The Political Animal

 The creature attacked her and she remembered it in bits. Arms (claws?) pulling, holding, tasting, painless (numb?) animalistic and sudden. And being awkwardly disheveled and tired, she just went home, at a slow but stubborn pace, nothing quite focused in her mind. Not like a man. It was a monster. But very, very familiar. 

She slept and dreamed about it in bits. She even went to work the next day and thought about it--raggedly. What hit her? No scars, only--changes. Slow changes.

It wasn't like the movies. No--The Wolfman. An American Werewolf in London weren't it at all. The full moon came, and the whole body changed in those movies. She understood what was happening to her, uniquely to her, she thought, before she saw Ginger Snaps. 

She laughed and howled. It was the "Are You There, God, It's Me, Margeret" of being were. 

She was far from an adolescent. 

The changes disassociated her from the moon. Her nails and hair grew thick. She discovered she had camouflage--and made herself invisible and very visible at will.  She carried herself differently, and people stepped aside. She didn't recognize her shoulders and her feet, and her eyes changed. 

Reading wasn't easy, but she saw shit no one else saw. And people who looked her full in the face knew she saw things, too. But she mostly went about her regular way. With a little more swagger. But regular.

Things got real in a TownWatch meeting. She was taking notes. Some thugs harassed freshman girls from the high school from their van. She had all the details.  Made her mad. She used to be that age, once upon a time. Could be her own daughters. And she decided to be where she thought they would coincidentally be.

She watched them catcalling from their Ram tough signifying truck from her Subaru. Not just. Not just now. 

But her mouth felt funny. Watering. Like when you have to throw up, but can't. Like your first experience with too many girl drinks in college. And she was following them. And they got out in an apartment complex, and before she knew it, she was coming out of her car, and there were three guys who were just ugly. 

They were ugly. They were like abandoned baby ducks. They looked like their mamas didn't love them, girls didn't dig them, and their daddies didn't even teach them how to leave properly. She didn't know what she was fixing her mouth to say before she hollered, "Why have you been bothering with those girls?"

"Fuck you, Karen!"

She watched that white fur come all down her skin, more like icicles than hair, and her teeth felt very different in her mouth. And she didn't want to call the cops when they were so small, and her hunger felt so different. For red meat. For chasing skinny stupid things. 

"Fuck you all with a power tool, fool." She grinned, and it wasn't great. It was dangerous, and she was liking that. And they thought she was some middle-aged not a werewolf person.

So they squared up and went up to her. And she felt the thing inside her. The change thing. The hot, wet, weird, numb, not really there thing. They didn't get it. She was highly visible, but they didn't see she was a Goddamned Werewolf. So, she vamped.. 

"You don't want a piece of this." 

"We don't!" one of them said, and that was it. She went numb, and something animal did the rest. She didn't think what happened to them was her problem when she drove her way home, and she wasn't even sure it was her problem when she saw their bodies had been found on the news. 

She had her reasons.  And there would be reasons for every other one. She knew that for a verifiable fact. It was damn near political.