Seven-Tails, Chapter 3
#3 of Seven-Tails Series
By the time I got home, my stomach was swishing about inside, like a cow's udder. I felt genuinely nauseous from the whole experience with the fox.
I completely ignored mom, when she said; "Hello! How was your luck?"
"Bathroom." I mumbled, the bag of mice swinging against my side. I tried not to let anyone see it.
I trotted up the short set of stairs. They'd seemed so much steeper and longer as a little kid. I was glad age had shortened them--and that the door to the bathroom was just at the top. I hooked a left inside, shut the door behind me, and locked it tight.
Taking my fingers off the knob... I saw them again for the second time. I'd hid them under the sleaves of my coat, held tight to the handlebars, and tried not to look.
They were cold, swollen, and sore. Absolutely bloody. I fumbled through the cabinet for peroxide. When I finally got out the brown bottle, I poured it over both my hands, and looked away as the stuff bubbled up, disinfecting my new claws. The antiseptic stung. Tears rolled out of my eyes.
He did not talk, the whole time. He was there, next to me, overlapping my right leg. I stood 'in' him, and felt the connection we had made. I could feel the sigh of his thoughts, like a calm before a storm.
I sat down, and he curled up beside me. He seemed to respect the physical boundaries of floors and walls--to not sink beneath or into objects--and yet denied touch, and sight--to all except for me.
When he rested against me, it felt like--unusually warm. The kind of warmth you experience sometimes in certain spots in a lake, when you go swimming.
I didn't try to talk to him. I was still mad. Scared, even. Our feelings couldn't have been entirely the same, because he seemed calm by contrast. I took the tweezers I'd fished out along with the peroxide bottle, and began to wince, as I picked away my hangnails. It stung. There was more bleeding... but I finally got rid of the mess that had been my fingernails. They were his entirely, now; fox's claws for digging holes and scratching at his sides.
I poured the rest of the bottle on my hands, which felt dry and pickled now. The burning was not so bad the second time. What finally made me take to the toilet was not the pain of new growth, or the breakage of the old--but the sound of the mice, still rustling in their box.
I didn't look at the contents of the bowl when I flushed. I could taste the blood in my mouth, along with the acrid flavor of stomach acid.
"It will come in time. You will be able to keep the things we eat down."
I spat out mucousy, acidy spit, and my eyes watered as I flushed.
"What if I don't want to? Is this really even fair? You get a free ride in my body, get to make me... CHANGE into what you want, and I get to live to be stuck like that?"
"Isn't that what everyone wants from you, in your life? To change? To conform to their interests, and focus less on your own? I would think this would be no different."
"You're not... my family. You're not one of my teachers, or my principal. Why should I conform to you, you stupid animal?!"
"Because I am your elder, and I can help you to grow strong, and healthy, and to last a lot longer in life than you would as you were--misguided and alone."
I poured water, and washed my mouth out, then filled the glass again and took a drink... and sat down on the toilet.
"But as a fox. As an animal, not me. And I'm not going to be me forever. You said you were going to make me live forever, and you lied. You LIED."
"I did no such thing. I said you would be immortal. You will. You will live as long as I have, perhaps longer if we can keep our distance from the less savory aspects of your world. But even I cannot remain who I am forever."
I shouted at him, and cried, and called him a liar, and a stupid, greedy fox. And I was probably right. At least about him being greedy.
But I went and laid down in my room, and rebuffed mom's questions about the day. Told her I felt really sick all of a sudden, lied and said it might be the Flu.
And while I rested beneath my blankets, still in shoes and jeans and sweatshirt...
I realized he was probably right, in a sense. No one remains the same forever. I thought about this house, my family, and my life. I was a way different person now than I'd been when I'd met the fox, and that had been how long now? Hours?
And what about the years that had past? Was I still the same kid I'd been, from back then? What about a few more years? Would I look back on my decision today, and say: "Man, was I a stupid kid for trusting in a figment no one else can see. Immortality as a fox's body? That was bound to backfire."
And him... he'd lived for countless lifetimes, if what he said was true. How far had he come, and changed as a person, from what he'd been? What if I was not the first body for him to inhabit? Had there been others? What if they lived out there lives, and... like he had described...
"Just... become part of each other."
"What?"
"We're just going to become part of each other, right?"
"Are you going to talk about this some more now? Hopefully a bit more civilly?"
"I'm still mad you cheated me. But what do you mean about us... becoming part of each other?"
"Look at your fingers. Do you see what your anger has done? It has brought us the beginning of a physical oneness. In time, your feelings and mine will continue to synchronize, until one day, our identities will join entirely. You and I will become closer, and closer partners, until we cease being individual personalities... and then, we will be one. Neither of us will exist. We will both be something new. A new identity."
"And my body will just conform to your shape?"
"Yes. You will be a fox. At least, that is what I think will happen."
"Then you don't know? I might stay human?"
"I can only speculate on the severity of the physical changes. What you have seen--what I appeared to be when you first met me, is how I appeared when I was alive, with my own body. I do not know if you will ever attain a shape like that. But your body will /try/ to change. You have me inside of you now, and the age and power I have attained demands it from your relatively young and impressionable form."
"Gee, thanks for the compliment. So I'm young and impressionable. Where've I heard that before?"
"In the long run, you will become wise and powerful. We may even attain the level of power and influence over humans that I once possessed. Think about it. Doesn't that interest you at least a little?"
"Not if it means I have to eat more live animals!" I rebutted.
"Hardly a cost. Albeit you may want to show more discretion about eating in public."
"Yeah really. I wouldn't want people to think I'm going to be a serial killer or something, because I eat the heads off of household pets."
"Your kind expect a level of elevation from the other creatures of this world. I do not. You are free to eat as you like in my presence, but do not draw the eye of too many humans, if you can help it."
"You talk about that as if I can!"
"Perhaps you cannot. I can't make your decisions for you. I can only tell you how I feel."
"I believe that." I muttered half-sarcastically, and nodded off to sleep.
* * *
I was a bloated body, floating in a river. I could see birds flying over head, though my eyes were glazed over. I felt them roosting on my body, pecking at my chest, nipping maggots that crawled beneath my skin.
The water washed me onto a shore. I tried to cry out to mom and dad for help, to call someone, anyone to my aid. The birds kept nibbling, tearing my skin open to have their meal.
Finally, there was a rustling from the brush by the creek, and a big animal chased them away. It was huge, my size... a red fox. No fox gets that big. He was enormous--muscular, fat with good food, and confident with successful hunting and rutting.
I thought he was there to save me from being eaten. He curled about, inspecting me, appraising. I tried to ask him to help me--to tell me why I was lying there--why I couldn't get up.
The fox opened his mouth, as if to answer... and began to continue the birds' work, tearing me open, pulling at my entrails.
I tried to protest, but it just kept eating, and eating, and eating at me intentfully--stomach, liver, intestines, heart--and my lips would not obey my urge to open them--to speak. Instead, they had become the fox's lips, smacking together. I could feel them. The most horrifying part was that it didn't hurt anymore. Suddenly, I was the fox, devouring my own dead body, and I was no longer a silent observer, but a hungry opportunistic scavenger, belching in contentment as I looked over my prize, snatching the eyes out of the corpse's face--
I screamed and woke in a cold sweat, clutching my heart. I was still human. Still alive. Thank God.
This had to stop.