Sporadic Thrum

This piece is a little dark, I know. I'm working on writing from POVs that don't closely resemble my own in an effort to expand my creative horizons. Thanks for reading, guys.  - Rose

I am not a human being.

That's what I'm supposed to be. In body and voice, it's what I am. Four limbs cinched into the flesh of a bipedal trunk, a set of ground-down molars and short brown hair. A feminine mouth with thin lips that are pink unless they are purple - which is more than often - and flickering eyes with white spaces at the edges. But inside of me, in the throbbing flesh bound between the bolsters of my ribcage, there is something that is decidedly unhuman. Undeniably different.

"How are you today?"

A normal response would be a lukewarm smile, an upward dash of pretensive joviality accompanied by a momentary furling of my eyebrows.

"Fine, thank you."

And if I were going all the way, if I decided to really push my boundaries, I might even add,

"...what about you?"

But I never do those things. When I'm asked,

"How are you?"

my instinct is to curl my fingers into claws. Flinch and furrow my neck down until my spine clenches up and curves behind my neck like electrified animal fur, allow the sounds I've learned to stifle within my gut to rumble up through my throat and wrench out through my contorted mouth. Bare my decidedly unthreating human fangs and wordlessly promise the person who spoke to me that, if they were to continue speaking, those teeth would not hesitate to bury their stubby selves within vulnerable flesh.

I do not like being spoken to. I hate the petty facial expressions that accompany spoken sentences and paragraphs, the emotive hand gestures that punctuate a speaker's point. I loathe catching the soft whitemint scent of mouthwash as someone else speaks to me. But most of all, I detest the fact that I am able to understand through experience the thoroughly human way I am being communicated to.

It is simple to silence a person. Vocal chords are frail things, easily severed by small, sharp objects if only one knows where to insert them. But even animals comprehend consequences; even the fiercest of us fear cages. I understand that giving in to my primal impulses means being hurled behind a set of bars.

So I skulk. I keep to corners and alleys, murky places that reek of feline, narrowing my haunts down to a few select places where I am not encompassed by the overpowering odors of human fragrances. I am reluctant to wash my own body, allowing sweat and dirt to stifle the mirk of my own skin and replace it with the stench of street.

People cringe when I encounter them. Their bodies curl away from me, being careful not to glance at me in my eyes because maybe a subconscious part of them already knows what they will find. They all move the same way, a pack of deer with the instinct to survive bred into their bearing. They are too socialized to consciously avoid me, but too alive to neglect to do so.

That is when it is most difficult to stop myself, because, when they move away, I long to chase. My blood rushes up through my throat and burbles thickly in my skull; the tendons in my legs compress until my muscles tremble. Even my teeth ready themselves, rinsing themselves in watery saliva.

Do it.

No. Do not do it. Teeth mean bars.

You are already trapped.

I am not trapped. Not behind bars.

Not behind bars, maybe. In your body, yes. Free yourself.

I am already free.

But I am not free. I am not free and I know it. Because all of me is bound to the prey; all of me belongs to the prey, and when the prey leaves, I go with it. The air in my lungs belongs to it. The sporadic thrum in my chest belongs to it. All of me belongs to it, has always belonged to it, and will never stop belonging to it.

Maybe, if the prey stopped existing, I would stop belonging to it.

Maybe, if I stopped the prey from existing, I would finally be free.