I grip it with both hands and throw it as hard as I can. It lands on the rug with a dull sound, like a human head hitting there instead of the wood. It lies there, askew, with one stiff paw stuck up in the air. I sit up, staring, as my heart does the sprint the rest of me refuses to make, and I say out loud, “No.”
My voice sounds strong, but my entire body is shaking.
The scratching in the wall pauses like a shy animal caught mid-chew.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand with such determination.
The room tilts, just the way it does when you have a fever.
I walk unsteadily to the doll and pick it up. I carry it back to the closet and put it away with such care that my hands feel like someone else’s; pushing, aligning, smoothing the ratty collar down around its rancid neck.
For a second I have an image of biting it, of taking it in my teeth and shaking it, and I am so disgusted with myself my vision whites out.
I close the closet door and turn the knob and then keep my hand there, gripping until the metal heat transfers to my skin, and I listen. I listen so intently.
No sound.
The scratching has stopped.
Relief is a cheap drug, immediate and bright.
I let out a laugh so small it could be an exhale. Good. That’s what I wanted. Everything in its place. Everything quiet. See how that works.
Iwake before my alarm because my skin is buzzing. It’s a furred, electric hum that doesn’t stop when I hold my breath. It itches without offering the relief of a good scratch.
It prickles.
It whispers.
It’s wrong.
The first thing I see is the halo on my pillow; a ring of fine dark threads around where my cheek must have rested, like the wilted stems of flowers after a long party. My sheets are a mess. My nerves are a mess. The back of my hands look… soft, but not human-soft.
The hair I shaved last night has returned not as stubble but as a tide, edging past my wrists now, wicking light in the gray dawn.
My forearms are carpeted, as if the night had been long enough for me to crawl through some ancient tunnel and come back with it still clinging to me.
I sit up too fast, and the room swings. The closet door is cracked open the width of a smile, and the long dark mouth beyond it breathes out a smell like dust, cedar, and something sweetly rotten.
I feel that smell deep in my nose, in the high caves behind my eyes.
The scratching I pretended not to hear in the walls last night follows me up out of sleep now; a faint papery scramble that knows my name. It always knows my name. It says it with a rasp. Briar. Briar. Briarr.
The bathroom mirror is a traitor. I avoid it because I already feel it watching, but my eyes find their way to it anyway, magnetic with dread.
There I am, and I am not.
The fur has crept onto my cheeks in a scatter of patches, a constellation that maps a territory I didn’t authorize. There’s a shadow along my jaw that isn’t a shadow. The down along my cheekbones catches light the way peach fuzz does on girls with soft stories; only this is a story written in all the wrong strokes. My lips look smaller. My nose tip looks… darker? My eyes are huge, ringed, catching too much. My pupils are fat and lazy in the dim.
No. No. Noooo.
I pull the shower curtain closed like it will hide the world from me and turn on the light with my elbow because suddenly, the idea of touching the switch with my furred hand makes me feel like crying.
The brightness is surgical. Cold.
The razor waits on the edge of the sink like a challenge. I pick up the pink disposable razor, pretending to be calm. No, Iam calm because I am not a drama queen. I am contained, I am civilized, I fix things.
The first pass through the hair on my forearm makes a sound like a whisper being cut in half, and the razor clogs immediately. The fur is too long. As I rinse it, hair eddies in the bowl like little drowned weeds.
