Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

“You’re not listening,” she says.

“Okay,” he says. He kicks off his shoes.

“One last thing,” she says. “This is maybe going to sound alarming but I think I should tell you.” She pauses, winces. “If what I think is happening is happening, I’m going to want you to fuck me.”

“I beg your pardon?” Billy says.

“You heard me,” Elisa says. She pulls her shirt off over her head. Before Billy really gets a chance to check her out, he jolts and falls out of his chair, needs to use his hands to catch himself. It feels more natural, suddenly, to be on all fours.

Something is happening to his face. That’s no good. He kind of likes his face, his boyish good looks. And then he vomits, a hot torrent of slime ejecting out of him. He experiences one acute moment of embarrassment, at having thrown up in front of Elisa, who he thinks is probably not going to want to fuck him now, but then the embarrassment is erased, wiped away, replaced by pain, the pain of his bones beginning to change shape. It sounds like kindling, crackling in fire, and it feels, well, it feels like shit.

His spine extends and his shoulders broaden. He gains mass. His shirt and jacket split across the back. He tears through his pants also. Turns out Elisa was right: he should have taken off his clothes.

He is growing what can only be described as a pelt.

As his jaw extends and his teeth begin to change, Billy finds himself wanting his mother. Not for the first time today. He wants her there, by his side, her swords at the ready, in full fighting stance, ready to fuck somebody up.

His skull extends uncontrollably, his ears flaring back and out, his bristling face exploding into a muzzle. The world of smells opens up to him. He can smell the coffee he spilled on the carpet, and the acrylic fiber of the carpet itself, and the dull note of industrial rubber that lies beneath. He can smell the shit on his torn clothes; he can smell microscopic particulates of goat from Apple Cheeks Farm.

And he can smell Elisa.

She smells like an animal.

He turns his head to look but she is gone. In her place is a wolf: a massive wolf, her coat so black it’s almost blue.

Maybe he should feel afraid, but then, his very capacity to think or feel anything is disrupted as something happens to his brain.

It’s as though his id and his ego are changing positions in some kind of Freudian square dance. Normally the part of him that is Billy —the part that is clever and funny and talented and distractible — remains front and center, merrily overriding the part of him that is something else —the wants and appetites, drives and instincts. The animal part. But now it’s the reverse. He can still hear his voice in his brain, frightened, trapped in some dark oubliette, repeating Your name is William Harrison Ridgeway , as though he might lose even that.

Your name is William Harrison Ridgeway , he thinks, helplessly. You prefer to be called Billy. You live in New York City. You are a human being. You are not a wolf .

Except a wolf is exactly what he is.

NO LONGER FRAIL FUCKING AND WINNING • MONSTROUS BEHAVIOR • GRECO-ROMAN EMBRACES • SNEAKERS WITHOUT SOCKS • BIBLES, MOLESKINES • OLD DUDES AND SEX MAGIC • MINIBARS IN HELL • MISUNDERSTOOD

Billy doesn’t think anything for a while. Because his brain belongs to the animal now.

The animal is not afraid, and the animal is not in doubt, and the animal doesn’t want a book deal or to save the world or to reconcile with its girlfriend or even to be cared for by its mother. The animal only wants what an animal wants. To eat. To fuck.

He looks at the dark wolf and the dark wolf looks back at him.

She begins to walk a circle around him, rubbing her flank against his. He growls, low, and with pleasure.

The pain of the transformation is gone. He no longer hurts. In fact he feels good. In fact being a wolf feels better, a hundred times better, than being a human being, riddled with human frailties. His heart is stronger. He can hear more things than he could before. His dick is bigger.

The female wolf completes her circle, brings her head next to his, snaps her jaws playfully, a bid for his attention. As though she didn’t already have it, every iota of it. And then she steps in front of him and he sees her hindquarters and they do something crazy to him. He wants her. The force with which he wants her is a force he has never known before, not with his human mind, not with his human body. It is like a living cord that runs down his center is being yanked.

He does what he wants to do, what she wants him to do. He gets up on her, slots his forelegs in front of her hind legs, uses the leverage to pull himself up.

He feels the yanking cord again; he thrusts. His heart pulses faster and faster. His whole body surges up into her and there is only the smell of her in his long nose and the sensation of being inside her, which might as well be destroying the world and everything in it because it’s the only thing he knows at this second. He thrusts, and a throbbing grows, deep in his groin, and it builds and doubles and then an orgasm jets into her and the wanting disintegrates and then there is a long still peaceful moment during which he does nothing but breathe her in and feel content, at long last, finally, content.

And then the dark wolf pulls away from him and yanks her head with animal alarm to look at something in the hall.

Billy can smell what she’s looking at before he turns his head to follow her gaze: it’s another wolf. A male. Massive, stark white, grizzled, glaring at them.

It smells familiar. But Billy doesn’t really have time to reflect on this, because the white wolf bares its teeth and he launches himself at Billy.

The collision knocks Billy to his side, smashing him into one of the bistro tables, toppling it, and he has to kick up into the throat of the white wolf with all four of his feet to block it from biting him while he’s down.

If Billy — the old Billy, the human Billy — were in charge here, he would be thinking This is it. This is the part where I die .

But Human Billy’s not in charge. Human Billy’s locked in the trunk somewhere with a gag stuffed in his mouth while the wolf drives. And Wolf Billy knows how to fight.

He slithers out to the side while the white wolf tries to stand on his chest. The white one loses its balance and falls over and gets trapped between Billy’s uprighted body and the edge of the toppled table. Now Billy’s on top and he bites down into his enemy’s face. The first time Billy lunges in, the white wolf jerks away just in time and Billy gnashes air. The second time he gets that son of a bitch’s ear in his teeth and he locks down onto it like a rawhide strip and jerks it hard. Just jerks the fuck out of it. He wants to feel it detach from the other wolf’s skull. He wants blood in his mouth.

Billy clenches and feels the ear perforate in his jaws, and the white wolf’s guttural growls give way to distressed yelping, and then, abruptly, that’s it. It’s over. He won. Billy feels a sense of satisfaction switch on, and it’s like a breaker coming down on his aggression. He lets go. He backs off a step, lets the defeated white wolf right itself, slink around the overturned chair, curl up in the corner, cowed.

And then something happens. Billy’s body begins to change again; it begins to soften. His snout and ears begin to retract. His paws are turning back into hands. He’s losing his tail. And his consciousness begins to reassert itself, to take over the forefront of his mind again.