Darrell Schweitzer - Full MoonCity

They do, equally recoiling from the silver nails.

“Mom, Dad… is that you, Heinrich?” The Big Hairy Thing nods, breathing heavily. “Mom, Dad, you have to learn to let go. I’m grown-up now. You have your life-or unlife or whatever it is-and I have mine. I’m not a minion. I’m your daughter. I ask you to respect that. Do you think you actually can? Do you?”

The fire fades from their eyes, and their fangs retract. Heinrich, a.k.a. the Hairy Thing, just stands there, panting.

Before anyone can say anything, I continue.

“Mom, Dad, I’ve got an announcement to make. I’m not the same as I once was. I’ve been… bitten.”

For an instant I can see Momma’s eyes beam with pride, in the sense of our little girl has grown up, but then she seems just confused, because she knows it isn’t what she thought.

I turn to show her the bruise on my neck, which I’ve had for a month now. “That ain’t a hickey, Momma.”

She just looks stupefied.

“Momma, I want you to meet Heinrich. I love him.”

The Hairy Thing leans over, as if to lick my face the way a dog would, but then whines and draws away from the silver.

That is when I realize my hands are smoking and the silver nails are burning me. I let them drop to the floor, and before anyone can react, I rush over to the window, tear aside the drapes, and let the light of the full moon flood what is left of the dining room.

I begin to change then. Fur grows on my arms and legs. I feel my whole body melting, falling down, hardening into something else. My senses are much sharper than they’ve ever been before. It’s as if I can hear a cloud passing across the face of the moon, like silk wiped across glass, and I can hear every sound of the night. I can see in ways that I’ve never seen before, through things, sensing heat and life. Were I so inclined I could tell Max where every bug in the whole damn house is hiding.

But I am not so inclined. Heinrich nuzzles me behind the ear. We play. I try to say something more to my parents, and I think I actually do manage to say, “His middle name is Wolfgang.”

And my mother sputters, “But he’s not Jewish !” and she is sobbing in Poppa’s arms. “We’ve lost our daughter!”

“No,” Poppa says, “It’ll be all right, Honey Love, as long as the… er… cubs are brought up Jewish.”

Howling, Heinrich Wolfgang Schroeder and I leap through the window, out into the night.

What beautiful music we make.

Sometimes when it was night and Uncle Bob and Mom were fighting, Jake would go to the park and sit on the swings, listening to the rush of traffic on Franklin Boulevard and enjoying the dark. Everyone said the park was dangerous at night, but Jake had never had any trouble there, in spite of all the rumors of bad things happening. Jake thought it was far more dangerous to remain at home when the adults were fighting: Uncle Bob was using his fists and Mom was throwing things. Just last week she’d smashed his PlayStation by accident; Uncle Bob thought it was funny.

Uncle Bob wasn’t Jake’s real uncle, or so his mother had explained a year or so ago. “But, Jake, he’s like family. He takes care of us, not like the rest of our relatives; you know what they’re like…” She stopped and went on in a more subdued but injured tone, “Since your father died…”

Jake couldn’t remember his father, not really: the man had vanished when he was four, and that was more than half his lifetime ago. He relied on his mother to keep his father’s memory alive, but the things Mom said about his father changed over time; Jake could still remember when Mom had said it was a good thing he wasn’t alive anymore-that was shortly before she met Bob. “I get it that you want to have a guy around.” He shifted awkwardly in his slightly-too-large running shoes. Jake was small for his age and was often mistaken for being younger than nine, and it didn’t help that, being undersized, his clothes made him look like a kid since he wore younger children’s apparel because it fit, a constant reminder about how dissimilar he was to his classmates; he hated the teasing he endured. Along with that, he also hated it when his mom got down on one knee to look him in the eye, and he knew from Mom’s voice what was coming next. “But does it have to be him? Uncle Bob?”

She dropped down on one knee, so that she had to look up into his face. “Listen, Jake, you’re almost ten, and you can understand things very well. You’re really mature for your age, and you’ve always been a bastion for me. I couldn’t have made it this far without you.” She often called him a bastion when she was about to ask him to do something unpleasant. “If you can just try to get along with him. Just a little.”

“I do try. He’s the one who picks the fights.” He rarely let himself be dragged into Uncle Bob’s ranting, but for the last six months, the verbal barrage had increased and had been punctuated with vigorous slaps which Uncle Bob justified by blaming Jake for making him angry. Jake’s mom always tried to make Jake understand that Uncle Bob didn’t mean it-it was just that work was so hard and he thought it was unfair to be denied another promotion, or that he had had a bad week at poker, or that he was really tired and didn’t want anything noisy around him.

“Well, Jake, I need you to try harder. If you aren’t willing to help improve the family, then I think you may need an extra two hours in your room.” It was her usual threat, one she never actually followed through on: Jake would have loved more time in his room, even if it wasn’t very big and at the opposite end of the L-shaped house from the bathroom. At least his room was quiet, and it had two windows, either of which he could leave through if he wanted to.

“That would be okay with me,” said Jake, disheartened to have his mother take Uncle Bob’s side again. “I can do homework, and read.”

Esther Sparges frowned. “Don’t you have anyone you’d like to study with? You have friends at school-everyone does. Wouldn’t one of your friends like to have you over to play games or work on projects together?” She had that wheedling note in her voice, as if she were offering him a treat rather than trying to get rid of him.

“Not really,” he said, not wanting to admit that he had no friends at school, just a couple of geeks he hung around with occasionally, who had the same taste as he did for spooky video games; he was especially fond of Shape Shifter .

Shaking her head, Esther got to her feet and began to pace. “I wish I knew what to do with you, Jacob Edwin Sparges, I really do. You’re a good kid, but you get up Bob’s nose every time you open your mouth. I hate being put in the middle of you two.” She clutched her elbows, her hands working. “It’s never easy when you have to blend a family. I wish you could make just a little more effort.”

Only we aren’t a family, thought Jake, and we aren’t blending. “Yeah.”

“If I could work something out with your Aunt Judy, but she believes everything Denny and Jennine tell her. They’re all against him, my whole family, and won’t give him a break,” Esther said aloud to herself. “Judy’s very closed-minded; she just doesn’t listen to reason about Bob.”

Jake went very still. “What do you mean?” He tried not to hope.

“Well, if you could stay with her for a while, until Bob and I work a few things out, it would be a lot easier on all of us, and that means for you as well as Bob and me. You’ve been one of her favorites, and it isn’t as if she has kids of her own.” She flung her arms wide in exasperation, then grabbed her elbows again. “You’d like to spend time with her, wouldn’t you?”