Eight inconvenient weres
1. One day you got so into the zone playing hide and seek that you became momentarily indistinguishable from a woollen cardigan. As a result you were bitten by a moth and turned into a weremoth. It is a difficult life. Not only do you turn into a moth if you see the full moon, but you also attempt to throw yourself at it. And a weremoth has a moth's distinctively bad powers of moon identification. So you also turn into a moth if you see light bulbs, bicycle headlamps, the eyes of mysterious swamp-beasts, et cetera. Perhaps the only plus point is that you can survive for months trapped in a wardrobe. Bound to come in useful when the apocalypse comes round.
2. It may have seemed like an unfortunate zip accident but no. You were bitten by those trousers. So now you are weretrousers. Like all good pairs of weretrousers, you are keyed to the other sense of moon. Therefore the sight of your own buttocks makes you turn into a pair of trousers until such time as you can take yourself back off via a fourth-dimensional transform. You have banned mirrors from your house; there is some speculation therefore that you may be a vampire. If only they knew.
3. You were bitten by a sleeping person. At least, come full moon you very often turn into a sleeping person for the whole of the night and sometimes even longer. It is the only explanation that makes sense in this crazy world.
4. You were bitten by a song. It was a good song, one with teeth, and you knew when you dabbled your fingers in it that it might bite in some vaguely metaphorical sense, but you didn't mind. But now you are a were-melody. When and only when the full moon rises in splendour over the distant mountains you dissolve suddenly and completely into sound waves, propagating and re-propagating between the houses and the factory. The melody that you transform into is a bit filmic, so usually bystanders are too caught up in the Hollywood glamour of the thing to ask where you have gone or where the music has come from. But you move on all the same, street to street, hiding out in echoing alleys until moonset, when the solid you drops back out of thin air.
5. There is of course a hierarchy in the were-world. An exciting origin story gets you invited to more full moon parties. A rare species is of course a must. And you should be absolutely sure of the individual variant. Â This is why you are so keen to tell everyone that you are not merely a werefrog but a were-phantasmal poison arrow frog. If only you did not keep on waking up in broken terrariums surrounded by police. Perhaps it would be better to be something else after all.
6. You were literally bitten by a book. It clamped on to both hands at once and you could not put it down; not, at least, until the fateful act of contamination had taken place. Now you are a were-book. You are not quite sure what you are about, because you have never been in a position to read yourself. Sometimes you go over to a friend's house for full moon and afterwards they say that you were good, and you know that come next full moon you will have more company on the bookshelf. Soon your whole social circle will be a were-library. You wish you could feel more regret about it, but somehow you can't.
7. You are definitely a were-something. The main thing you remember about being bitten was that the thing was fast, hairy and knocked your glasses off. You are fairly sure that, come the full moon, you also become fast and hairy. The details are usually hazy. An experiment with a camera trap proved nothing. But somebody left a wolf-tail in the fridge. You think it is possible that you might be that were-cryptid that the werewolves tell each other stories about.
8. You don't like to talk about your days as an astronaut or what you found up there. They covered up that mission, of course. So you get to live out your life in secret peace and on a good day you can almost forget about the white valley where you found the moon's many mouths, about the lost glove, the blood in the dust. About the thing that happened after that, and all the people with telecsopes who needed to be silenced. About the experiments. The secret service have been very careful to fit out your house with a light-proof basement. You are the world's first were-moon and very probably its last, because be sure that nobody is going back to that valley for a long, long time.
