Time To Change

 The air in the cramped kitchen grew instantly cold, the kind of sudden chill that makes your breath bloom into white mist. Then came the sound.

It wasn’t just a rumble; it was a deep, wet, subterranean grinding from somewhere beneath my ribs. My stomach knotted violently, a sudden spasm so intense it dropped me to my knees on the linoleum. I knew deep down this was the sign of the change again.

It was starting earlier tonight. The moon hadn't even cleared the tree line.

I gripped the edge of the counter, my knuckles turning white, then a sickening yellow as the pressure built beneath the skin. A wave of intense, oily heat flooded my throat, tasting of copper and bile. I gasped for air, but my lungs felt compressed, squeezed by a ribcage that was suddenly, agonizingly, beginning to expand.

*Snap.*

The sound echoed in the quiet house like a dry branch breaking. It was my left clavicle fracturing, sliding, and lengthening. I screamed, but the sound died in my throat, morphing into a wet, bubbling choked rasp.

The true horror of the change isn’t just the pain; it’s the sheer, unadulterated filth of it. The human body doesn't just magically shift—it tears itself apart to make room for the beast.

My fingernails blacked, splitting down the middle with a wet *pop* as thick, curved talons forced their way out through the bleeding quick. I watched, paralyzed by a mix of agony and morbid fascination, as dark, bristling coarse hair sprouted violently from the weeping wounds around my cuticles, rapidly spreading up my forearms.

Another spasm hit my gut, harder this time. I vomited, but it wasn't food. It was dark, clotted blood and a couple of my own molars, pushed out of my gums by the massive, jagged canines erupting from behind them. My jaw unhinged with a horrific, wet crunch, elongation forcing my face forward into a sickening, distorted snout. The skin of my cheeks tore open at the corners, unable to stretch far enough, leaving ragged, dripping flaps of flesh.

I rolled onto my back, kicking wildly as my boots split open, my feet flattening and lengthening into powerful, digitigrade paws. The bone agony was absolute, a roaring fire in my marrow. Through a vision rapidly blurring into a terrifying, monochromatic crimson, I saw the moon finally crest the horizon, casting a pale beam through the window.

The human mind was slipping away, drowning in a rising tide of static and ancient, predatory hunger. The grumbling in my stomach had stopped. The emptiness was there now. A vast, hollow, burning void that only hot, pulsing meat could fill.

And out on the quiet street, I heard the distant, unsuspecting laughter of the neighbors walking home.Time to forefill my hunger.