Cat's and Dog's

Fire and ice... and cats

I shivered in the bed, the covers simultaneously too warm and not warm enough. I'd met a girl at school, Amber, and she'd suggested I join the writing club. I'd agreed wholeheartedly, loving the idea of a place I could write my stories, read the stories of others, offer advice, and be given the same. Though mostly I was drawn because of all the other sander-fans that would join. Amber was smart, peppy, and had reddish orange hair, which slowly became the mental image of my friend, Amber, on Wattpad.

I had gone to the first meeting and we'd talked afterwords, my constantly jovial attitude seeming to make her somewhat confused. She'd asked me if I knew what she was and I'd gotten confused, asked her what she meant. That's when her eyes had grown mischievous and she'd gotten sly. I only noticed after I got sick though. She had told me to try acting like my favorite animal over the next week, to see how my life improved. I'd blown it off, of course, but had eventually decided to try it out.

What you need to understand about me is, before the rest of this story happened, I was an overly optimistic, overly happy, extremely trusting, idiot.

I now regret that, to a small degree.

I gave it a shot, acting as much like a cat as I could. I was weird, and everyone knew it, so they passed it off as one of my many, quickly passing eccentricities. I thought it was one too, and so I took it to the extreme. I acted human while eating, but I was more... feral, when I ate the meat. I eyed everyone analytically through slitted eyelids, and I kept a fairly neutral expression on my face throughout the day. I moved like a cat, moving the entire left half of my body when I stepped before the right half of me followed. I slunk along at a pace that surprised people in the halls after they saw how smoothly I moved. When I began unconsciously yawning like a cat, my tongue curling and pushing out of my mouth, I began to worry.

I began toning it down, focusing on moving like everyone else at least. I say focusing because I had to focus. I found myself becoming more and more accustomed to the catlike gait I'd temporarily adopted. I had to focus on my walking or I would slip back into it. And I found I was growing more and more silent, watching everyone through my drooping eyelids. I confronted Amber and asked what was going on, but I grew confused when she just laughed before walking away; grew confused until I realized I had literally hissed at her. I started getting hot and cold flashes, baring my teeth and hissing to express discomfort or anger, and I grew increasingly wary of loud environments.

By Friday, I couldn't handle being in the school anymore. I was so terrified of Amber, the painfully loud noises, and the constant aggressive atmosphere I felt oozing out of the walls, that I actually threw up before I had to go. The shivering and temperature shifts grew worse after that, and my mother kept me home. And now here I was, sitting in a bed because laying down was painful, unable to think past my need to cool down and warm up, both so painful and desperate at the same time. I knew how to satisfy half of my need, the winters cold of the outside was the perfect thing to cool me down, but I had nothing to satisfy my need for heat. So I went outside.

My mother had left an hour ago, so she couldn't stop me; my brothers and father were at school and work respectively. I was home alone, and the cold wind outside froze me alive. I gasped at the sharp chill that attacked my skin, the burning heat still seeping through my body, and I felt the internal cold chills dance across my skin. I shivered, in a state of bliss and pain, before I felt something in my leg snap. I collapsed to the ground in pain, screaming as more bones all around me began to snap and crack, shift and melt, fade away or appear out of nowhere. Everything hurt, and I wanted to make it stop. But all I could do was scream.

When the agony stopped, most likely less than a minute later, I lay panting in a weird cloth like material. I shivered and thrashed, making it out of the thing with the sound of tearing cloth. When I was finally calm enough to look, I turned my head. Behind me were two things I was terrified to see. The first, and least shocking, were my clothes on the ground, the shirt torn down the front and the pants ripped and full of tears. It looked like I'd been raped, and I wasn't there with the clothing. That lead into the second thing I saw, this thing absolutely terrifying me. Instead of seeing legs, feet, or my human hips, I saw the hindquarters of a small, grey-black, house-cat.