Living the Dream, Part Three
#3 of Living the Dream
This is part three of a challenge I gave myself quite some time ago - to see if I could reliably upload chunks of a story on a MWF schedule. It is a challenge that I failed, but I definitely liked the idea of it, and I rather enjoyed the direction the story was taking.
It concerns the dream we all share of one day transforming into an anthro, and a look at what might happen in that event.
Living the Dream, Part 3 By Finn Panther
Admittedly the learning curve was a bit sharp. But in the end, being a Furre wasn't all that different from being a human. For instance, the rules of looking sharp hadn't changed one bit. Good outfit, commanding posture, and excellent hair. The only difference was tending to all the fur, but that was easy enough. Even pants had become trivial, and Joseph came to admire the way his tail anchored his jeans. It was more secure than any belt and it led to a shapely rear. Not that he was putting himself on the market - far from it. It's just that he liked to look good, no matter which body he seemed to be in. Surprisingly, his tail went a long way in accomplishing that.
It had certainly been beyond strange, having a tail. It was long and hefty, and the blasted thing had a mind of its own. After you got used to it, though - it became pretty fun. Using it to playfully swat people, having it involuntarily sway to music, habitually sweeping it to the side as you sat down - Joseph never would have thought he'd come to actually enjoy being a Furre, but after several weeks it became kind of hard to deny.
However, his new self also posed innumerable challenges. For instance, it stood to reason that Furres had to brush themselves daily. Having stray pet fur was difficult enough in the human world - and here it was an absolute necessity. What Joseph didn't expect, however, was how much time it took. Consistently and reliably brushing out all of the loose fur - especially in the hard to reach places - it was a very time intensive process. Even so, it was not altogether difficult - and Joseph would swoon if all of his problems were so simple.
One such problem was his unfamiliar muzzle. None of his Furre brethren seemed to realize how difficult their muzzles were. To them it was a fact of life. To Joseph it was cruel and unfair. It was long and awkward (some species had it even worse!) and his lips had a lot more area to cover. Thankfully they were still agile enough to allow plenty of expression, although they felt particularly stiff at the front of his mouth. It was just barely possible to cover the tips of his teeth while his jaw was open (not even that was possible if his jaw was open wide), and his new and improved canines were especially strange.
It was impossible to stop from running his tongue across them, as though he had a canker sore that he just couldn't leave alone. Having two sets of large, intimidating teeth was entirely new, and he found that eating with them was a very tall task. It took opening your mouth quite wide in order to tear anything using the large canines, which was useless for anything but meat - and since a civilized person cut his meat before eating anyway, the teeth were nearly obsolete. This left mainly his molars for chewing, which was a challenge in itself.
True to his new feline anatomy, each of his teeth were markedly sharper than his old human teeth. Also true to his new anatomy, Joseph could chew through meat like butter - but vegetables had become another matter. It took a restructuring of everything he knew in order to figure out vegetables. Their tough fibers were impossible to crush with his pointed teeth, and the new method involved delicately trapping them between his molars and sliding gently, trying his best to grind together the lengths of his jagged, misbehaving teeth.
However, after several weeks of being here, he had decidedly learned most of the basics - and although he hadn't learned the grace of an entire lifetime of practice, he could certainly get the job done. It helped that his body seemed to remember a few of these daily tricks. Things like speaking, aside from a few phonemes that were slightly altered, came fairly naturally. Joseph was also consistently surprised at the noises that came from him. Unexpected growls when he got frustrated - once in his first week he belted out a full blown roar - and incredibly surprising mewls when he did something right. Purring was the strangest of them all - it was impossible to control, it was wildly unpredictable, and felt embarrassing, like his body was betraying him by showing a sign of contentment. And that was the biggest problem of them all.
Joseph had been cooped up in this house for over a month, persistently having the habits and lifestyle of a Furre instilled in him. He had learned everything from washing and cleaning himself to frustratingly controlling his claws. One too many rips in the couch made that one a priority. Objectively it might look like he was making progress, slowly becoming a better Furre. But on the inside each thing he learned about this new world only served to make him feel more hopeless. His strange new life was unfamiliar and stressful, and with each everyday task that he couldn't get right he felt more trapped than ever.
Yet somehow, through the thick of it all, he somehow found it in himself to occasionally purr uncontrollably.
Funny how life works out sometimes. Alternate universe or not.