Ok, so this is a little silly for October Flash. To be fair I am early. To be honest I’m a silly little motherfucker. I’m not ashamed of that, it’s just a phrase. For some reason known only to, well, nobody I guess, only my friends have ever called me a silly little motherfucker. Not that an enemy calling me names would goad me into a fight, it’s more like, again for reasons unknown, very few people have ever found it wise to goad me into a fight. I’m built like a pit-bull, short and stocky. I have the disposition of a pit-bull, smiley and assuming good will in them what walk upright. If it weren’t for the media and the myth a pit-bull is not a scary dog; they are short and smile a lot and have that quality that cats think is the dumbest least likely to work as a survival skill imaginable; they like humans. I’m sure cat philosophers figure it’s because dogs, in general, are sell outs, exchanged their street cred for a bowl of kibble and scratch on the ear. I’ll tell you one thing no one has ever done to me that gets done to cats all the time; no one has ever thrown me bodily out a door into the rain. Why? Ask nobody, he or she ought to know. I was thinking of using H or aitch as a personal pronoun to get around the whole he/she thing. I think I’d have to explain too often
It starts in the ears and in the teeth the way acid used to, the 500 mic acid when we thought we were on a spiritual quest not just stupid kids getting stoned and watching the tracers fly from our fingertips. Christ that was a long time ago. I can’t even remember if the change had already started back then.
Yeah, I feel it in my ears first, a stiffening. It hurts a bit but it’s exhilarating; it hurts because they become sensitive and expressive. Ears back; take no shit. Ears forward; tread light. Ears upright; the night is mine.
And then the teeth, it’s like for a moment you have too many of them, crowding your mouth, pinching against the gums and cheeks which feel sallow, pale, unequal to the task. This fucks the young ones up, scares them, it --- I don’t know, reminds me of my college baseball coach “Get out of your head, it’s not you and the pitcher, it’s the ball and the wood”. He sucked as a coach, but he was right. I couldn’t hit dick when I thought about hitting. That’s how it is with the kids.
I hardly even notice it except for the anticipation of scent. The dark itself has smells. It’s like a priest have a religious epiphany, seeing in the air around him all the saints and demons and other constructs he thought were just for the rubes and the knowledge that they’d been there all along he just hadn‘t used his eyes the right way.
And the scents narrow to a singular focus, it’s a force of will, but an irresistible, immutable one, primal and savage like eating the deformed young or scratching in the dirt to mourn the loss of what was never expendable.
A singular focus; prey. And the small forearms dig into the bark with all claws and the powerful hind legs push you up. It’s big, your field, immeasurably wide and to take it all in would overwhelm you. You run on faith, not a leap from the heavens but a full on rush into them. And there, where the whole world sways in a stiff wind, a wind ripe with all the scents of the dark, of fear, of distant fires lit for comfort as though the dark could be held at bay, it’s there in the rarefied air you find it; an acorn.
The only madness, the only attack of conscious I have as a weresquirrel, is that I have the eyes of a victim. The teeth and claws to rend flesh from bone, but the eyes of a creature made to run. The night is mine, I know the nuances of the night, I am intimate with the unseen world, the saints and demons, the three hundred shades of black, I am all ball and wood. But waking naked in a field as dullness of man seeps back into me surrounded by acorn shells gnawed open, --- I don’t know --- I can’t even manage proper shame, I just feel a little silly. I would like to keep the bushy tail though, it’s kind of sexy.
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