MAN BITES BEAST
BEAST BECOMES MAN
Before that, there was
the Dream.
Not sleep. Not the cheap little movies the brain plays when the body gets tired. The Dream was first. Older than dirt, older than hunger, older than the first mouth that learned how to lie.
The Dream opened its eye in the dark and made form.
From it came the first ones: huge, bright, half-spirit, half-meat, shaped like stars trying to remember bone. They joined. They multiplied. They made children who made worlds. They made bloodlines. They made cities. They made rules. Then the rules made cages.
Eventually, after holiness got watered down enough, there was Man.
Man had tools.
Man had debts.
Man had gods he no longer believed in but still feared at night.
One man wanted back in.
He lived at the rotten edge of the city in an apartment that smelled like old paper, burnt sugar, sweat, and failure. Rent was late. Sink was stained. Windows were sealed with tape. Books leaned in dying stacks: anatomy, astronomy, chemistry, dead languages, saints, frauds, diagrams of nerves, diagrams of stars.
The walls were worse.
Equations. Sigils. Timelines. Family trees of gods. Notes written in marker, chalk, blood once, then never again because blood dried too ugly and told on him.
One question sat at the center of all of it:
What lives past the human form?
At first, he asked like a scientist.
Then like a priest.
Then like a beggar.
Then like a thief.
Friends stopped calling. Colleagues stopped arguing and started pitying him, which was nastier. Lovers became stories he told himself badly. He sold what could be sold. Ate what was cheap. Slept when his body ambushed him.
The city kept going outside. Sirens. Engines. Laughter under streetlights. People spending money to forget they were dying.
He wanted more than that.
He wanted the Dream.
One night, after years of losing, he made the vial.
It sat at the center of his altar, glowing faintly orange, small as a dare. Not gold. Not holy white. Orange. Last-light orange. Warning-sign orange. The color of a sun that knows it is leaving.
The altar was ugly but useful: glass tubes, copper wire, cracked bowls, salt, chalk rings, old instruments, new batteries, things bought online, things stolen from labs, things dug from places a decent man would avoid.
The potion pulsed.
Alive, maybe.
His reflection trembled in it. His eyes looked bigger than they had any right to look. His face had become the face of a man who had traded sleep for certainty and got neither.
This is it, he thought.
A stupid thought. A holy thought. Same thing, usually.
He lifted the vial.
For one moment, his hand paused. Not from wisdom. Just memory.
A friend saying, You need help.
A woman saying, You are not here when you are here.
A doctor saying, Stress can become delusion.
A younger version of himself saying nothing at all, because youth never thinks the bill will come.
Then obsession did what obsession does.
It made the room simple.
He drank.
Nothing happened.
No angel. No trumpet. No ladder of light. No deep voice calling him chosen.
Then the pain arrived.
It came through his veins with claws. It opened him from the inside, not the flesh, not exactly, but the place where flesh reports to spirit. He hit the floor. Bit his tongue. Tasted iron. The symbols on the walls bent and crawled. The chalk marks breathed. The room stretched too long, too deep, too old.
The Dream had not opened above him.
It opened in him.
His senses sharpened until the world became a punishment. Dust screamed. Light had edges. His own heartbeat sounded like a fist on a locked door.
When the fire passed, he was still shaped like himself.
That was the joke.
Same hands. Same teeth. Same tired body. Same unpaid rent. Same stink of failure in the room.
But something new had moved in.
A hunger.
Not for food. Not for sex. Not for praise, though those were cousins. This hunger was older. Low in the gut. High in the skull. It wanted contact. It wanted proof. It wanted a boundary to break.
The man staggered out of the apartment.
Down the stairs.
Past the mailboxes.
Past the corner store.
Past men laughing by a car with no plates.
Past a woman smoking alone like she was keeping watch for the end of the world.
The city thinned.
Concrete gave way to weeds. Weeds gave way to trees. The forest waited beyond the last reach of streetlight.
Something in it called him.
A pull.
A rhythm.
A command with no words.
Deep in the dark, the beast waited.
It was panther and wolf and something else besides. Black muscle. Silver fur. Amber eyes. Built for the old laws. Hunt. Sleep. Mate. Kill. Survive.
It saw the man and did not run.
That was its first mistake.
The man stepped forward, shaking. The hunger rose in him. His mouth watered. His chest hitched. For one clean second, some rag of humanity lifted its head and said:
Stop.
Then the Dream beat once in his blood.
He lunged.
The beast struck first. Claws opened his shoulder. Hot pain. Real pain. The kind that makes philosophy shut up.
He did not stop.
He hit the animal like a drunk hits the floor: all need, no grace. They rolled through leaves and mud. The beast snarled. The man gasped. Its claws tore him. His hands found fur. His mouth found neck.
Then he bit.
Not like a hunter.
Like a sacrament gone feral.
Teeth sank in. Blood came hot and metallic over his tongue. The forest tightened. The air went wrong. The bite was a door. The door was flesh.
MAN BITES BEAST.
The beast howled.
Not from pain.
From recognition.
Its body convulsed. Fur pulled back in waves. Bones argued with themselves. Limbs lengthened. Claws softened. Paws became hands. Growls broke into raw human cries. Skin appeared, new and terrified, too tender for the world that had just made it.
The man fell away, blood on his mouth, shoulder ruined, eyes wide.
The beast rose on two legs.
No.
The new man rose.
Naked. Shaking. Breathing like each breath had to be invented. His amber eyes locked onto the man’s eyes.
For a moment, neither understood.
Then both did.
Not predator and prey.
Equals.
Creator and consequence.
The new man looked at his hands. Fingers flexed. The horror of them arrived slowly. He touched his face. His throat. His chest. His body had become a question with skin on it.
Then he ran.
Branches broke behind him. Leaves shook. The forest swallowed him whole.
The first man stayed on his knees.
The hunger inside him quieted. The Dream withdrew its hand. Night sounds returned one by one, careful as witnesses.
He looked down at his own hands.
Blood.
Mud.
Proof.
He had done it.
He had opened a path past Man.
And like most men who get what they want, he understood too late that wanting had been the clean part.
Somewhere in the dark, the new man ran with no name.
Behind him, the old man knelt beneath the stars and listened to the Dream whisper through the wound he had made in the world.
It said nothing kind.
It only reminded him:
creator and destroyer are often the same poor bastard seen from different rooms.
The cycle had begun.
And that man—
the new man,
the bitten beast,
the thing with hands now—
would one day become pulsinella.
But first,
the bittersweet man.
The Beast has to become Man.
To do so, he must meet Man.
The Man he meets is himself.
And the man he meets reminds him of the man he met.
Teeth first.
Blood first.
LASHING OUT.
Ready to strike.
He did not forget.
His first thought was simple:
Beast and Man, not so different.
So much time spent for money to spend
that when it stopped for her, he could not tell when
the treat was done or the trick would begin.
The ups and downs,
low thrills and highs,
gave way to Prince of Clowns.
The crown hides in his eye.