El started calling me “woof paws” because I couldn’t convince her black wolves are super rare and usually have white spots around their lips. Also because she took sadistic glee in calling me by a name that made sense to no one else, because they literally could not see how it applied. The implication of that, of course, is that we saw one another more. Our fourth date finally moved to El’s home, which was a very cute studio apartment-plus – you know, a studio apartment with enough square footage to do more than stand in and a kitchen. She was much more judicious in her money spending than I: her apartment was a menagerie. It was one with no pungent odors, though, because it was one with arthropods, reptiles, and a pair of axolotls. She introduced me to all of them, but, uh… uh…

An Aviculara aviculara pink-toed tarantula named Pink Feet, a Grammostola rosea rose-haired tarantula named Rose, a Charina trivirgata rosy boa also named Rose, a Python regius ball python named Reggie, and the two axolotls were Black and White, because the former was albino and the latter was melanistic.

I may have possibly maybe used mnemonic tricks to memorize them all on first meeting. Also, it helped to have had training memorizing esoteric names for things for my job.

Most of them were even tempered, though Black and White were easily the least cuddly. I felt spurned, but Rose and Rose were both extreme cuddlers who must have had tremendous empathy to know I needed their touch and love. I forgave El her lack of imagination in naming schemes because, well, her mother had clearly named her after a letter of the alphabet and done so in the cruelest way possible: by having the name start with a different one. She explained, though she didn’t need to, that she could only afford all of them and her other niceties while going to school if she lived in a studio like this a couple miles from the university. I noted that the ceilings were pretty high for a studio. She agreed and drew my attention to where the ceiling seemed like it had been chopped in half and one half had sunk down by three feet directly opposite a skylight.

“That’s why I built the loft.”

“What.”

“I’d been here a year and wanted a loft. So I built one.”

“The landlord didn’t…?”

“What, mind that I’d put a 1.5 multiplier on his property for free? He whined a lot during the early phases of construction, but he’s afraid of spiders.”

Ah-hah. He was insane, of course. Rose had settled into my curled hand and was peeking out between my fingers, content as long as she was enclosed. Spiders are great.

“Mostly I worried about the menagerie – that’s why I have so many quilts. Keeps the noise down.”

I had in fact noticed that the couch we were sitting on had, instead of pillows, a collection of variously folded quilts. “Right… so how do you afford all this and dental school?” It was rude to ask, but she had screamed at me in broad daylight in front of a dozen people for trying to keep her from falling down. Our relationship had rapidly become candid to a degree other people would call boorish.

“Commissions. I do woodwork.”

I didn’t see any carvings around, or wood scraps or tools. I made a skeptical show of looking for them. “Do you do a lot?”

“No, but I’m good with money. I’ve never understood how people aren’t.”

I felt chastised. I was terrible with money. I was just lucky to be well-employed and have a very narrow band of expensive tastes, as well as, recently, a terrifying patron spirit with apparently infinite wealth. “Can I see some?”

“I don’t do any for myself – it’s just for income. There’s a creative space rental with a woodshop called Extra Creative Space on the edge of south city. Pain in the ass to get to.” She rubbed her jaw. “It would be nice if I could sell it somewhere, but most little places that do that aren’t up to snuff.”

“Okay can you at least show me a picture? You can’t brag like that and not at least show me a picture.”

“Ugh fine. It’s weird, though.”

I waggled my furry fingers in front of her face. It felt so alien and good to be playful. “Same.”

She smiled at that, her face crinkling into the increasingly familiar shape that put a misty sadness on top of the clear joy. She tapped her phone’s password in and started scrolling through photos. “Oh, here we go.”

I took the phone when it was offered, gave Rose back to her, and squinted. “Did you do the mounting board?” There was a warthog head mounted on a wall in some cabin. The backing for it was, uh. It was polished, so it had that going for it. It was not impressive.

“Ugh no. I did the head.”

“You what.”

“I carved the whole head. Well, most of it. Found the skull, so I used the tusks.”

“So you carved all the stuff that’s impossible to carve.”

“You got it.”

My “all this shit is impossible” senses started tingling and I remembered that she could see the fur on my arms and face. I felt myself start to shut down. Sure, she hadn’t done anything actually magical, but that was… close. I zoomed in on the picture. The russet coloring on the hog lacked the irregular gloss that often gave away faux fur. It looked matte and bristly. I zoomed in again. I could see each individual hair. That was impossible. That was literally impossible.

“How do you do the fur?”

“That’s not fourth date material.”

She was looking directly at my face. She could tell it had darkened, but she didn’t know why. I pressed on. “How much did you make off this one?”

I think she calculated that she would drive me away if she demurred again. “Twenty thousand. And she tipped a case of wine.”

I could believe it. I would have believed another order of magnitude higher. “How long did it take?” There was a war in me. I was scared. I could feel the panic creeping up my throat, closing it off like someone choking a tube of toothpaste for its last molecule of fluoride. It made retreating to breathing techniques hard. At the same time, I was flushed with excitement. I was interested in something. I wanted to know more. I wanted to see it, touch it, watch El work on it. I wanted to tell her it was worth ten times what she had been paid, if she could find the right clientele.

“Four months. Five, counting the eyes. But that’s ‘cuz I only had time on weekends.”

I used my interest to fight against the panic that ratcheted up my throat at how that couldn’t be true, and wheezed, “Epoxy or glass?”

“Wood with a lot of lacquer. I layered it o- um. We’ll call that fifth date material. Fifth date is when people divulge how to make eyeballs.” She gave one of those sad smiles. It was the first time it hadn’t been spontaneous and I felt guilty for forcing her to force a smile. “Are you okay?”

“Uh.” She valued honesty. I was reminded of my encounter with Harry, when he had asked the same question, but provided his own answer. “No. Panic attacks.”

She gently took her phone away from me. “How bad do they get?”

I remained hunched over as though I still had her phone in my hand. The more I thought about how badly I didn’t want to panic, the more I panicked. I reached up to where Mufasa usually was. I hadn’t brought him. What a stupid decision, to not bring my support animal. “Bad. But they’re new.”

“What did your therapist say to do?” She was next to me but wasn’t touching me. We hadn’t progressed to cuddling, yet. So far, that intimacy was just for me and Rose and Rose. I needed it to not stay that way.

“Breathing techniques, but I feel like I can’t breathe.”

“Let me see…” She left. I couldn’t see her. I could hear her opening doors and cabinets and probably leaving. I thought about her not coming back. I thought about her rolling me out of her apartment like a dead body. I thought about being alone forever with a new job I hated already and no skills but being bad at piano and nascent alcoholism and a mirror demon corrupting me and how everything weird was a desperate hallucination to pull me from the brink of

“Sniff this.” A mug rose up to my face and wafts of sweet and earth and flora got pushed into my nose from the motion alone. “Lavender and vanilla.”

My nose, of its own volition, opened up in curiosity, as noses do. That tiny inspiration sucked fresh air into my lungs and began oxygenating blood that had been telling a scared brain it was suffocating. The scents, some of the very few with consistently observed effects on the body and mind, told the same brain to relax. It was suspicious, but the monkey piloting it insisted that it was far more dangerous to be acting like an alien in front of another monkey than to be actually dying, which meant that together, the whole bodymind needed to get its shit together, and that inhaling these gentle fragrances would help.

I breathed.

A slow pattern of of respiration tiptoed out of the back of my brain while my gaze continued to drift into the infinite horizon. Steadily, my shoulders relaxed. Steadily, my posture recovered. Steadily, I blinked and accepted the mug from El.

“Um,” I asked, “how long did that last?”

“Only a few minutes. I’ve never seen someone have one of those before.” She didn’t sound concerned or curious. It was more like seeing a new flower or a new appliance, to her. I think I preferred that over real interest.

“That’s good.” I had a dozen things I wanted to ask her still, but even bringing the questions forward in my mind had the vertigo feeling of stepping towards of cliff that follows from a tiny decline. Slipping without slipping. Infinitely and kaleidoscopically imagining falling.

Anyway, I gave El an awkward side hug and left.

I had kind of wanted to have sex with El. Not really wanted to, but kind of. It sucked that my whole crotch region was covered in fur, now, so the thoughts of both sex and masturbation started up a whole suite of dissociative and dysphoric sensations, leaving me in a stew of libido and anxiety that surely the entire Internet doesn’t experience regularly. Ultimately, I managed to bury those feelings down with the panic under a giant, cornfield-wide layer of apathy, then undid all of that progress by deciding to play some piano.

Claws happily do not inhibit piano playing. I picked a sad, neoclassical piece that sounded like rain. It was Saturday afternoon. Mufasa picked his lock and came to join me, for the price of a blueberry I’d kept in a little coin purse. “Where were you, bud?” I muttered pointlessly. And then, I shoved myself out of my arms and hands and into the keys. I was tired of hating myself today. I needed anything else to happen, and we’d gone on a coffee date so a depression nap was out of the question. So I played.

People who play instruments often develop a peculiar sensation in which the instrument feels like an extension of the body. This happens with cars, too, and weapons – we gladly extend our concept of self to include tools we control. We don’t have nerve fibers that extend out to those objects, but because we’re so attuned to them, their vibrations and sounds translate easily to the mind, so that when the hammer strikes, we know the shape of its target and when we hit a pothole, we know the impact on the axle. For a piano, it’s a little different, especially an electric one, because there are no strings and no acoustic body and no rocking of wood and fabric, but even so, I felt I could offload my consciousness into its synthetic voice.

In that way, I realized how loud the mental noise of moment to moment had been all day. The chatter of worry and self-talk slipped off because so much mind was melding with the music. Emotion burbled to the surface, able to overcome the buzzing swarm. Crescendo, sforzando as a sob, and staccato breaths. A suspended 1-4-7 resolving into a soothing minor, then flowing rubato from phrase to phrase as thoughts of El and the recognized feelings I had quickly developed surrounding her took shape for me, instead of being gnat-like fragments pushed aside by worry. They floated and condensed rallentando into an epiphany, that I hadn’t wanted to be with someone since the last time I’d lost someone. I didn’t love her and it wasn’t romance – it was simpler. It was someone who lessened the load, something novel, and of course I was scared: She was more than a witty, beautiful, talented person to me. She was a witty, beautiful, talented person and proof I could still feel. I smiled and relaxed.

That was a mistake.

Therapy went reasonably well. I wasn’t sure whether every therapist started like this, but Lori asked me what I wanted to talk about. This was our third meeting. The second one, I had spent nearly half of in sullen silence to hide how exhausted I was, then pretended El was the only thing I wanted to talk about. I couldn’t do that a second time in a row. I was a little embarrassed, but I pulled up my notepad app on my phone to show Lori I’d taken some pathetic little bullet points of notes attempting to track my lost time. She cooed in approval. I was mortified. It was obvious I’d spent no more than ten seconds a day on her homework assignment.

“Any effort is good,” she insisted. “I cannot tell you how many clients would not do even the first bullet point you have here. It looks like these are pretty regular – all at mealtimes. Are these your mealtimes?”

I nodded. I wanted to tell her I was living with a malevolent spirit who took over my brain in the day and my body at night, and in the day it was just so we could have meals together and at night sometimes it went out and commissioned carved gemstones – well, once. I distractedly touched the one on my necklace. However, I was still holding a grudge that she refused to acknowledge I had arrived at her office by using a plant in my house as a doorknob. I knew it was a bad idea not to tell her, but I refused on principle. She wanted trust? She could earn it.

“Does anything strange happen during that time?”

My eyes said yes, but my mouth said, “Sometimes I do the dishes.” That was true.

“Are there other menial tasks that trigger this lost time?”

That was a surprising insight. I gave it real thought before I could be petty enough to decide not to. “No. Laundry is boring as hell and I have to do all of it myself.”

She hung onto that. Goddammit I hate working with a professional. She shifted her position in curiosity. “Yourself?”

“Uh. I just, uh.” A pitying look came over her face. She knew I was about to lie to her. “I feel like maybe I have dissociative identity disorder. Is it still called that?”

“You know that is deflecting.”

I felt childish. “Yeah.”

“I won’t make you share anything. It is your time and your money, and I am happy to get paid to sit here and doodle while you say nothing at all. But it is more interesting for both of us to understand what is happening, so that we can try to solve it and work towards a healthier mind.” Her faint accent and the way her voice was gently clipped allowed her to make it an admonishment as well as an invitation.

Fuck her. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Then we will not.” She scribbled a note for herself. My ears burned. “How about this girl you are dating now? How is that going?”

This, I could be honest about. Nothing weird had happened here unless you counted a collection of snakes and spiders and axolotls as weird. “I, uh. Went to her place.”

Lori smiled earnestly. Her smile had gorgeous wrinkles. “Yes?”

“And had a panic attack.”

“Oh dear. I am sure that is not all that happened, but how did you handle it?”

I described the scene faithfully and finished hollowly with, “Then I just kind of left.”

“I know you will not like hearing this, but I think that you did remarkably well, just being honest with her and letting her help you.”

“I don’t want to scare her aw-w-w.” My lips trembled stupidly on the word. “Away.”

Lori didn’t say anything for about ninety seconds. Instead, she first pushed a tissue box that was made of living bamboo towards me. Then, once I had cleaned up my face, she inhaled deeply. I inhaled, too. She exhaled slowly, much more slowly than she had inhaled. I exhaled, too. We did that for a little while. I picked up some wooden puzzle toy she had left on the table between us to keep my fingers busy so I wouldn’t claw at my pants again.

“What was your last relationship like?”

I told her. It had been mostly teen stuff, just older. Not totally juvenile – he and I had both gotten our virginal teen romances out of the way by then. But, the honeymoon period had been long, fights had been florid and dramatic, passion had run blazing hot, and it had ended in a bonfire that had sort of… slowly guttered out, and smoldered, and consumed everything put into it long after it should have died.

“Ah. How do you feel about it now?”

I guess I hadn’t realized how long it had actually kept going after it was over. “Kind of empty, I guess.”

“That can be a very draining experience. Do you still think about it now?”

“No.” Yes. “Sometimes.” I worried until yesterday that I would never love again or care about anything ever again, and then as soon as I decided I could, a demon possessed my body and I lost the entire evening. “It kind of came to a head yesterday.”

“Do you think it caused the panic attack?”

A magical woodcarving of a boar had caused the panic attack because sometimes I see a man with a stag’s head and I’m sad and alone a lot. “Yeah, maybe.”

“I think that you should keep seeing El, and that you should be as honest as possible with her about all of these things, but not all at once. Too much too quickly can lead to a sort of burn-out between two people. She is already likely reassessing her investment after witnessing a panic attack.”

“Yeah.”

“I know that hurts to hear, but it is important to recognize and prepare for. Do you want to maybe practice some breathing and mindfulness, as part of that preparation?”

I nodded.

Anyway, that ended. I stepped “back” into my apartment from her office (through my bromeliad in the window) and thought about what I’d do with the sense of lightness that came with finishing therapy. It was a floating sensation, not an easy one. Therapy was exhausting. It was cleansing, though, and it seemed to create mental space to take care of thoughts and ideas I couldn’t normally make myself act on. I went downstairs and moved the mirror inside my closet facing the wall. My reflection in it seemed disconsolate, but at least had the grace to show up on time this time. I mumbled vitriol at it.

My blackout the previous day had not resulted in any new wounds, any new furniture, any new jewelry, any outgoing calls or texts I couldn’t recognize, or even any expenditures in my bank account. I had apparently gone on some indie hobbyist marketplace sites searching for wood carvings – I guess to stalk El? – but I hadn’t purchased anything or sent any messages. For all that I could tell, the spirit had just decided to move in in the most terrifying way possible and forgotten social media was a way easier method of stalking someone. I still remembered the sensation of my shirt falling through me and shuddered when I did. It had to have been a full-sensory hallucination, but it had felt horrifyingly real. Just to fight the memory, I reached down to strip off my tee shirt.

It got stuck. I frowned. I was doing the cross-arm thing to get it off and my arms weren’t coming up past each other. I wriggled and shifted and managed to slide the thing off eventually. It slipped off my shoulders as though it had gotten caught on them. With a little trepidation, I looked over at one.

Coated and worse. Black fur uninterrupted from my fingertips to my clavicle, then like tentacles wrapped over my chest and across my throat to the other side. A fingernail-sized, plate-like protrusion rose up from my shoulder bones on either side. It felt like it was made of marble. Beneath it was another of a similar size, but flexible and leathery like armor.  It was nice that the ensemble covered up some pimples, but it sparked a tiny, ice-fire ball of fear in my brain stem. The fur was so thick now that it made my clothes fit different and I guess I was growing horns and shit from my bones. I tried to be sardonically irritated that I would have to go buy all new clothes and wondered what it would look like to my coworkers. Would they see it hovering in the air, or drooping like a tent? The fear wouldn’t dissipate, though, so I stood still and limp and worked my way through breathing exercises.

It went away.

The fur didn’t.

I decided to go see Harry. I put on a new shirt, gathered Mufasa, and headed out. On the way, I passed Manuel and Maria and gave them a brief nod and smile. They didn’t seem to think anything was out of the ordinary. I arrived at Harry’s and El was there, deep in conversation with the man with the stag’s head.

I stopped in my tracks. El regarded me with a cold and hot mixture of intrigue and suspicion. Harry greeted me with a tremendous smile. His liquid baritone poured out, “Ah, how serendipitous! Ah, no.” He stopped himself but gave me a conspiratorial wink. “I have recently met El, due to a wondrous anonymous tip.”

“You, uh. What?”

“That same person who reminded of you who bought that ruby – would you believe it? – has put this talented woman in cahoots with me.”

El’s eyes flashed. It was passion, but I could not discern for the life of me what flavor. She said, low and slow, “Someone coordinated a three-way partnership among me, Ecological Success-ion Woodworking, and Harry’s Occult and Sundry. It’s unbelievably well-structured. Literally everyone wins.” The disbelief was palpable. And it should have been: such contracts were vanishingly rare.

“She’ll be contributing to the Sundry. I have not been able to convince her to consider the Occult.”

El’s eyes darted accusingly at Harry. “Any reason you’re sharing this with a random person who happened to show up while I happened to be here?”

His face fell. He looked stricken. The skin under his facial fur reddened. “I, ah, no, they, we’ve simply met, a few times. We’re friends.” I decided other people couldn’t possibly be able to see his head, because he could never have lied about it. Insanely, I finally wondered what his human head might look like. “Oh! Yes, I know.” A sense of dread settled in. I didn’t like how clever it looked like the man with the stag’s head felt. “You see, they have a connection to Ecological Success-ion.”

“And what’s that?”

“Why, it’s owned by the woman who used to live where they do now. Ms. Ebony Obb.”