Breed by Chase Novak

crying.
    “What’s going on?” he asks her.
    She shakes her head, unable to speak.
    He moves closer to her, as close as two bodies can be. “Hey,” he says, “I’m here.”
    She hikes up her nightgown and takes his hand and moves it down and places it between her legs.
    Alex tries not to show any reaction—no pulling back, no shudder, no matter how slight, nothing by which she might surmise how strange and unsettling this familiar private patch suddenly feels to him. But the difference is unmistakable; it feels as if her pubic hair has tripled and maybe even quadrupled in density, and what had once been a soft, wispy inverted pyramid is now a thick, coarse square. She holds on to his hand, as if to prevent him from drawing it back in revulsion, though revulsion is far from what he is experiencing. What he feels is perplexity and curiosity. How could this have happened? What does it mean?
    Maintaining her control over his hand, Leslie slowly moves it up and down her private middle.
    “Wow,” Alex says, trying to sound impressed and not dismayed, “when did this happen?”
    Leslie shakes her head, unable to speak.
    “I think it’s hot,” Alex says.
    But Leslie is having none of it. “I think it’s disgusting,” she says, scrambling out of bed. Alex wonders what time it is and lifts himself up on his elbows to get a look at the old GE digital alarm clock, a piece of junk from his college days in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he has not been able to part with. But the clock has somehow gotten itself turned around and he can’t make out the numbers. He raises his wrist and holds it in front of him to read his Rolex and what he sees so startles and unnerves him he makes a strangled aacchhh sound, repelled by the sight of his arm.
    When he went to sleep some seven hours earlier, the hair on his arm was sparse and pale brown. Now it has darkened by several shades, and indeed seems more like canine fur than human hair. He shakes his head, as if to dislodge the fog of fantasy and hallucination from his mind, and a wet ribbon of drool flies from his mouth.
    Alex goes into the bathroom, where Leslie is sitting on the edge of the tub, crying into her hands. She looks up at him, her eyes barely visible in the predawn gloom.
    Alex turns on the lights and thrusts his arm out. “It’s happening to me too.”
    Just as she had guided his hand so he might feel what had happened to her, Alex takes Leslie’s hand and rubs it up and down the sudden fur of his forearm. In her distraught state, she isn’t as protective of his feelings as he was of hers. “Oh my God, what the hell is that?” she says, snatching back her hand as if from a fire.
    “What is going on here?” Alex feels light-headed, nauseated; he thinks for a moment he might actually pass out.
    “He did this to us,” Leslie says, her voice wobbling.
    Alex wants to reassure her, but he can find nothing true to say that would soothe her soul. He merely shakes his head.
    “He ruined us,” Leslie says as she begins to cry. “He killed us, he turned us into… oh God, Alex. Don’t even look at me. It’s not just my pussy, it’s everywhere. I’m just grotesque.”
    “We’re going to be okay, I promise you. And we’re going to have a family.”
    “This is what you wanted.” Leslie hears what she has just said, and she suddenly snaps out of the whirl of grief that momentarily possessed her. “Okay, I can’t go to work like this,” she says, taking Alex’s elbow and leading him to the door.
    “What are you doing?” he says, pulling away from her.
    “I’m going to get rid of this,” she says.
    “But how?”
    “I’m going to shave what can be shaved. And I need you to go to the Duane Reade and get some bleach, it’s called Jolen, I think, and it’s made for lightening hair on your face, and I want you to get me some Nair.”
    “But…”
    She shoves his chest with startling vigor. “Go!” she says. “And hurry. I’ve got a meeting with some