I AM NOT A WOLF

You’re scared. You knew today was coming, but you thought it would be easier to do what needs to be done. You thought you’d find yourself overwhelmed with adrenaline and ready to complete the task at hand. You know nothing happens without hard work. Your mother used to say that the only guarantee any living thing has is that each moment of its life will be spent in a desperate fight to justify its existence. If she saw you now, she’d tell you that you’re a coward. She’d tell you that if you were going to do this, you’d have already done it. She’d wonder why you were even bothering. But your mother isn’t here, and today you’re going to do it. Today, you’re going to take a shower.

You are a wolf. But this is something the world can’t know. Some people aren’t ready to know, some aren’t willing to understand, but most are just terrified of wolves for some reason. You’ve spent much of your life integrating into human society. You have a job, an apartment, several online dating profiles, and a terrible roommate. But human beings are expected to maintain a certain level of cleanliness that you’ve let fall by the wayside. You refuse to risk sacrificing all that hard work just because you fear running water. It’s time to make this right. You ease your paws over the shower knob and gently move it to the left. The shower sputters to life, spraying harmless water into the tub. You watch the water run into the drain and glance back at the showerhead. Harmless. You leap into the tub and the water strikes you. At first you bristle at the sudden warmth but you take a deep breath and allow yourself to relax. It’s just water. You’re safe and soon, you’ll be clean too. You don’t find yourself showering often and you’re certain that your roommate won’t miss a little bit of his shampoo, so you wrap your jaws around his bottle of 2 in 1 shampoo and conditioner. All you need to do is get a little bit of it on the floor of the tub so that you can evenly distribute it across your fur and bestow upon yourself the smell of “fresh rain” or at least its chemical approximation.

You squeeze your jaw shut to squeeze the shampoo when suddenly, the water gets hot. It shoots from a comfortable lukewarm temperature to something more along the line of hot knives and you suddenly feel extremely uncomfortable. Caleb must have run the dishwasher in the kitchen. Your jaw clamps down instinctively on the shampoo bottle with incredible pressure, causing your mouth to fill with a goop that tastes nothing like rain as the shampoo explodes into your eyes. You howl in rage and sprint out of the tub, blind. You run through what must be the shower curtain and tumble out of the bathroom and into the living room. Still completely wrapped in the shower curtain, you run towards what smells like your room and violently shut the door behind you. You escape the shower curtain and shake yourself dry, taking a moment to note that while you’ve definitely ruined the bathroom in a big way, you do smell less like dirt now. You really hope your roommate didn’t see that. Speaking of which, it’s time for breakfast and based on the nightmarish smell you’ve just caught on the air, Caleb is making his ridiculous vegan sausage patties again so you’ll be fending for yourself. As if that’s a new concept.