I Am a Werewolf

fiction by Jason Edwards

from Diary of a Wolf Man by Paul Lucas:

I am a werewolf. Do you want to me to talk about the change? It hurts. Do you want me to talk about running free in the woods? It’s exhilarating. There’s really nothing more for me to say. Ask a ballerina what it’s like to perform in front of a theater, packed. She’s lithe, she’s supple, she’s graceful, she has dancing in her DNA– but not words. She can’t tell you. And even if she had the right words, you wouldn’t understand. She’s an alien, she’s a one-way mirror. I’m a werewolf. I’m blood and fear, moonlight and rage. I might as well talk about quantum physics.

Or molecular biology. My condition is not natural. I’m the one percent who survives one percent of the time. A werewolf is nothing but the inevitable consequence of metabolism taken to the utmost extreme. The beast hunts its prey, and devours the protein. But it must be living protein. So the beast infects its prey with enzymes that keep it alive. The prey burns through its energy stores, begins converting its own body into more protein. It lives while the beast feeds. Eventually, even magic cannot keep the carcass alive. The beast leaves behind a pile of offal.

Sometimes, but very rarely, the prey escapes before the beast is done eating. But it is infected, and it continues to change. It goes mad. It really is very painful. You don’t know how painful it is, and you will never know. Pain is just a word, and words have no meaning, wrapped in that kind of Hell. Hell is just a word too. Eventually, the body dies, the beautiful complicated interlocking systems broken down, converted to a pile of protein. It’s almost worse, to die like that for nothing. If you’re not even food, what’s the point.

And sometimes, even more rarely, the prey escapes, and it’s only barely infected. The enzyme gets into the blood, into the brain, into the endocrine system. The body burns, hot, and in this early stage, you can never get enough to eat. You have never know such hunger. Naturally, at first, you turn to sweet things, sugary foods. That kick. But it’s just a kick. Just a punt, and you need a catapult. You need a rocket launch. If you’re lucky- actually, if you’re lucky, you starve to death. They find you twisted on your kitchen floor, emaciated and drained, your skin still hot for days.

But if you can get on top of it, if you can stay fed, if you can get that protein, you can survive. That’s what I did. It chased me through a city park, had me, bit me, and ran with me into the middle of the road. We were hit by a car. I woke up in a hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses. They were pumping me full of protein. I got on top of it. I survived.

Why wolf? It’s in our DNA, all animals share DNA, and the enzyme just reprograms you for a little while. It would be elegant if it wasn’t so horrifying. The full moon rises, and ancient strands of valine, threonine, alanine, and glycine, time wearied patterns, respond to the pull and begin to devour you from the inside. You grow, literally grow, like a baby grows into a young adult, but in the space of a few hours instead of a few decades. This is what I mean when I say it hurts.

It’s an efficient process but it consumes unworldly amounts of energy and there’s nothing left to do then but feed. Find something alive and keep it alive until it’s dead and then find something else and do it again. You’re gifted with all the tools to do this: hearing and smell and eyesight and speed and agility and, oh, right, what do you call the opposite of morality?

Because you’re aware, you’re so aware of every single moment. There’s no amnesia. A creature that grows from man to wolf in the time it takes to watch a bad movie has the advantage of certain evolutionary benefits– the man who woke up in his own bed, washed of the night’s blood, was easily naturally selected over the man who woke naked in a field surrounded by slaughter with no memory except yesterday’s growling stomach.

This is why I don’t talk about the change, talk about running in the woods. Those are romantic notions, and ask yourself this the next time you’re tooth-deep in a piece of fried chicken and you forget for a second that you have a job and a family and a cock and a Playstation: what if your entire existence could be defined in that salty bite? What if, when you took that bite, the result wasn’t bloat and shame, grease and fatigue, but instead it meant strength and power and more rage than any one man can justify stifling? Would you, at that moment, answer silly questions about how the fried chicken was coated with flour, why they chose those colors for the paper napkins? No. You would just keep eating. Just keep eating and eating and eating and eating. Until it was all gone.