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A story I wrote for the Thursday Prompt on FA, which is a little writing exercise you can find here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/51846310/

A disturbed man who can see the eventual deaths of everyone around him has devoted his life to playing a convoluted and deadly game of cause and effect, hoping to avert a terrible fate. But is it a solved game, as he claims?

This is a piece I wrote in memory of a friend I knew long ago-- indeed, it's a response of sorts to that piece. Zorha, if you're reading this, thanks for Frankenstein's Conundrum. It's been lurking on the outskirts of my meadow for years, awaiting my inattention.

Fair warning. This one is fairly disturbing, and incautious readers will find the opening scene unpleasant. For those of you with the will to push through, and read the story for what it is, you have my gratitude. I think that there will be something there for you, at the end.

---

I closed my eyes, but the future burned through.

• Elvis Perkins

Nobody loves no one.

• Chris Isaac

Wicked Game

He has me now. His long, vulpish face is a blank, expressionless mask, but he knows it and I know it. I won't live past moonrise, but that doesn't mean he can't have his fun. He turns the chair so that it is facing west, takes a sip of his coffee, and lets the setting sun burn my eyes a little as I struggle in the restraints, desperate to look away, or at least shut my eyes. The fur on my face is wet with tears, because the pain is very great, and because I find that I'm not truly ready to leave after all. But I'm not afraid. I have studied this moment for all my dark, stupid life. I know he drinks that coffee black. I know when he's going to sip it, and that a few stray hairs from his winter coat will end up falling into it. I have played this game of mine for so long that, aside from the agony and the harsh, rattling energy of the speed he needled into me, it is almost serene.

One gloved paw fishes in me, and I scream a little and twitch with newfound pain. He pulls something tight and closes scissors over it. Then he holds up a bloody pink lump. "Sweetbread." He says, sounding a little disaffected, even though I know he is over the moon. "Pancreas. It's good."

"Fucking please," I beg, because it is what he wants to hear me say.

"Please what?" He says, but I have lost my powers of speech, and can only burble now.

"Ok." The fox says, walking to the counter. I can't see him now, because my eyes are rolled back in my head from the shock, but I know he's vacuum sealing my pancreas and putting it in his refrigerator. I do not know if he really wants to eat it or if this is just to fuck with me a little--it's one of the few things I don't know about today--but it also doesn't really matter. For either of us.

Just when I am returning to heaving, weeping awareness, there's a pounding outside. It's the cavalry.

I don't have much fight left, but this will buy me a little more. He gives me a look, sips his coffee, and sets it down. Duct tape is wrapped around my muzzle, and quietly the fox pads into the hallway, and out of sight.

I close my eyes and gather my will. Since puppyhood, since my fall and the opening of this shitty third eye, I have been forced to relive this moment in time over and over. Now that it's here, now that I'm hurting for real, I worry I won't have enough to finish it after all.

With a violent jerk, I rip my broken paw out of the restraints.

I've been playing for so long. Please, please, just let me win.

***

Light buzz, the feeling of night outside, and I am trapped in the bathroom. Cold greasy air. Stale smoke. Mirror is in bad shape, and I'm in it, in bad shape. Feel dizzy, feel an ache. Eyelids are heavy. My body is pleading with me, here, begging me on all fours. We're about to die, it says.

No, we're not.

I have a pinch of fire right here in my pinkie claw. I lift it to the shiny black block of my nose, twitching restlessly behind some yellow-tan smear that runs across a crack in the mirror. I breathe it in and I barely feel the bitter numbing snot trickling down the back of my throat, spreading fire back into my bloodstream. Not much longer, now. The coke will keep my head on long enough to do what needs doing. After that, it hardly matters. I am now a god, and I have been parted from death.

There's a knock at the door. It's demanding, but the fist is light. I bet myself a dollar I know who it is. I wipe off my muzzle with a paper towel, claw at the latch, throw it back, and there she is. All six feet of her, her face lit with feline irritation: little Melody R. Harper, all trussed up for the first day of sixth grade, with her new shoes and a dog-eared copy of Breeze In the Attic, and Other Campfire Tales of Mystery and Terror.

I shake my head. I owe myself a dollar. Not Melody. She goes by Rachel now, and she's in a nice black gown and elegant heels, and I can smell the lemongrass in her perfume. Strange choice, but it suits her. She never did like very girly scents. The other girls never played in the mud looking for bugs with us, but Mel sure did. The sight of her in this disease-ridden shithole at the farthest edge of town is pleasantly absurd, and I giggle drunkenly. Rachel frowns.

"Did you forget about me?"

"Sorry Rachel," I say.

"It's been like twenty minutes. Were you jerking off in here?"

"Rachel," I hold up my paws so she can see how clean they are. "You can't jerk off in a glory-hole. That wouldn't be glorious at all."

She gives me a flat unamused look, and I splay my ears. It doesn't absolve me of whatever she thinks I did in here, but she's at least unwilling to get the claws out for it. Not that she'd ever take a swipe at little-old-me. We just work too well together. Small shy puppy, big strong cat with an early puberty. Once upon a time, we'd been peas in a pod. So I wait patiently for her forgiveness. I know I'm safe when she rolls her eyes at me. "Whatever dude, I guess. Are you done or not? Eli texted me and he's already there."

"All done." I say. "I swear to God, I was just getting it all out of my system." I study her face. Still too irritated. I give her a clownish smile. "I didn't piss the entire bus ride over. Things were about to get biblical."

"Augh Mark," her face wrinkles up, her ears pin. Big teeth, that girl has.

"I was gonna text you plans for an ark."

"Mark, dude, just say you're nervous--I don't care, we can talk about it in the car." She stands to the side and gestures down the hallway, tail flicking. "Come on. I don't want to be smelling cigarettes and dick sweat all night." She glances at a couple who pushes past us and into the bathroom. A stall door slams behind me. Someone unzips, someone else moans. This place is making her point for her, but that's fine. I'm almost done here.

"Fuck." I sigh and look away sheepishly, my tail curling its apology. "Fine. I'm nervous, ok?" I lie. "I just... haven't seen him in forever. And I'm..."

"Hurt and sick." Rachel says. She can be real sweet sometimes. The big cat reaches for my paw, puts it in hers. "He knows you've... that things have been hard. Right? So come on, you asshole. You've had like six years."

"Ok." I say and let her tug me by the sleeve back down the hallway and out into the pulsing air of the ER Lounge and Bar. The blacklight shadows swim before me and I feel the scraping little sparks of cocaine kicking in, making my face numb and my mouth dry, and my nose alive with smell. The men here are drunk and hungry. There are very few rules. Rachel does not know it, but she is in danger here. I can smell the amphetamines on some of them, the arousal as their eyes glitter at us out of the shadowed corners. For a canine nose this place is a dark feast. Three-star poison luxury. My friend Rachel and her dress and her stink are upsetting the homeostasis of the joint. The lounge itself is filthy, and it crawls with my kind of creature. We're all night-prowling animals in here, except her.

Rachel and I pick our way around packs of leering eyes, huffing noses and lifting tails to the deep breathing of porn played over synthetic pulsing drums. An old bull in crotch-less leathers rolls an eye and fixes it on me. He has already broken one toy two years ago, and he is going to do it again tonight. He looks at me as Rachel pulls me past, and I shake my tail in his direction, but he just snorts and returns to sipping his whiskey sour. He doesn't want me because Rachel is with me. That's fine. I wasn't waiting for him anyway. We turn out of the main lounge and into a dark hallway where something huge has a fox pinned up against the wall, and the steady wet sounds of their fucking invite in the next set of questing snouts and shining eyes to appear at the door. Rachel navigates them. We leave.

Then I see him, just as we make the threshold out to the cold, clear parking lot air. A tall grey wolf with eyes the color of blue-jeans is licking his fangs in my direction. I waited those twenty long minutes just to see him. I need him. I slip a note down behind his belt buckle and get a brief tickle of his sheath before I'm pulled away by my mountain lioness friend, and I give him a puppy's play-grin and a wave when he begins to snarl his surprise, then his dissatisfaction. The note has my name, my motel address, room number, and a time tomorrow evening. It also has my rates, which he will find to be very reasonable.

He's going to hurt me. But I need him badly, and it is what it is.

"Finally," says Rachel as she slams her car door shut. I'm in the seat next to her. "I don't know why you wanted to pee here so badly, but next time, let's just hit a gas station." Her sedan rumbles, and I feel the cool breeze of her AC on my face. I'm feeling more alert now and my face is hot, so this is pleasant. I stare out the window at the stars as she pulls around and gets back on the highway.

"You got it, Rache." I say.

The mountain lion is silent for a long time, and then she sighs. "Be honest with me. Are you still seeing your therapist?"

"Yeah."

"Every week?"

"Every month. It's expensive."

"And are you still... you know, do you still have your... you know, your stuff going on?"

"No, there's a medicine for it now." There are several, in fact, and I am on none of them. I don't know if they'd do anything if I were. I don't live so much as I am kept alive; I am a system of drugs, and it takes a lot of careful balancing to maintain me. I'd been fiddling with the scale right when Rachel walked in, as a matter of fact. I reflexively wipe my snout and check for a nosebleed. Nope. We're good.

Things are wonderfully warm now, and the cool dark of the woods at night is very alive. This is nice. I will need this very soon. I look at my reflection in the car window and smile big. Fangs all messed up. Eyes sunken. Little cuts from being bitten in the face over and over, where the fur never grew back. I'm not beautiful. I'm enough for people who need a hole, but the playful canine charm of my youth has been dissolving season after season for years now. I close my eyes and enjoy the coolness of the window against my cheek.

"And you're taking it? Your medicine?"

It is the cocaine she's sensing. Felines have noses, after all, and I'm still acting like a wreck. I need her to trust me for a little longer, so I straighten up in my seat and turn my eyes to her face, in the posture required for a full and honest confession. "Yes. And it helps. It just makes me sleepy. I'm sorry to worry you, Rachel." I splay my ears apologetically. She lets it work on her again. "It's only weird dreams now."

"I wish you'd just talk to us once in a while." She says. "That's the real problem I have- that we both have, you just never talk to us about it. You don't respond to our texts, you never say anything in the group chat, you don't even look at invites." I just shrug, and she looks back at the road. "I'm not asking you to be social, just stop..."

"Dropping in when I need something?"

"Keeping us at arm's length." She says, and we both know I am nearer to the mark. Silent stars go by above us, and I resist the urge to open her window and feel the wind on my muzzle. I shift in my seat, try to get comfortable. Rachel puts on the radio, and scratchy REM pours out. Night swimming deserves a quiet night. "... You look like shit, by the way." She says.

"Thanks. I know." I say with as much apology in my tone as I can fake. "Would you want to see him if you were..." I gesture at myself broadly. The ruin of my body speaks for itself. "This?"

She's silent for a while as streetlamps draw bars of light over us in steady rhythm. I don't say anything either. We pull into the passing lane to skirt a pulled-over pickup and a police cruiser. I hear gunshots, but when I look back, nothing's happened yet.

"Eli doesn't care about any of that, man, you know he doesn't. He'd love you if you robbed hookers and killed convenience stores." I smile crookedly. "So relax, alright? It's just coffee."

"Relax. Yeah. I can do that."

She looks over to me, and she notices my ear is flicking.

"Are you ok?" she says.

"Uh-huh." I say as I tremble to contain myself. She lets a moment or two pass as we drive down a steep hill, and into a shadowed valley.

She looks over at me, and her eyeshine is lovely. Lambent. "You're not on anything?"

I smile a coyote smile and lie gently to her. "I had to go without meds for a month to save up for the plane ticket. I'm always jumpy when I get back on."

She isn't happy with that answer, but she's ready to believe it anyway. We drive down a quiet boulevard, and neon shines in on us from signs and traffic lights. Insects are making love in the nearby grass. I see in Melody's eyes reflected the black blossom of cancer in her breasts, when she's in her mid-fifties. I stare at it the way you stare at tacky wallpaper you see every day.

"I'll be just fine." I say, giving her the old 'airplane ears' and putting on my prettiest face. It melts her, the way it always has and always will.

"Don't give me that look. You're not a puppy anymore, don't give me that look." She closes her eyes. "You're lucky I love you, dude."

"Yes." I say.

The rest of the way, I watch the moon rise up over the hills and spill into the valley, turning all the streams silver, the asphalt blue. I pant a little, because of the coke.

***

The bar is nice. Wood paneled, warm lighting. People at tables drum their claws and lift sparkling glasses, red and tan and brown, and I soak in their quiet conversation with a little unease. It is clean. I am a cockroach here, and heads turn to see me skulking past, drawn up in my jacket like a self-conscious leper. They see the patches missing from my tail, see my face always a twitch away from a smile and a snarl, see the tremor in my left paw where I had to break it a few years ago. For some reason the coke feeling is collecting there. They see me and they see Rachel, and they think I'm a charity case, and they turn back to their cocktails and their soft jazz. Nardis, I think. The piano suggests it's the Bill Evans Trio. I am diseased and unwanted in this nice place, and everyone knows it, but they'll go easy on me, because I'm not alone.

Rachel leads me to a dimly lit corner booth. She smiles when I sit down and jerks her thumb. "Eli just texted. He'll be here in five. You want something to drink?"

"Seltzer water." I say. "The meds and drinks don't mix."

"Oh," she says. "Duh." And then she's off to get herself an old fashioned with a single clear ball of ice in it. Nardis changes to Caravan. I don't know who by.

I sit and wait and enjoy my cocaine hit from earlier. It was good stuff, a little yellow. It's going to last unusually long tonight, and I have suffered a lot of withdrawal to get my tolerance down for this. It'll all be worth it. I could kill everyone in here with my claws and it would be easy. I like this version of Caravan. The moment approaches.

I look up to see him coming around the corner.

He turns. We lock eyes.

There he is. I see his big broad feline smile, appearing like fire on a struck match. Fur like red-lacquered brass, fine stripes all down his face and neck, the creamy white of his throat. His stupid leather jacket that I love, his gasp and his laugh.

I see the twinkle in his eye that goes out when he takes a better look at me and sees me. I see also the change in his smile as sincerity leaks out of it. The way he is thinking 'where have you been, where have you been, damn you, why are you like this after all these years', though he is trying with every fiber of his being not to, floods out of his features like the sun shining through windowsill tea. I smile coyotically.

Eli, too, never learned to stay mad at me.

"Holy shit." He says and slides into the booth and starts hugging me before I can get my arms up. He is strong, and his coat is plush and soft, and when he hugs me his cheek fur intersperses with mine, and that cracks my heart. "Holy shit, I didn't think you'd come."

"Neither did I." I lie. I wrap my arms around him and feel the tremble of familiar pleasure as he sighs and shakes the feeling out of his tail. He's happy to see me, but there are a lot of emotions slithering around under it. "It's good to see you." I say, and we part. He looks at me.

He is about to say 'It's good to see you, too', but the words don't make it out because he sees my face, and pity runs him down. "You feeling ok, coyote? Your eyes are all wide, and your face..." He traces a little scar under my eye and above my cheek. Knife. His voice is solemn. "Did someone hurt you?"

"That's years old." I say. "I was carrying a load of groceries. Tripped on the top step of my stoop and put my head through the glass beside the door. The doctor couldn't believe I didn't lose an eye." I wink it at him to sell it. "My lucky streak continues."

"I have never ever met anyone who flirts with disaster like you." He says and sighs, running a sympathetic thumb along my jaw.

"Jealous?" I say, and let an easy grin slide up my muzzle.

"Not remotely. Cats only have nine lives, and you've been almost dying since we were in third grade. If I were you, I'd be..." He thinks back. "Roadkill, when we were eight. That one woulda got me."

"I meant 'jealous of the flirting'." I say, bumping him with my shoulder. Even though he's huge, he lets me sway him, and he gives me a big smile. He shows a lot of teeth. Predators in polite company do not do that- it's the thing you reserve for your most ancient friends, your lovers, your husband. "Besides, nine lives-- isn't that only for small cats?"

"It's all of us, you tail-chaser." I pretend to stifle a laugh at the schoolyard insult. "God, you've been through so much. You're so skinny."

"Yeah." I say. "It's called keto. You should give it a try, stripes. You put on a few pounds."

He touches his tummy under his shirt, the stripes between his ears contorting with concern. "I did not." He did not. But I laugh and brush him with my tail, and lean a little against him, and it is so much like old times that he forgets and wraps an arm around me. "And there's no diet that'd do this, or everyone would be doing it." He circles my bicep with his paw and I shrug casually. "You're not eating right. If you're eating."

"Feel like buying me dinner?" Eli scoffs at this. I knew he would, at first, but my tail is in his lap now, and I'm leaning against him like I'm exhausted. The coke gives me a few believable tremors, but I need more than pity to sell this one. I close my eyes and lay my head on his chest, and I feel him still, unsure of what's happening. My paw touches his chest under his leather jacket, drawing lines on the shirt with a pair of claws, just over where I know his nipple to be. "Just, you know... for old time's sake?"

It's what he's been dreaming of hearing for almost five years. But something is wrong. It's my face, my body- I'm in there, it's me he smells, but I'm a wreck. I might not be in my right mind, and he knows that. He's not stupid, so I cheat.

My claws tug at his shirt and I lay my muzzle under his neck. "Kitten?" I whisper, the way I'd done the night he'd come out to me. Fifteen minutes later, we had his first time in the back of his moonlit sedan, little lake-waves breaking on the shore to compliment my gasping. In the velvet night-serenity of the afterglow, I'd said it just like I'm saying it now. I crumble his defenses. The excuse he will make to himself is that he can fix me.

My ex takes my paw in both of his, squeezes it. "I'd really like that."

"I'd really like that too." I say. He encloses me in a hug only a tiger could give. Good fucking coke tonight.

Rachel comes back. She grimaces openly. "Oh my God, you two." She holds up her paw in rebuke. "I literally didn't even have time to say hello. It's been zero seconds, do you mind??"

Eli backs away from me and I pretend to be sheepish, and to dust off my jacket.

The evening is beyond pleasant.

When we finish our drinks and catch up and it is the small hours of the night, Rachel says she'll call me a driver. While she's off fiddling with the app, I lay my head on Eli's shoulder and wag my tail against his thigh. "Seven o' clock, alright? I'm staying at the Moonrise Motel on 19th. Room 308. We can go anywhere you want. Trust me." I blow him a kiss. He's so into me his whiskers straighten. "I'll be good and hungry."

I'm as smooth as I can be, but the coke is starting to dip at last, an unprecedented 3 hours later. My coach is going to turn back into a pumpkin here, and I can't let him see. So we say our goodbyes, and I am driven home by a college stoner, who pointlessly confides in me that he's proud guys like me can hold hands in public now, and that his university is raising awareness so kids-- like me-- can feel safe in their communities. He tells me they're doing a fundraiser, tells me my tips go to the fundraiser. I doubt that this is the case, and when I tell him that Rachel is paying him, not me, he goes instantly quiet and turns up the radio.

I can't tell if the rattling I'm feeling is the pulse of his music or the cocaine going dark.

***

Restless sleep burns up the hours of the next day in a nightmare fire, and in my dream I am screaming. Getting it all out of the way, I guess, but I've had this dream for years. I wake up. I shower and prep myself and scrounge.

I manage a bag of corn chips and a Pepsi from the vending machine, and I give thanks. Things are about to get nasty, and I am grateful for the saltiness and the sweetness, and for my life, which is a miracle. I take some aspirin. Tonight is going to be longer than the last, and it's going to be a lot worse. I meditate to steel myself and deaden some of the feelings and misgivings that are welling up. Sometimes you have to make of your heart a stone. Tonight demands more of me. This is my prayer:

May my heart be an autoclave. May the heat and pressure kill everything inside. Amen.

I make sure I am naked when he knocks. My heart races as I draw back the deadbolt, and my paws tremble with anticipation as I open the door to the future.

"Holy shit." Says the wolf with the blue-jean eyes. "I guess this is the place." The weirdness of finding me like this is his kind of weirdness. He stalks in in and I giggle and touch his chest so that he doesn't quite shut the door all the way. Already he is getting everything he was promised, and I am only too happy to show him my skinny body, my attractive back markings, the places where I've blown my coat but haven't brushed. My scars. My damage does not offend him- he's actually encouraged, turned on. I tell him I'm a freak, and I can take a hit. He is already at the pinnacle of anticipation, but this dissolves him.

We negotiate for money he will never pay me, and I ask to see his cock. He pulls it out, and I rub the sheath on my face, and try to get a little scent-drunk.

It's easy.

***

I was twelve when I first started seeing them. I woke up with my leg in a cast and half my fur shaven off, and bandages all around me. A nurse was there, setting the drip on my IV and she looked just like an angel, despite being a jowly old bulldog of a woman. "Prince Tut awakes. Good morning, kiddo." She said, when she caught me staring. She gave me a big, sweet smile. She never saw the bus coming- it ran her down right there in my hospital room and the impact of it shattered her spine and twisted her broken neck so that her head was staring at me from over her back, on the floor, and I shrieked, and I cried, and the next moment she was comforting me and asking what was wrong.

The vision dimmed, but when I stared at her I could see it happening again. I could see the street signs under broken traffic lights, and knew that it was going to happen downtown, not five minutes from her workplace. A clock in a storefront window said it was 7:44AM. It would get her in the spring, a day or two after her bluebells come in, and I know that because a picture thereof is the last she will ever send to her best friend. These details were dripped over my mind like absinth over a sugar cube, and it was too much.

They got my mom to come in, and she held me. When I looked in her eyes I saw her laying on her death bed in a nursing home, alone. I recall laying there and my mother holding me and squeezing my paws, the nurse reassuring her, saying this was normal for head injuries of my variety and things went on like that for a long, long time, and I tried desperately to shut it all out. They brought in Eli, but I wouldn't look at him and he sniffled and told me he was sorry, that he wanted to climb up after me but he was too afraid, and it was all his fault.

It wasn't. He couldn't have stopped me from falling even if he'd come, but I was too upset at the time to comfort or look at him. I didn't want to see. I didn't want to know. I kept my eyes closed until practically the end of my hospital stay, which was only a few more days.

We never played in abandoned buildings ever again.

I opened my eyes eventually. I had to, to go to school. I saw my mother on her deathbed again, and all during my recovery I practiced shutting it out, until only the traces and hints leaked in, and those I learned to manage. School was a battleground. Girl playing four-square, overdose. The stag kid next door, prostate cancer in his 50s. I watched Mrs. Carlson swing from a noose in her basement while she went over long division at the blackboard, and I had to harden myself against the surreality of it.

And then there was Eli.

***

The wolf gets what he wants out of me. He pulls my ears, gets rough with my throat, I gasp and push away and try to breathe but he holds me down in the fragrant thatch of his pubic fur. The deprivation makes me kind of giddy, and the world slants. I'm aching from withdrawal and all my accumulated hurts, and I pull a muscle in my jaw and while I'm nursing it, he spits in my mouth and turns me around. I get pushed. I shakily stumble over the bed, but he's on me, and I'm glad I prepared myself because he does not bother to check. I get the wind knocked out of me with the first thrust. Things are sharp, they grind uncomfortably, he was not made for me or I was not made for him but it doesn't seem to matter to the wolf, who regards my fluttering internal anatomy with casual indifference. He fixates instead on my sounds, my breathing, the way I get a little scared when he pushes my head down into the bed and slings his knee up to apply more force.

It's bad. Several times, I think I've slipped up, played badly, or failed to think things through. He likes the scared little noises I make when I think these thoughts, because he's been prowling that gay bar for months looking for someone just like me to take it how he wants to give it. He likes his smaller canines, and I'm small enough to count. Wolfie likes his fear-smell too and I can't help but stink of it now. I don't want him to like it too much, but I'm starting to lose my grip. Starting to forget my strategy.

I'm on my back with my legs up to the headboard, feeling hideously naked and vulnerable, when there's a knock on the door, and it swings open.

"Heeeeeey kitten~." I rumble drunkenly as the percussive clap of the wolf's hips slows, and he twists around to see Eli standing in the door with a button-down shirt, slacks, and a single rose. "You want to be next?"

"Hey buddy," growls the wolf. "How about you fuck off for an hour?"

I don't show mercy. I loll my tongue, look like I'm in paradise, and it twists the knife I put in him hard. My moaning follows his footsteps far out under the gleaming stars. Shattered. The feelings I have about this are put away, the records are sealed. I don't have time to worry, because the wolf is turning to me again.

"You like choking?" He asks.

Before I know it, it's all white sparks and useless clawing. Somewhere in there, I finish abundantly, and he cuffs me a few times maybe. I feel him corkscrew the knot inside. Something shifts out of place and I go cold.

***

I'm going deep now, now I'm way far down in the dark. He doesn't quite kill me, I'm sure of it. Why am I scared? It's because I don't remember him being this rough. Maybe I overdid it, changed this or that, got him too riled up. The details aren't always clear, the information can't always be interpreted. He bit me. He bit me, that fucker! Was he supposed to bite me? What changed? Am I wrong? Am I never going back?

Now I'm going deep in the great undertow. Now I'm a swallowed stone. As a child I was eaten by time and I have been struggling through its intestines like a flatworm every day since I woke up in the hospital. Like the page of an old book, impossibly fine, such that the text on one side can be seen on the other, with good light. You've always had weird dreams since you were a puppy. The light in the church as I fell. Spinning. Feeling of a popping head.

The look in His eyes, as he puts Eli in the chair, and wraps duct tape around his wrists.

***

I wake up and he's still pissing in the bathroom. Something's wrong with my head and my vision is all fucked up, but I've gleaned enough from my long study of these moments to make my way over to his jeans anyway. I can hear him pissing in the bathroom, and I know about how much time I have. I get to those blue jeans that are the same color as his eyes and slide his belt out from the loops. I'm not really in good shape for this, but it has to be done. The blue-eyed wolf steps out, lingers a little too long wondering why he doesn't see me on the bed, and the belt is around his neck and I haul on that son of a bitch with everything.

He cracks my back as he shoves me into the closet again. I snarl and lock my legs around his waist and clench the leather tight. He tries to dig his fingers in, tries to huck me over his shoulder, but I cling on like an insect and cinch that fucker on his throat. The wolf gags, and I take the opportunity to wrench the leather in the other direction. His eyes bulge. He knows what's happening now as we both hit the floor, and he rolls on his back, arching. I snarl and squeeze and clench my eyes, my arms aflame with the continuous effort. The wolf manages to get his arm around one of mine and he pulls it away from the belt, but he's slower now. Weaker. I bite him out of spite and give it all the juice in my exhausted, withdrawal-wracked body. Soon we are laying on the floor, and he is out.

I pay the price for my knowledge of tonight's events. I murder him on the floor of my hotel room, a line of his cum still drying on my tail. He does not deserve it, asshole though he was, but we're both making sacrifices here in the endgame. I just don't have it in me to grieve for him or myself right now.

I don't have much time, so I wipe my ass with a towelette, put on my clothes, and grab his wallet and keys from his jeans. I take the time to write a note, and I try very hard to collect myself. Still alive.

Hey Eli,

Sorry about earlier. Got high, did something stupid.

I want to apologize but know I hurt you.

If you want to talk, I'll be at a house at the edge of town. 103 Stone Mill Road, green siding. My friend is a little paranoid, so if they act like I'm not here or they've never heard of me, just come around back and I'll find you.

I'll make it up to you, kitten.

I lock the door and tape the note just under the room number. I put up the Do Not Disturb sign, which the cleaning staff will respect. His truck is out in the lot somewhere, and I hit the lock button a few times. His horn sounds and I see his lights throw brief parking-bumper shadows on the asphalt. Suddenly I feel like I can do this, and with a surge of determination, I make my way to the truck and drive to the address on his driver's license, holding weariness and the tremors at bay. This is the home stretch. A little more, and it'll all be over.

I get to his apartment and let myself in. It's untidy, but not really a mess- the wolf probably wasn't here much. Work all day, stalk around the ER lounge for a fuck all night, that was him. I make myself a sandwich out of his refrigerator, and then puke it up again five minutes later. I need every advantage, including calories, so I drink his doctor pepper and keep it down. Then I go through his medicine cabinet, and before I know it, I have my avenging sword. I check the tablets themselves to make sure the identifying imprints are right, that the label isn't lying to me, and they match exactly with my memory. This is warfarin, alright.

I memorized these markings when I was fifteen, and finally seeing them for the first time is nostalgic. I dump about half the bottle into a plastic baggie, grab a condom from his nightstand and a hammer.

Now there is nothing but time between me and Him. I sleep for maybe three hours on the dead wolf's couch.

No dreams this time. Haven't had that since I was twelve.

***

The next morning is busy. I crush up the medicine with the hammer and pour it into the condom, then tie the end of the condom in a knot. There's the matter of my paw, too, but I find a nice private street curb and do it quick, and even though the pain is wild, I know that it is nothing in the long run. I remind myself it's a matter of willpower, and I put myself into the work until I am certain He will never be able to bind it tight enough. I check to ensure that there's still enough movement in my fingers, and then I ditch the truck near the edge of town and walk four blocks to the streetlight where He finds me. I'm shaking. Excitement, yeah, fear, yes, withdrawal, for certain. Sometimes I feel like I was born shivering, and I never stopped. Maybe it's my coyote blood.

A clean, smooth spike of ice slides into my heart when I see His shitty sedan cruising under the lights. I stand there and smile at Him, curling my tail around the pole and doing my best to look like the kind of person He likes. He has grown bored of people like me. He wants to move on to something better, something more meaningful, and He's frustrated because He doesn't know where to start, and His old, safe games are no longer cutting it. I am the last of my kind for Him. The last greasy, indulgent hamburger before he moves up to steak. The car slows as He debates, and then stops right in front of me when He makes up His mind. Down the road, there is a spotted hyena boy who had his nineteenth birthday yesterday, who, as of right now, is going to die on a sailing trip almost forty-four years after he turns his life around. Maybe it makes up for the wolf. Maybe not.

"Well hell-o sweet thing." I say when He rolls the window down. I stick my head in and make sure He can see my waving tail as I lean on the door and peer into the dark cab. I take a sniff. "Fox, huh? Ever wanted to put a leash on one of the big dogs? Be the alpha for a night? Bet I could do stuff with your knot that'd haunt your dreams for weeks."

"How much?" He says.

"Forty an hour. Whatever you want." I say. The price is immaterial, but it marks me as used, cheap goods that will not be missed. I am ticking boxes for Him.

He doesn't even deliberate. "Get in." He says.

"Oh sugar, you just made the score of your life. You and me are gonna party."

"Uh-huh." He says, and we drive to where his house is. It's a pit. The buildings on either side are alternately condemned and up for sale since time out of memory, and the whole place smells like wooden dry-rot, dust, iron and a thick layer of scent-neutralizer. I see the boarded windows and pretend to get jumpy, and then to freak out. He's reassuring with me, soft. He gives my arm a squeeze, and I walk like Orpheus past the threshold of his house.

In the dark of His foyer, I look back and see Him in the doorway, silhouetted by the light of the rising sun. No looking back, now.

***

With a violent jerk, I rip my broken paw out of the restraints. The swelling went down a little bit while I was tied up and even though pulling it free sends lightning down my arm, it's nothing compared to all the other final agonies I've had today. He started on me early this morning, and the magnitude of today's trauma eclipses all the other aches and pains of my life. I've been battering myself into invulnerability for years, however, and I drill through the pain.

The condom, He found in my pocket. He thinks it's cocaine, and decided to keep it in case I needed something to keep me kicking and squealing for the last stretch of his murderous little jerk-off session. Or perhaps he is saving it for himself for the afterparty. Either way He left it alone and put it on the counter, and I have spent the day trying not to look at it or make Him suspicious.

With my other limbs bound, I must reach awkwardly across from myself, and it takes all the strength of will, high-singing adrenaline and meth in my body. I have to close my eyes and grit my teeth to do it, and I can barely feel it when my fingers pinch the tip of the condom. My heart races. I start to pick it up. I think that I'm going to drop it, even though I have never dropped it, not once in all the dreams I've had since I settled on this plan. It dangles precariously and I hook a claw into it. Careful. Make no mess. Nothing for him to see.

Gingerly I draw it over the gap between the countertop and me. I almost cry when it slips from between my pads, but I catch it just barely on a claw and dangle it until I can rest it on my chest. I heave and pant, trying not be exhausted with the effort, but there's no time. I can hear the door opening.

"Hey," I know Eli is saying. "Sorry to bother you so late in the afternoon, but I'm looking for a friend of mine. He said he'd be at your house?"

"Nobody's here but me." He says, and in my mind's eye I see him almost shut the door, but stop, fascinated.

"Really?" Says Eli. "Because he said he'd be waiting for me around here. You're sure he's not inside?"

I'm dawdling. Stupid. I grip the condom with my fucked up paw and lift it to one of the bolts on the chair I'm in. It's not all that sharp, but it's sharp enough, and I can't use my muzzle anymore anyway. I work the condom against it, rubbing until the material tears. Halfway there.

"No." He says. "I live here. I'd know if there were someone in my house besides me."

Eli is silent, fingering the note in his pocket, debating whether or not to show it to this guy at the door. He doesn't. Eli is a smart cat. "Oh" he says after a pause. "I guess I made a mistake. Sorry to bother you."

"No trouble." Replies the fox, thinking about what it would be like to take a strong, beautiful body like Eli's and spend a long weekend ruining it. He reads and memorizes Eli's license plate. I think he wants to come down and kill me so he can start thinking about what he wants to do, what kind of supplies he'll need, how quick he can clean me up to make room. Just like me, Eli sets his brain on fire, and just like me he cannot think of anything else now that he's seen that face, that soft, good face and the eyes like green flame and the line of his lips, soft and dark around white fangs as they curl up and smile at me and I am eighteen and I love him so badly that I cry after we make love and he asks me what's wrong and nothing's wrong and that the door closes when I am lost in my delirium and I scramble to do it while I am still alive to do it. Focus up or die, coyote.

I pour it all in the coffee. It's still hot. I pray to God and all the angels and archangels that it dissolves quick.

I hear foosteps down the hall.

I try to fling the condom away but it catches on my claws.

The creaking of old floorboards on the other side of the wall.

I whip my hand up.

He comes around the corner, and sees me seizing on his table, my paw free and flailing. His vulpine gaze narrows and his dark-dipped ears pin with a sudden, rare flash of emotion. "No." He says in a voice that only sounds slightly less bored. "That's bad."

He wrenches my broken paw, pulls and pushes it so that the shards of my bone within hurt me, and the muffled scream that comes through my muzzle binding sounds like a feral cow. Bright stars flash before me. "That's very bad." He says and slams my paw against the chair. He binds it again in duct tape.

He does not see that my condom fell behind the chair. He is too much off balance now.

He reaches over, grabs His coffee, drinks it down and sets the empty mug on the countertop with a sigh.

"Now we have to do it tonight. It's ok if you're scared. It's almost over."

He pauses, because he looks at me and there is no fear, and there is no resignation. I know what it looks like from his perspective. I've watched these moments every single night since I made my decision. I know that there is a wicked look on my face, I know it upsets him to see. In my eyes is all Hatred and all Love and all Sacrifice, and when he puts one of them out with a ballpoint pen out of frustration, I keep the other one wide on him, letting him see the laugh in the Coyote Dark of my remaining pupil, burbling red foamy laughter out of the unbound corners of my muzzle. He gets mad, whips his paw into my face, but still I stare.

Then my eye shifts to the window at the far edge of the opposite room, between the boards.

There stands Eli, petrified with horror, with the Daylight in his eyes.

He follows my gaze back to the tiger and there is a sudden clamor as Eli bolts and something falls. I howl with triumph through the duct tape, because I see it now, I see it golden and bright as the breaking day, The New Future that I have bought and paid for.

When He looks back at me I see anger, real anger, and He rams a knife into my chest that I do not even feel. I laugh at Him as he races to catch my kitten, and I see the New Future swallow Him in light. There is no escaping it now. I followed the rules. I solved the game. Death is all that diverts death, and my wet, dying grunts of laughter follow Him out of the room. My sight goes dim, but in the new comfortable dark, where all my pain and weariness bleeds into the nothing below me, I am treated to one last vision for the road.

They will play cat and mouse for a while. Eli, thinking he's lost Him, will call the police. They'll come and find my corpse, tell him to stay with a friend, and Eli will call up Rachel, who will cry over me. The fox will stalk close behind Eli. He will have to wait twenty seven hours and forty one minutes before He will get a shot, and it's lust and desperation and spite that will force Him to do it. He'll be thinking he'll spend his life in prison and wanting a final treat. By then He'll have noticed the nosebleed, and the bleeding in His gums and eyes. He could drive to a hospital, but he isn't going to. He wants my kitten too badly, even if He has to do him with a box-cutter. It will be the most desperate and incautious thing he's ever done.

Eli will step outside to try to make sense of everything, and He will leap. He will get Eli bad in the ribs. I can't do anything about that, but Kitten is going to get a claw across his shoulder, and just the one will be enough. He'll exsanguinate on Rachel's lawn.

I can't see past that. So I imagine the rest as my body fails.

My cheap funeral. My mother's tear-stains on the letter to Eli I asked her to read in the event of my untimely passing. The police, bewildered, tracing the insane line of my doings back through the abyss of the last decade. Rachel trying for years on end to make things ok, and failing, then succeeding a little. Thousands of sessions with therapists. Eli meeting the gentle wolf who will hold his paw as he passes away on their marriage bed at 88.

The last is real, glimpsed through a dirty window two rooms away with my third eye. Worth it, I think, to have seen it for a moment.

...

It's happening.

Be happy, kitten. I love you very much.

Goodnight.