A sick day
“Daniel!” his mother called. “Danny, get up!”
Daniel awoke and found himself as foxy as he had hours before. He sighed and hugged his covers close to himself.
“Daniel!” his mother called again, opening the door. “This is the second day in the row! You’d better not make this a habit!”
“I won’t, mom,” he said, pausing before he spoke further. His voice sounded different, higher in pitch and slightly growly. He blinked and smiled weakly at his mother. “I just feel...sick.”
“Oh!” Immediately her face filled with concern. “What is it?”
He shrugged and dipped his snout against the sheets.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I just feel...weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah,” he said, his mind racing as he realized this wasn’t an adequate reason to get out of school. “My tummy is all queasy and I felt hot all night long...I could barely sleep and…”
“Oh honey,” his mother said, smiling. “It sounds like a bug. Why don’t you stay home
today?”
“But, mom--”
“No,” she said firmly. “You know yourself better than I do, and so if you say you’re sick, you’re sick. I don’t want you to get any of your friends sick either, do you?”
He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I--Mom, do I look weird?”
She stared at him, shook her head, and smiled.
“No, dear,” she said. “You look just like you always do.”
“Foxy?” he hazarded.
“No.” She laughed. “You just look like you, like my wonderful son! Now, are you going to keep on talking, or are you going to get some rest.”
Daniel grinned and laid back.
“Rest,” he said, closing his eyes.
He heard his mother murmur something and then she closed the door. Immediately afterwards, he stood up and reached for his overstuffed wallet on his nightstand. Fishing around in it, he pulled something out: his driver’s license. He stared at it, because the photo of him on it was him as...well, as he was before he was a fox.
In the next instant, this all changed. The face in the photo shifted, nose and mouth pushing out together into a long snout while the ears relocated to the top of his head and reformed to fuzzy, triangular shapes while black, red, and white fur rushed over his visage. In a matter of moments, the photo had changed from his old self to the current one as if some hole in reality had just been sealed.
Daniel sighed and returned his license to his wallet before lying back down in his bed. He closed his eyes and when he reopened them he looked over to the clock. He had slept for a couple more hours, enough so that his mom was gone at her part time job. He shuffled out ofbed and sat at his computer. Opening his browser, he began to search.
Written by skiesofsilver on 06 March 2017
