Sweet Revenge

By Julia O’Donnell

The blade pierced the skin, and bursts of silver fur erupted between the folds. My fingers elongated and grew slimmer, slowly at first, forming knobby tendrils of bone, stretching until I felt my wrist crunch and twist in upon itself. I felt the fracture without any pain at first, just stared in shock, until one moment when my entire body seemed to writhe and the pain melted me from within. I began to shriek from a place so deep within me, I think it did not exist in this world before I became this. The air came out of me, rushing, uncontrollably, unhinged, my jaw broke open and narrowed itself. The shriek became a wail and then a howl with a monstrous high pitched sound inside of it. I screamed again, and again, and again, until I screamed without ceasing.

I felt a ringing in my own head, my heart trembled in fear and power as it took over me. It split me open from the inside out, quite literally. My skin exploded from my body and I felt needles plunge from me into open space shimmering in the moonlight, forming a mane around my whole body. Where there should have been flesh and bone, there was monstrous fur and a misshapen body. Inside, sinews of muscle stretched themselves as if they had been in disuse for too long. Like a rubber band snapping they took over my insides.

The despair I had been fielding for years cut through me like a knife and I leapt forward. My wails thrust forward from me in growls and hisses at every creature that passed. I crawled between fences and over houses until I found my uncle’s house, where I had been wounded again and again as a little one. I tore his door from it’s hinges and shrieked in assertion of power in his door. I derived sick pleasure from standing on my two hind legs at his door and watching him quake with fear. I growled at him once again. He stuttered and trembled attempting to hide in the kitchen, and timidly grabbing a blade for cutting vegetables.

In this form, I was no longer helpless. I wailed in rage and I threw my teeth over his head until they came out of his head. They trickled out of him one by one as I discarded them like popcorn kernels. “Fuck him,” I swore as I tore him apart slowly. One piece of flesh at a time I dismantled him. His face for the innocent facade he played for my mother. One ear for the comfort I did not hear, the other for the comfort he did. One eye for what he saw of me, the other for what he did not see. His throat for the cruel words he uttered, every single finger that touched me, every strand of hair that fell over his beady eyes when he looked at me.

I learned that night, as mine started to consume me, that humans have a limit to their hatred. It raged like a fire that began in the soles of my feet, raging in the most ridiculous parts of my body even my toes, to the fiery eyes that get attributed to every redhead throughout time. I screamed from every one of my bones as I destroyed him. I would not be satisfied until there was nothing else, or until, it turns out, he was humiliated even in death. I strung his body around his house, flinging pieces of him around the room, but his mangled torso, with his offending male part attached I dragged outside. I flung it into the city square watching as his intestines flew from the body to cover the businesses and cobblestones.

Only once his mangled remains were left strewn about the square for others to find did I breathe again. He was done. He would hurt no one else. Not that that was quite what I cared about, but I savagely stalked away to hunt again, knowing the gaping wound in me would never be made whole, but resolute to fill it with the bodies of any who came into my path. The world would know the pain I felt, if it was last thing I did.