Bewere the Night by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthology, werewolf
ISBN: 9781607012979
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2011-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

The Were-Wizard of Oz

Lavie Tidhar

EXT. EMERALD CITY—DAY

Emerald City. A dark and dangerous place. City blocks tower above mean streets and open sewers. The sky is the colour of blood. There are winged monkeys circling slowly in the air, searching for prey. Under a broken street lamp stands OZ, smoking a cigarette, his fedora pulled low over his eyes. His face is in shadow.

OZ:

Emerald City.

OZ:

Shit.

OZ lifts his face. The light of a passing car illuminates them. He is unshaved, and his eyes are red.

OZ:

It’s always dusk in the Emerald City.

OZ:

Even in the middle of the day.

Oz is thirteen, just entering puberty, when he begins to discover the changes to his body.

The way his voice drops several octaves unexpectedly, becomes a growl that makes guests’ hair stand on their arms. The way the moon pulls and stretches at his limbs, curves his spine, makes hair grow everywhere.

Learning to shave is embarrassing, the blades break and finally he has to go with a barber’s razor, and when he cuts himself the bleeding stops in seconds, the wounds heal—too quickly. At school the kids make fun of hairy boy until he growls and shows them nails like claws and then they stop and after that they mostly keep away from him.

Puberty is confusing, he gets a hard-on every other second, it seems, he has hormones raging through him and on full moon nights he wakes up and doesn’t know where he is, and he is naked, and covered in feathers and blood.

Oz lives in a small town where nothing much is going on, somewhere in those featureless plains of a sometimes-Americaland. Mostly, Oz goes to the movies. Alone. He sits close to the screen, in the first or second row where no one else likes to sit, and he watches movies in the dark. There’s the smell of popcorn and years of spilled Coca Cola on unwashed carpets. There’s the smell of wet hair, and a hint of blood. Kids make out in the back row and the attendant goes around with a torchlight and the smell of grass on his clothes.

Everyone leaves Oz well alone. Which suits him fine.

He watches horror movies and romantic comedies and family dramas, fantasies and sci fi and adventure serials. He watches sequels and prequels and the things that come in the middle. He watches Wolf with Jack Nicholson, which is kinda boring (but Michelle Pfeiffer makes him hard), and Teen Wolf with Michael J. Fox (an 80s classic, but he secretly prefers Doc Hollywood), and An American Werewolf in London, but to be honest, even though he won’t admit it, he prefers romantic comedies. He loves Four Weddings and a Funeral. He just wishes there was someone like him in it. Nobody does romantic comedies about werewolves.

Because that’s what he is, he is beginning to realize. He can no longer deny the changes. When he takes on the wolf shape he feels alive, free, strong. He loves to run, for miles and miles, snapping at the wind, scenting for prey.

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