The Love we Hide (Gay Furry Romance/Thriller story) MA15+

C3P21 - Sticks

Dusk

A name sticks

Furs always used to ask me where my parents were. And I'd always give them this salted sort of look, the 'why the fuck does it matter to you' sort of look. I used to rationalise that as me being locked in the grieving process, bouncing between the 'denials' and 'bargaining', like a pinball on crack. Always that simple question – Where are your parents? Where are my parents? Kind of feels rubbery in my mouth, still.

Of course, it all started when I met Vincent.

The funny thing about Vinny, the thing I don't usually tell people – because no one would ever normally ask, the resemblance is uncanny – is that there was actually a him to meet. A strange sort of someone, bordering on something, but still someone I was able to talk to at the time. So... he's not so much of a brother in the womb sense. Not glistening in mum's arms, rancid with afterbirth... in fact they've never even met.

That day when I met him was when the salt started. When that liquorish, burning garden-hose question first got perched in my mouth, and the snow had been stacking so high up the windows of my house that I felt like I was in stuck in the very same snow globe I'd gotten dad as a Christmas present. Equally unplayed with, where the snow was left to its own devices, if you get what I mean.

So I've got this jacket on. And mums saying her classic mum sayings, and my dad is saying the complete opposite, as parents often do. I've got this snowboard perched under my arm that I'd nicked off one of my friends, an annoying sort of panther that I was a friend of simply because our mums were friends. I was young enough then for shit like that to be the norm.

I'm cruising down the street, thinking of this assignment I had due later that day that I knew I was going to get down – some visual arts shit where I had to mould something. And that was all that was going through my head when I first met him – making a kebab out of clay.

Suddenly the world is rushing up at me. I'm shoving my paws out in front of me and hitting the ice hard. Pain flares up from my knees and wrists. My ankles stretch at awkward angles from the snowboard I'm dragging along the ice behind me.

Ice.

Not snow: ice.

As I'm rubbing my head, I'm noticing what I tripped on and at the same time wincing in disgust. Roadkill of some sort, freshly butchered by natural causes. But the thing is, the thing that gets my curiosity sparking, is that I'm smelling burnt meat. That sizzling of rabbit, and it doesn't smell so bad.

I'm feeling over the group of ice across the footpath, how it thickens, becomes more watery as its getting closer to that dishevelled corpse. It's legs sticking out at weird angles. It's head missing. I'm too damn curious to consider it gross. I'm just trying to wonder how this thing got cooked.

I spin my head around, eyeing the trees in this forest. It's a dodgy sort of walk, the one to my friend's place.

Yet despite the darkness of the trees, I see a red... tendril tuck itself behind one of the closer birch trunks, just the second after I turn my head. I don't need to blink. There he is for a second: my soon to be brother, this strange, scaled, red thing. Staring at me with these eery eyes, right before he tucks himself back into his hiding spot.

There's mums voice springing up in my head, distant warnings to keep on walking. There's dad's voice, talking to mum about all these interesting cases he's reporting about, children going missing around the town at young ages. Too young to be me, but still, with this strange creature lurking just ahead of me, I'm thinking that thought. I know why I'm thinking it.