Changes, Confrontations, Consequences

Then on the eighth day, I woke up. I was… cured I supposed. I was well-rested, no lingering joint pains, no flu, no fever. I leaped out of bed and only later would realize that I didn't need my glasses. Considering that I was 25 and had been wearing glasses since I was 10. I thought that was strange.

When that perfect vision suddenly became near-perfect night vision, I went to see an optometrist. He said my eyes seemed fine. Nothing unusual about them. But he was confused as well – I'd bought two pairs of glasses from him as a student.

The month of July was a taxing one as the changes continued. My hearing became ultrasensitive, and I was able to hear hearts beating and had to live with another headache from hell as I adapted. Cynthia did not quite know how to deal with me and neither did I.

I was moody, cranky, irritable all the time. There were flashes of head pain and sometimes migraines that lasted for days that no over-the-counter painkiller could even remotely help me deal with. My senses seemed to be either working on overdrive or were not working at all. I saw doctors, went for medical scans, MRIs and CTs and they all couldn't seem to find anything wrong with me whenever I went.

My fiancé was scared – and I don't blame her really – because of the changes in my personality, my mood swings and all. She started spending a lot more time "at work." Maybe I'm partially to blame for how things would turn out.

Perfect vision and superior hearing were great to have but I found myself craving very rare steak. I would fall asleep in bed but wake up in the middle of the night in the most bizarre places that included the sofa, the balcony, and the bathtub twice. I never mentioned the chewed raw steaks on the kitchen floor to my fiancée. I thought Lynx had somehow gotten into the fridge.

When my sense of smell went into overdrive, I was in the bathroom taking a shower. I could smell the subtlest of scents and found that everyone has a unique scent that is as individual as fingerprints and DNA. I could smell my own scent, that of my fiancé, that of Lynx, and a trace of something…someone else.

My fiancé came home from work that day and I nearly died. That trace scent in the bathroom was all over her, mixing with hers. Masculine, unfamiliar, aftershave or cologne, heat, and musk. My brain put it all together before I could even process it: Those scents on her had been there, for weeks.

Even if I did not believe it, some part of my mind was telling me that I needed concrete evidence, the undeniable kind. I thought it was a heart-versus-head debate. It was something far more sinister, inside my head that helped me make detailed plans to capture concrete evidence.

Being unemployed, I had all the free time I could possibly need to play detective, even as I grew stronger and more agile during those few weeks, losing the minor beer belly that had started to grow.

I found myself growing stronger, more agile with a better sense of balance. I began tailing my fiancée and met her lover on the second day of my hunt. Every year digital cameras get smaller, boasting better picture and sound quality and they still record the same kinds of depressing audio-visual garbage. Her illicit rendezvous took place two or three times a week, always at the same hotel, always in the same room. Turns out, he was the General Manager of the property and was screwing my fiancée to screw his own cheating wife.

The first of August is a public holiday in Switzerland – National Day – when I chose to confront Cynthia about her indiscretions. The metaphorical love boat went over Niagara Falls to find the sharp rocks at the bottom. Accusations lead to raised voices accompanied by twenty minutes of denials. Then the pictures forced a confession with accompanying harsh words and foul language. They had been sleeping together for six months… and that was all it took.

I fell apart pretty quickly. Something inside me whispered that the truth was out and that I could now do something about all of it. Pain. Anger. Betrayal welled up in me and in the midst of all that, I slammed my fist into the dining table and punched right through the wood. That shocked her. What scared her was when I pulled my hand out, knuckles bloodied with splinters that I didn't seem to notice or care about. She saw something in my eyes that utterly terrified her and she paused long enough to grab her phone, purse, and flee.

I assume that she went to her lover - because I do not know or care – as the front door slammed behind her, hung pictures rattling in their frames as the rest of the apartment shook as in a seizure, the final exclamation point on her departure. Blood from my hand dripped onto the floor, and that was it: I realized that I was single, without a job, without a place to stay, and nowhere to go. I think the appropriate term is "psychological break" as emotions bubbled out of control and then, for the first time it happened. I changed.

I remember the physical aspect of that first change, what we would call "shift" acutely. None of it hurt much, at first but it was the feeling of having ants crawling beneath my skin, my heart pounding in my chest like a jackhammer, adrenalin, rage, hatred all flushing through me when my skin exploded in a mix of burning and itching.

My skin warped and stretched, as bones cracked and shifted without bursting out of my agony-wracked flesh. It felt like my bones were being altered at the whim of some mad flesh crafter. That's when I screamed, as pain like powdered glass in an open wound flayed every nerve.

My face twitched and I felt my face shatter, and then reform. I could not scream, I could not cry for help, I could do nothing as I fought within my skull to maintain control, as some primal animal with a bloodlust awoke within me.

I must have passed out… but I don't actually know for how long. I was still me, in mind, but my body was different. There was aching and soreness. The ache in my lower back was a throb in time to my heartbeat. I tried not to breathe because I could smell blood, and the stink of something, like spoilt milk and mint.

It took long minutes for me to open my eyes, terrified of what I would see. Things looked normal enough, but the colors of everything seemed softer, somehow more muted, with shades of gray and black. But if I focused on something, it came into incredible focus. I could even see the motes of dust in the carpet underneath my face.

I brought my hand up to my face and completely lost my mind. My hands looked normal but were partially curled, like claws. Acting on an instinct I didn't understand, I tensed my knuckles, and claws extended from my fingertips. I was still lying down – probably a good thing – as I just played with them. Extend. Retract. Extend. Retract. Just trying to understand what I was seeing.

I still don't know or remember how I made it from the dining room to the living room.

I gave up trying to understand that after a few minutes and managed to roll upright into a sitting position. There was a sharp stab of pain at the base of my spine. And I scrambled immediately to my feet, promptly overbalanced and crashed straight through the glass-topped coffee table in the living room and also catch the side of my face on the sofa.

Glass punctured into me, but I had managed to catch the thing that had hurt when I sat on it. I stared at it, blinking owlishly in confusion. It twitched in synch with my confusion and lack of understanding of this entire situation. I was holding a tail. I have a TAIL?!

Between the pain and confusion of everything that happened, I don't remember passing out. But I did remember waking up due to the sandpaper texture of Lynx's tongue, lapping at my cheek and meowing incessantly in my ear. Vertigo and nausea raced through me as I raised my head and studied the damage and the stench of blood that was almost physical in its intensity.

Unsteadily, I got my phone out of my pocket and managed to croak out my address, before deciding that I'd worry about whether or not I got my address right when… if I woke up…