Teacup Werewolves
“What you have to understand is this: Some wolves are smaller than you.” He paused. “Some are bigger.”
It wasn’t just that he spoke slowly, although I finally understood why Southerners used so much contraction. He was either pausing or blanking dramatically. I could hear his colon.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“Let me put it this way: An adult male wolf ranges from about sixty-six to a buck eighty. Females are fifty to a buck twenty. What do you think a baby werewolf looks like?”
I shrugged. “A pup?”
“All werewolves are born fully grown,” he said, “like Frankenstein.”
“Are you saying Frankenstein is real?”
“Don’t be dramatic,” he said. “Want another guess?”
“I’m n— Okay. A… teacup werewolf?”
“I would genuinely like to see that.” He pronounced the third syllable like wine. “But no. Want a hint?”
I nodded.
“Consider this, Senator: The Law of Conservation of Mass.”
I might as well have asked who he had voted for. Only my opponents called me Senator, which was better than when they called me Mamn.
My supporters called me Bos. Mom had named me after Italian priest-cum-saint Don John Bosco. She was an old-Sunday-school Catholic who came very close to disowning me over global warming. She was also members of the Salesian Society, founded by Don John Bosco for “spiritual and corporal works of charity towards the young, especially the poor, and the education of boys to the priesthood.”
Basically, I was named after the Patron Saint of Pedophilia.
By the time I came out, I was already in politics. It had taken me some time to identify as a non-binary. I had been raised in a religion that valued traditional marriage. On the other hand, I had also been raised in a religion that valued pedophilia.
“The Law of Conservation of Mass,” I replayed, giving myself time to buffer.
He snapped his fingers, and I heard a knuckle crack. “Now you got it. Human comes first. Human is the base. Human is the baking soda of your bathbomb. Wolf is the glitter.”
That took even longer to buffer. I used to work at Flush. They sold lotion, soap, and makeup, but they were famous for their bath bombs. Most of them had glitter. One of them turned the water black, which did not go a long way towards making me feel clean, but it did make me reconsider my mother’s constant nagging to get re-baptized.
I never expected to get the job. I didn’t go outside often enough to get dry skin, only took baths when contemplating suicide, and wore just enough makeup for a natural look (moisturizer, mascara, eyeliner, cover up, concealer, blush, lip liner, lipstick, and setting spray). None of which I bought from Flush, because an ounce of #00 MJ foundation cost more than an ounce of cocaine in some markets.
“So a werewolf is actually…”
“Couple of people, sometimes. You get your babies, and they’re just a snout. Old people might be a rump. Now you would think this might lower the amount of werewolves, but you would not be accounting for something: The rise in obesity. A whopping 35% of the population are obese. And we cannot ignore the fact that obesity and feral werewolves are both distinctly rural epidemics.”
He paused, but only for breath. He hadn’t been expecting the laughter.
When it died down, he continued. “It’s like how vampires— Don’t ask me if vampires are real. It’s like how they can transform into a colony of bats equal to their anthropoidal mass. Except Dracula could just add or subtract a bat after Taco Tuesday. With wolves, the divisors aren’t all tidy like that. One person might be two or even three werewolves. Even four. Most I’ve seen is four. And a baby."
This time, the laughter paused for him.
“People have tried to tame them. They got that werewolf park in Dallas, and someone registered an emotional support werewolf in Austin, but one thing your rural areas got is a lot of hunters. Cottage industry here, werewolf hunting. Your little-girl guns aren’t going to work on that kind of hide. You’re going to need a .243. AR-15s are usually a .223.”
The Senators shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Maybe some of them needed to change their Depends, but I was thinking about the last school shooting.
Oregon... Colorado... I couldn’t keep them straight anymore, but I couldn’t forget the leaked footage either. A kid got his hands on an AR-15. He shot his classmates, his teacher, the janitor, and then himself. The way the bullets tore through them, it was like they’d been shot with baseballs. Forget femoral arteries. Their femurs were severed.
It had been the basis for groundbreaking public school reform. One graphene detector for every entrance and computer lab. The same kind we had here in Congress. (Nobody bought guns now that they could 3-D print their own.)
Everything I knew about guns came from Jared. He used to take me shooting. We even went to a machine guns range in Las Vegas when he and Mom got married.
He never let me touch the guns. The first time I fired one, I had been braced for the recoil. I hadn’t been braced for the noise.
A naked gunshot was about one-hundred-and-fifty decibels. Hearing it once without protection could cause permanent damage. Silencers (rebranded suppressors in the 70s to combat Hollywood tropes) didn’t actually silence a gun. They just made it sound like a smaller gun. You couldn’t suppress a small caliber revolver, but without gas escaping through the barrel-cylinder gap. By plugging the gap, revolvers could be silenced, or at least muffled enough to hit forty decibels.
More of a pop than a bang.
Jared’s favorite gun had been an antique revolver. A financial statement piece. Point and click. If it had been an iKel-Tec, the biometric lock wouldn’t have allowed me to pull the trigger.
“Now, I know, only 0.00000120048% of the population is affected with lycanthropy,” he continued, pronouncing the first syllable like lye. I didn’t know if that was right or not.
The werewolf situation had come as a surprise. Just one of those things that people didn’t understand until they moved South, like just how totally fucking racist it was, or that cockroaches could fly.
Epidemiology was still ongoing, but the smart money was on GMOs, global warming, or furries. The last one was probably a joke. It certainly wasn’t a very accurate representation of the furry fandom. How much sex could they have possibly been having?
“We are up to an even thirty million population. Here’s what that means: At any given time, in Texas alone, we have thirty to fifty feral werewolves.”
He paused again, but not for breath.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate, legit question—”
Pop.
About the author
Lucy Mihajlich lives in Portland, Oregon. Her first book, Interface, was chosen for the Multnomah County Library Writers Project, where it appeared on the list for Best of the Library Writer’s Project 2017.