The kit arrives

You wake with your phone still in your hand and an itch all over, the kind you'd blame on new sheets if the sheets were new. They aren't. What's new is the color on the backs of your hands: a fine, silver-brown down that wasn't there when you fell asleep, sprouting in patches along your forearms like frost deciding to be alive.

You remember the order. Premium fursuit kit — complete, custom-fit, no assembly required. You'd laughed at the confirmation page and its single line of fine print, something about gradual delivery. You pull up the site now and it isn't there. Your browser history has a hole in it the exact shape of last night, and under your jaw the fur has opinions about being touched.

Your ears feel wrong — higher, further back, listening to the refrigerator hum like it's a language. Somewhere in you, something that has been tense for years notices the change and does not panic. That's the part that scares you most. In the hallway below, your neighbor Mara's door closes softly, and you have maybe an hour before the mirror stops showing someone you recognize.