arms...they still looked like a man’s, more or less, and the transformation seemed to have stopped advancing.

  His groin jumped. An erection was forming. The smell of the female was still in the wind.

  Galloping on four limbs now, Mark reached the intersection of two streets and stopped, rabbit-scared, when he saw her.

  Gwen was no longer a woman, but she wasn’t shifting into this great equus, either. She’d become something else entirely, and in any other mindset, Mark might not have recognized her. But those eyes, the shape of the face. It was her.

  Gwen stared across the snow and concrete at Mark, two vertical pupils narrowing to slits. She shook her head in glee, let out a lion’s roar, and pounced.

  rabbit rabbit

  “Rabbit rabbit.”

  Oh, shit.

  “Rab—”

  “Too late!” Grin. Thwap. Saunter. Teeth brushing and straightening of shirt hem, skirt hem. A kiss on the cheek. “Have a great day, sweetie!”

  “Rabbit…” Frown at the mirror. Shit.

  Cigarette break. Lighter out of fluid, nobody has a match. I slide it back in the pack, spend my break sitting on the concrete by the dumpsters half meditating.

  Back behind the counter, making change all day, making small talk, keeping it to the books and the weather and the “have a nice day”s that sometimes get modified based on how much I actually want to them to have a nice day. “Have an awesome day!” “Have a good one!” “Take care!” “See you next Tuesday!” (That one’s for the shitheels who I know won’t get the old “cunt” joke.) Normalcy, save the lack of smokes. I get lulled into thinking that’s all the rabbit’s gonna do, gimme a bum Bic and let me move on.

  Except, no, ‘course not. Because it’s the first time I’ve lost, and the universe has to balance things out a litt
le.

  I’d tell Deb we gotta stop playing the game, but it was my idea in the first place. But I knew I’d hear all kinds of accusations of “sore loser” if I broach the subject.

  Closing shift lets out at midnight, and of course I have a flat. And it’s raining. Not hard, but enough. Call home, no answer. Call again. Text. Leave messages all over the goddamn place where Deb might see, but of course I know she’s sawing logs by now like a normal person. I try one more time, and then it’s the auto club, but they can’t dispatch somebody this late since I’m not a platinum member.

  “How much is that?”

  “Oh, I can’t upgrade your membership during non-business hours, sir.”

  I don’t even keep talking, just hang up and start getting the doughnut out of the trunk.

  “You need a hand?”

  Red umbrella, beautiful eyes, red bob, big smile. Carrie or Christy, maybe. Or maybe not at all, but I know her from the place I get my morning smoothies when I work opening shift.

  “You handy with a jack?” I know I’m smiling back, and I probably look like a goddamn creep, but I don’t care. Right now, I’ll flirt if I damn well want, when this is all Deb’s fault, really.

  No, not really, but that’s what we tell ourselves, innit, when we want to rationalize some bullshit like this? Words like “harmless” and “nothing happened.”

  Except somehow we don’t so much change my tire as slam ourselves up against the back wall of the store and make out like horny teenagers on prom night. And then she’s leading me into her car, into her backseat, into steamed-up windows and an open blouse and—

  “I have a girlfriend.” I push her away a little, cringing and trying not to look at her. “I can’t…”

  “Are you sure?” She looks and sounds genuinely surprised. “You’re always talking about the toppings on the smoothies and how many I’m gonna give you. I thought…”