Fiction By John Everson

    When I wrote the erotic horror werewolf love story, "Anniversary," I also thought of a humorous spin on the topic. It turned into this short-short, published in a magazine called Ixxis.

     

Ixxis"Why Do You Stay With Him?"

Originally published in Ixxis, Spring 1995

 

Her friends all said that he was an animal and she couldn't deny it.

"Why do you stay with him?" they asked. "He's rude, ugly and ... well, frankly Jean, he's disgustingly hairy."

Jean snickered silently at the last -- if they thought he was hairy now, they ought to see him under the light of a full moon.

She knew that they were right, in a way. He was a constant trial to her. He came back after walks in the middle of the night and tracked mud and blood into her white carpets. He never cleaned it up and he never apologized. She could smell the stink of bitches on him when he returned from these monthly walks, and dogs or not, she burned in the green fire of jealousy over it.

Her mother took her aside once and said, "You should tell Marty about breath mints, or that anti-plague toothpaste. He just kissed me and it smelled like something died in there."

"Oh, he was probably just chewing on some mice he found in the basement," Jean had replied. Her mother had laughed at the joke.

But Jean wasn't joking.

Then there was the time he came home with fleas and left the two of them scratching themselves raw for a week. "Quit slumming on the wrong side of the tracks," she'd cried.

And who had to sterilize and disinfect the entire house? She did, of course.

And when talking about Marty's "distinctiveness," one couldn't forget the clothing bills. He was so modest that he refused to sit around naked on the night of the full moon, preferring to wait to strip until the change came. But he always waited too long. The change was fast, and the seams of his sleeves and pants were popped before you could scream "werewolf."

Still, Jean thought, she did love him. And to their ubiquitous question, "why do you stay with him?" she only smiled.

But secretly her mind and middle quivered at her answer: "Because the sex is incredible."

 

THE END