Fangs

By Priyansh Singh

James woke to the dreaded sound of his alarm clock ringing. He lifted his head… and let it fall down again.

The next time he woke up, he just about managed to look at his clock, he jumped out of covers like a cat with a pin in its bottom. It was 7:30! And school began at forty-five!

He put a pair of trousers and a shirt on, quite forgetting to brush his teeth, take a bath, or even eat breakfast. He threw on his backpack, grabbed the keys, and rushed out the door.

He looked at his watch: thirty-five already. Ten minutes to get to school. Then he remembered that he had a math test, which was around twenty percent of his grade. That information did not help him, except to give him more adrenalin. He began the run to school.

He soon realized that he wasn’t going to make it. He covered around two meters before realizing school was a quarter mile away. He was about to sob in despair when he heard a sharp crack, like someone snapping a whip.

What he saw made him rub his eyes, shake his head, and look again. In front of him, stood a huge, brick-red building: his school.

Was this another building? No- looking at the top, he saw the name Oakland Elementary School. It was his school in flesh and blood – or actually, brick and cement.

But how did he get here? There was no way he just speedran there.

Looking behind him, he saw a steaming cloud of dust, extending, say, a quarter mile away.

Or had he?

James shook the thought out of his head. There was a math test he had to get through. He would think about it later.

In the math room, his teacher, Mr. Chie Kenn (Real name; although no one compared him to poultry in front of his face) frowned at him. “Heathers. Good, we were just about to start.”

During the test, James chewed his pencil over a particularly tricky equation. He pulled it out to write down the answer, then froze.

There were puncture marks on the pencil.

He brushed his fingers over the top row of his teeth. When he looked at them, they glistened with blood.

No way his canines were that sharp.

He asked to go to the washroom. Looking at his teeth, he observed that they were so pointed that they were close to blurred. He was just about to wonder if some kind of bug had crawled into him and was collapsing his DNA, when he felt an itching in his armpit.

In normal circumstances, he would have dismissed it as a normal itch. But these weren’t ‘normal circumstances’, and he wasn’t going to let go anything out of line with him.

He pulled of his shirt and looked under him arm. He almost had a heart attack. Great tufts of black hair were sprouting from his skin, and as he watched they were curling around his shoulder!

He tried to swallow his fear. Fine. Okay. School day was almost over. He knew where his father kept some shaving cream and a razor. He would just quickly head home, and cut the hair off. Although he had a feeling it would take more than a little blade to remove all that hair. It would take a lawnmower.

James never thought that he been ever happier to hear the school bell ring. He kept his mouth firmly shut to avoid public observation of his dental anomaly, and threw on his jacket over his t-shirt, just in case his shirt slipped down a little and everyone took notice of his bad hair day. He began walking to the bus, as if someone could easily see his super-speed if he traced his way home on foot, and it would be very tempting for them to dial the FBI.

One guy looked at him funnily. “Halloween was last year, although that looks very real.”

As he walked away, James was struck with panic. He knew he hadn’t opened his mouth, and the jacket would have covered up all his upper body skin. So now what?

He rushed to the washrooms again. He was going to check the progress made on his Almighty Body Hair of Pre-Adolescence, when he noticed that he didn’t need to.

His eyes. They were glowing so red that they illuminated a five-meter radius around him. Come to think of it, now that he focused on how his vision looked, he noticed a slight reddish tint at the borders, and his sight itself was like looking through a light red screen, or as if someone had painted the aforementioned color onto his retinas.

This was seriously hard to cover. He just decided that he would concentrate all ocular abilities onto his shoes, and put his hood on low over his face.

In this way James stayed on the bus, practicing a possible future occupation as a Goth. He couldn’t possibly stay like this! He would have to tell someone about all of it; not like someone wouldn’t find out anyways. But the right people, like his parents, or teachers. He would find a cure, he would reverse this, he would-

The bus jolted to a halt, disrupting his thoughts. Right now, he decided to focus on He would get home. Bolting off of his seat, he ran down the aisle, jumped off the bus, and headed for the door. He unlocked the door, locked it tightly behind him, and ran for the bathroom.

As soon as James looked at the mirror, he realized there would be no cure- not for something as horrendous as this. As he watched, hair sprouted out of his torso, tearing through his shirt. Not any hair- fur. His red eyes flashed in fear as he saw what he saw. His lower face elongating into a snout. His canines narrowing and roughening into dentals sharper than acupuncture needles.

James was turning into a werewolf.

He stared at himself, until late evening when the full moon came out. Then he crouched on all fours and howled at the skies.

By Priyansh Singh