The Monthly Ritual

Chet had no idea what he was doing. This fact would have been painfully obvious to anyone watching, if anyone were unlucky enough to be watching. A werewolf trying to shave mounts the list of off-putting images faster than a gorilla raping a kitten. It was just wrong on many levels, most of them very hairy. But Chet didn’t care. All he could think of was that scent.

He’d walked past the club two days ago before the moon was full, but even then the scent of an enormous crowd of women sweating, dancing and rubbing their swelling bodies up against virile men whilst menstruating hit him harder than the first time he discovered what came on Cinemax after 2am. It made a physical impact on his brain and lower parts of his anatomy. At the time he’d concluded that a small, scrawny, nerd- looking guy like himself would be kicked to the curb quicker than a young republican at a fair trade rally, but as soon as the moon turned, that logic went right out the window.

He started thinking, as limited as that capacity was at these times, that a big, burly man with a stature such as his shifted form allowed him could get in easily. He just needed to get rid of the fur…

He started with his hands, thinking that they’d be most obvious. As much as he cut himself the shaving wasn’t the difficult part, but once he had bare hands his nails seemed akin to Freddy Kruger and he realized quickly that they had to go. He destroyed a nail clipper, a pair of scissors, a Ginsu knife and an electric can opener before he realized that trying to cut nails strong enough to rip bark off a tree was an exercise in futility. He painted them with black nail polish left over from his early adolescent goth phase and moved on.

Then he focused on his neck and chest as he’d seen big, brawny guys with waxed chests and remarked on how much fuller their muscles looked without all the hair. Granted he’d seen these men in underwear ads, but that didn’t occur to him at the time. He removed a substantial amount of skin along with the fur, but managed to get the bulk of his chest bald.

Then he realized that if he were actually lucky enough to get a drunk woman to leave with him she’d scream that high-pitched, shrill scream that wreaked havoc on his ears if she actually saw him naked. So he started working on his torso, legs, knees, and feet. He forgot any technique he'd had and cut at the hair in the same manner as avid gardeners going after rogue weeds in their prized azaleas.

Had he not lost so much blood in the process of all this, he might have actually gotten to his face before realizing that a hairless werewolf looks a lot like an aborted baby alien straight out of a Ridley Scott film. Luckily enough, he passed out before experiencing that particular horror.

He awoke the next morning looking very much like a murder victim with large bits of black, sticky fur jutting out of him in stalagmite-like formations. It took him a full three days and so many reapplications of Neosporin that he lost count before he looked anywhere near normal again.

The next month he bought a fireproof safe big enough to fit every cutting tool he owned and added the collection and locking of these tools into his monthly pre-shift ritual.

Thanks to John for the story Idea!