What would you say to an offer that would change you, body and soul, for eternity? To the possibility of trading in the momentum of a life lived for twenty-eight shaky years, to alter its course with an uncertain yet firm finality?
What would you say when offered the mantle of a god, feeling like you’ve never done a thing to earn it?
Truth is- I didn’t think all that hard before what I said.
“Yes. Please.”
The old dog must have known my answer, given how he smiled knowingly. Truth was, in those days I had little to lose from the detonation of my old life, yet so very much to gain. Even if I didn’t know what it was I sought to gain, the pressure of its need had grown on me since my months of loss- like atmospheres after atmospheres crushing me. Faced with escape or implosion, I chose the only course I thought I had.
I chose escape; escape, and uncertainty.
It would be fittingly dramatic to say there was some grand moment of shining light, some spoken magic, some exclamation mark on the pact I had just sealed, but truth is, we simply exchanged smiles, hugged tightly, and parted ways.
“Simple as that?” I thought.
Ha. “Simple.”
I had no damn clue.
It was the next morning I began to understand what I had invited, what I had become. I remember standing in front of my bathroom mirror, stooped awkwardly over the sink, one thought foremost on my mind:
“I wasn’t always this tall, was I?”
Strange thing to notice first, given the other changes that had begun to make themselves known, but the mind is funny like that. It was only as my self-inspection continued that I began to spot other changes, small things, yet ones that set my heart to racing. My nails were thicker, taking on dull points, my ears ever so slightly longer. On my knuckles and cheeks, the smallest wisps of dark hair.
No. Not hair.
Fur.
It would be easy to assume that what followed was awkward fumbling- realizing none of my clothes fit, shock and stammering as I wondered what was happening to me, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth, dear reader. If anything, it was strange in the manner a mundane change in one’s life is- discovering everything fit as before, that not a soul at my dead-end job so much as narrowed an eye. Of course nothing had changed for them- they saw only the quiet, awkward sous chef, albeit with just the tiniest bit more spring in their step. Why would they see anything different? To them, I was who I had always been- not a creature in the midst of a metamorphosis that would alter the course of their life for good.
It was only over the next few months that things began to change without as they had within. Waking up one morning to discover my nails had become claws, my hands coated in dark fur up to the elbows, pawpads on their tips, and wondering if I really needed to keep doing a job I hated. Having breakfast days later, my pointed canine ears swiveling and twitching at every sound, and deciding to pick up art again. Awkwardly maneuvering around a new tail, always wagging, and feeling I’d look better with pierced ears, calling myself “them” instead of nearly thirty years of an unfitting “him”. With each physical change, I felt as though I could change more in my world, be rid of things that had never suited me- my job, my name, my presentation.
I was not under any delusions about what the mantle of godhood was turning me into, for the most part. My pointed, canine snout, my tall ears, my dark fur, now coating the whole of my body; these were all like his had been, almost carbon copies. Years later, he’d tell me this was not by design- he only gave me the mantle, that I would come to bear a striking resemblance was down to the content of my own heart, though he did admit, he saw me as a descendant before long.
Of course, not all of these things changed out of desire- some were borne from a new and… somewhat flustered necessity. And where they diverged, they diverged… greatly.
My hips were the first thing I noticed. They were wider, my thighs thicker. In truth, I had begun to put on weight since I had freed myself from the stress of retail, but the way it distributed was… not what I expected. My stomach rounded out, defying any shirt I tried to contain it within, and the hips had only grown softer, limbs taking on a gentle hang when I held them out. I had suspicions about what was happening, but I couldn’t help but loose a now-characteristic, canine whine the day I woke and found I had grown breasts.
The desires of my heart had shaped this form… and I had desired, though never spoken, this change, too.
It was three months total. Three months of steady and persistent change, three months before I stood once more before my bathroom mirror, now stooped low, my ample chest all but crowding the vanity. Whatever I was before, now there stood a jackal- her eyelids flecked with gold which trailed to each side in a procession of freckles, her body plump, each thigh bearing one half of a heart-shaped, golden mark. Her tail was wagging softly behind her, of course- why wouldn’t it be?
She hadn’t known it when this all began, but this was what she most wanted to be. Something her adoptive predecessor had known from the start.
I didn’t know what godhood meant for me, if anyone would ever see this true face, not the tired, scruffy man still worn on the outside like an ill-fitting coat… but for once in my life, I was excited to find out.