Inheritance

I slowly gained consciousness, but I refused to open my eyes, letting myself stay in my half asleep half awake stupor. I smiled lightly remembering that today was my sixteenth birthday. I stretched out of my curled up position my eyes still closed. The briny smell of the ocean wafted through the open balcony doors with the fragrance of flowers mixed in. I could pick out individual scents in the breeze. Funny, I couldn’t do that before. All the sounds around me seemed amplified. Normally birds’ morning songs mix into a discordant orchestra but this morning I could pick out every individual song as they mixed with the sound of swaying branches. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the breed of the songbirds in Hawaii. Everything was sharper but somehow farther away, almost dreamlike. I opened my eyes to my beautiful new room. Except the walls of vibrant colors were gone, instead replaced by swirls of black and white. I lazily rolled off the bed onto the floor landing on all fours. I tried to stand up but my hips didn’t want to extend like they normally do. My hind legs felt short and misshapen. I collapsed onto the ground in an uncoordinated heat. Suddenly I felt very, very awake. I stood up on all fours. My legs were all the same length which messed up my balance. My torso felt too long and my face seemed distorted. My nose was elongated, almost a snout, my ears had migrated to the top of my head and had become strangely mobile, and there were a mass of hairs covering… everywhere. I turned my head to try to catch a glimpse of the rest of this body. The long hairs on the front of my face grazed my neck and I jumped at the sudden rush of sensation. What’s going on here? I felt panic creeping into my mind. I started running around the room frantically trying to get away from, myself? I knocked over a standing mirror and climbed over it to see a leopard’s ebony eyes gazing back at me. I opened my mouth to let out a scream but a wildcat’s desperate yowl is what I heard. I saw fangs flash in the mirror. The oiled hinges of my bedroom door gave an almost inaudible sound and I turned to see two humans standing in my doorway. My animal mind couldn’t recognize them as anything more than food. Claws extended from my padded feet and my mouth salivated for blood. I lunged. One of them threw himself in front of the other and knocked me aside in a tremendous blow. He grabbed the second and threw out my door then closed it before he ran across the room. I was beyond any rational thought. I was working on only instinct. The person could only register to me as food. I attacked again going for a debilitating stomach strike but he wasn’t there. My claws ripped through unsubstantial air where his gut should have been. Abruptly everything went black.