#werewolfing

your head cracks off the pavement before you’ve fully registered falling

blood and air and precious, vaporous focus punching out of your throat 

something ringing in your ears 

it’s either a police siren or a children’s choir or a shattered eardrum

(it is a problem for someone who isn’t going to choke to death on their own vomit in)

(oh lets highball it)

(the next forty seconds)

you can feel it rearing its head, roaring nausea and gag reflex 

if you could roll onto your side, your temple would already be flush with the ground 

but your arms are trembling and weak when you call for them

bleeding from the back of the head and forced into an awkward sprawl

and you’re not even sure you remember what put you there

a cough forces its way through you 

you writhe around it, this horrid and wet thing that leaves gouges on its way out of you

fleeing into the night air with something like physical form 

(you are distracted from this)

(as the thing that bounced your head off a neglected city sidewalk)

(circles back around)

it’s massive

four, five feet tall and twice as long

it walks with a silence unlike anything you’ve ever seen

a two-door sedan of perfect stealth, that seems to eat any light foolish enough to get near it

but for two flickering streetlamps, near center mass

they sit just above a pointed muzzle, twitching in the air

and you start to piece together the shape of its face

surrounded with what must be a pelt, and a terrible stench, billowing out in front of it

the smell of old meat, left moldering in midday sun

(your hindbrain has been keening into itself since those dying lightbulbs peeled back out of the night)

there are teeth around your shoulder in the time it takes to blink at an opening maw

and you are overtaken by a pain so complete 

it must surely be about to kill you

the beast pulls away and you wouldn’t have noticed at all

but for the lance of fire it sets into your mauled shoulder

(and would you look at that) 

(the nausea’s back)

you’re throwing up into your own mouth for three heart-stopping seconds

bile in your throat and bile in your mouth and bile reaching into your lungs

before some instinct older than the body it lives in

hurls you onto your side

and you’re vomiting and bleeding with about the same level of enthusiasm and you can feel your shoulder unraveling 

and you’ve never been in this much pain in your life

(until your left arm strikes pavement, trying to brace you over the puddle of sick)

and your vision goes

stomach twisting around itself again and again and again

nails scratching themselves raw in the concrete 

(and you come back to yourself) 

(in a body you do not recognize, that twitches and snarls and seeps blood from a shoulder that is mostly in one piece) 

🎄Christmas werewolfing🎄