Disappearance (1/4)
'Getting away from it all', as a dream, is a pretty good one. It's going to take a bit more thought than this, though... [CW - brief sexual content in part 4]
“This is going to sting.”
I nod.
“No, this is going to sting a lot.”
That warrants a dry swallow and a second nod, more nervous this time.
The first thing they’d done at the mod parlor was shave my fur. A smooth line back from my muzzle toward my ears. They’d gotten all of both of my cheeks, down to the jawline and up toward my ears, though not quite all the way.
It’s not a good look for a weasel, this awful grooming.
I’ll have to live. I suppose it’ll take a few months to go from stubbly to bristly and back toward soft, and then another few after that until I’m back to normal.
Well, not normal. New. Different.
“Alright, first bit,” the rat begins, tugging over the lower part of a milk jug that’s been cut in half. “Gonna get the bars super cold. You sure you want the straight lines?”
“Yes.” I don’t sound sure, even to myself.
The rat does that thing where he just sits still and silent, waiting on me. His ears have been tattooed black up along the backs, and the fluorescent lights shining through them cast blurred shadows, crenelated ideas of shapes.
I sit up straight in my chair and give a firm nod. “Yes. Straight lines. Three on each cheek, spreading out toward the back of my head.”
The rat waits a little longer, then cracks a goofy grin. “Good. Good choice. I’m gonna start the middle one a little further back. And I’ll use tapered ones rather than rectangular. It’ll make you look speedy.”
We laugh at that, and I use the it to hide the terror. Not at the pain, mind, but at the sheer enormity of what I’m about to do.
“Alright, lady.” The rat stands, pads across the room with claws clicking on linoleum. There’s a hissing, gurgling sound, a sound of something more complex than water being poured, and then a soft curse. A single curse is more a matter of form, though, and the lack of follow-up keeps me from panicking outright.
The rat hurries back toward me, the half-jug in oven-mitt-clad paws billowing a sinking fog in his wake. This gets quickly set down on the steel table so he can shake the mitts off. The nitrogen fog continues its cascade, flowing over the table and onto the floor. From then, everything happens in quick succession.
I’m laid out on my side.
A thick petroleum jelly is smeared into the fur around my eyes, and a piece of aluminum foil massaged into that to create at least an attempt at a seal.
Footsteps.
A paw holds the foil in place. Another holds my muzzle down against a pillow in a sanitized paper pillowcase. A third, more spindly than the others, presses down on the side of my neck. Someone presses a rolled-up towel into my paws.
Murmuring.
A rush, a clatter, and then pain as something presses against my cheek. I grit my teeth, clench the terrycloth in my paws, and let out a sort of gurgled moan. Someone’s counting down.
The pain leads with cold, then turns searing, and then is lost in a labyrinthine landscape. Sere, white, a sun too bright to look at, and the smell of snow.
The countdown reaches zero, and the pressure against my face relaxes. That ‘something’ that was pressed against my cheek is lifted away, and someone murmurs dryly, “One down, five to go.”
I spend the next half hour alternating between gasping for breath between each countdown and exploring that landscape: a tangled mess of chalk-white rocks, angular, thorny bushes with no leaves, lingering snow-scent, and a flute playing whistle-tones above it all.
I’d never known how intricate pain could be.
After the last countdown is finished and I am allowed to sit up once more, I finally allow myself a simple, “Fuck.”
There’s laughter as the foil is pried away from my gummed-up fur and I blink my eyes back into focus. There’s the rat along with his accomplice, a weasel far taller than I, sitting on a stool with a kerchief keeping unkempt headfur out of his eyes. On the table by him, a short copper bar clamped into a stainless steel handle is still oozing tendrils of too-heavy fog.
“Fuck,” I say again.
“Stings, huh?” The weasel grins, and I recognize his voice from the countdown.
“Uh…I guess.” I try to smile, feeling cold-burnt skin pull at my cheeks, and the smile turns into a wince. “Bit of an understatement. What does it look like?”
The rat reaches to snag a mirror and hold it up to my face. Shaved cheeks—that much I’d seen—cutting fine brown fur almost down to the skin, and three bars on each cheek, radiating away from my whiskers toward the back of my head. The bars show up as patches of matted, crispy, burnt fur.
“It’ll turn white soon enough,” the weasel says. He stretches out his arm and bunches up his sleeve, revealing simple coiling patterns of white fur amidst the brown of his fur. I’d seen it before in pictures (that being the reason I’d chosen this parlor), but seeing it in person made me all the more eager for the fur on my cheeks to grow back.
“Now you just need some piercings.” The rat laughs as I shake my head.
I pay in cash. They accept cards, but I had more than enough on hand.
From the mod parlor, I head home to take care of the apartment. All the stuff I need is already in the car, packed into a backpack and a suitcase. Nothing from inside, of course. This all has to stay. Still, it’s good to make sure.
Everything’s neat. Not too neat, of course, as I can’t keep up with Jarred’s standards, and he can’t keep up with the rate I make things messy. Stuff’s on shelves, dust free. Clothes are put away, but the hamper’s overflowing. The kitchen’s wiped clean, but there’s a stack of plates and glasses in the dirty half of the sink.
Poor Jarred. Ah well.
Once my account of the house is done, I begin to dismantle the life I’d built up for myself. I unwind it in slow, circular passes of the apartment, starting from the ground up. I carefully destroy what I was.
I slowly untick a checklist, item by item, of the things that got me where I am, made me who I am.
Drawers are tugged open and clothing strewn haphazardly about the floor. The bed sheets are pulled free of the mattress and shredded with my claws to look as though it was all done in haste.
It’s not. It’s all careful. I have to be quiet for the neighbors, and I have to be deliberate for myself, even if it does feel like watching someone else work.
The mattress is thrown askew as though someone had been digging for cash beneath it. The bathroom is mostly left alone, but pill bottles are dumped in the sink, looking like someone was hunting for something more interesting than aspirin. The top shelf of the closet is ransacked, with shoes tossed on the floor and the contents of my jewelry box tucked away in a backpack, along with Jarred’s nice watch. I didn’t care for the stuff, but I knew a burglar would.
The living room is more difficult. We have a TV, which a burglar would latch onto immediately. I’d planned for this, though, and the TV is set neatly by my door while I see to the rest of the room.
I tip over the speakers on their poles and scratch carefully crazed claw marks around their bases, a show of trying to detach them. They stay on the floor.
The bookshelf is dismembered as quietly as I can manage. Books are pulled off in armloads and scattered around on the floor. One from every armful is bent and torn, my heart aching to do so. A yearbook tweaks memories and is discarded. Paintings are removed from their hooks and tossed on top of the books.
The couch is shredded and exposed just as the bed had been. Nothing there, beneath those torn cushions.
The kitchen is next. I step quietly over the pile of books and head on in. There’s a cursory pass of the fridge and cabinets: pushing glasses and food to the sides to expose the backs of them. My concession to looking hasty is to put a glass in a plastic bag and crush it under my foot, then scatter the shards over the counter and onto the floor. A very careful “whoops.”
The garage had been my space, and is the last to get torn down. We’d rented half a duplex and paid extra for the side with the attached garage, which I’d claimed for all of my painting stuff, but which was under constant threat of being slowly consumed by junk.
I eviscerate my old camping gear. I trusted Jarred to never pull himself away from his computer long enough to even consider camping. So much time at the keyboard, so little to spend elsewhere; so much time spent on him, so little on anyone else.
My easel is easy to deal with: I just tip it over. The rickety thing clatters to pieces just shy of the front bumper of the car. A sketch of a painting, burgundy on black, tumbles askew. Boxes containing old clothes are turned out. A clock is broken most carefully.
Jarred and I, we’d never hidden anything together, but I have to look thorough.
On my own, though, I’d hidden cash. Just shy of twenty grand in a locking cash box disguised as a two-quart thermos tucked firmly into my old backpacking gear in the mess of our garage.
Or it had been. Now it was tucked into the car, just behind the driver’s seat.
My life isn’t completely unwound. Not yet. But I’m getting there.
I reach in the car and grab a bag of odds-and-ends fur sweepings. Little bits snagged here and there from shedding coworkers. Some from a grooming place. Even a bit from the mod shop’s bin before I was shaved. I make a quick circle around the apartment, scattering fur on the most torn up bits
I grab the TV on the way back to the garage—a flat screen thing that we only ever used for movies——and lay it down its back by the car. I give it a kick until it’s squarely behind one of the front wheels.
Here we go.
I climb in the car and hit the button to open the garage.
When I reverse over the TV, there’s a delightful crunch. I can’t smile without my newly branded cheeks burning, so I breathe satisfaction out on a sigh.
To be continued…
“Disappearance” first appeared in Restless Town, an anthology of contemporary furry short stories set in the fictional town of Sawtooth, ID. You can find the book — and read several of the stories — here.
Disappearance (1/4)
Absolutely love this. Can't wait to read more!