When the full moon rises

It’s a warm summer evening. The sky is clear and the full moon shines brightly, leaving everything in a milky glow. Melany sits in her room. She leans out of her window to cool off, it doesn’t help much. She hates the summer, it’s always too hot. She gets sweaty and stinky and when the night does come to cool everything, even just by a little, the mosquitoes come out. And to top it all off, wearing lithe clothes to try and get rid of the heat guarantees that every boy in town bothers her whenever she goes out. She sighs. If only it were almost winter again. Everything beautifully covered in the white snow, drinking coco, movie marathons with her friends. Oh well, not until another few months. At least she can see the moon now that the clouds are gone. That’s the only good thing about the summer. With the little rain they get, the moon is visible and bright almost every evening. Its cool light makes everything seem so peaceful and the heat almost bearable. The wolves sing their ode to it, as does she, silently.

This evening, she can hear the howling again. She closes her eyes, drinking in the sounds of the night and the cool breeze that gently blows along her cheeks. Suddenly, she hears a howl so loud it drowns out everything else. Startled, she realizes it’s coming from close by, in fact, it seems to be coming from just behind the far hedge of their backyard. A wolf, here? She never heard of wolves coming this close to town. She sees something sticking out behind the hedge, she squints her eyes and it looks… Like a head, a wolf’s head. How can that be? The hedge is at least 6 foot tall. Then, the head sharply turns, its eye looking straight into hers. She suppresses a scream and drops down beneath her window sill. Her heart races as she props her back up against the wall, her hand over her mouth. She hears a growl and then silence.

She sits there for a moment with her eyes closed. Her parents aren’t home, should she call them? And then what, tell them she’s afraid because she saw a wolf? It’s probably long gone by now. Then, as she slowly gets up, she hears the house creak. Her heart jumps at that, but she manages to convince herself it’s just the house settling. As she peeks over the windowsill, looking for a sign of the wolf, suddenly a claw bigger than her head reaches up out of the night sky and latches onto the window frame. This time, she can’t suppress the scream. She scrambles up onto her feet while she sees the claw being quickly followed by the wolf head she saw a minute ago. By that point she’s turned around and running for the door, her heart pounding in a chest. Her hand is just an inch away from the handle, when she feels the claw grab her ankle and tug her back. Her leg feels like it almost got torn off by the force behind it. Screaming, she grabs tufts full of carpet, trying to crawl away while her loose leg kicks wildly. She hears a growl and an ear-shattering bark. The unexpected noise paralyzing her for a moment. She looks behind herself and there, she sees something she’s never seen before in her life. A gigantic, muscled, wolf-like creature, standing on two legs. His forelimbs look nothing like a wolf’s though. They look more like arms, with sharp clawed hands. Once again, her screaming picks up. The creature grabs both her legs in one claw, drags her off the floor and swings her over its shoulder. It jumps back out through the window, landing with an audible ‘thud’. He takes off in a sprint, with three claws to the ground and the other firmly coiled around the girl’s waist.

In fear and in panic, Melany screams her lungs out, as she tries to pound and kick the huge form under her with all her might. But the creature looks unfazed as the impacts get absorbed by its thick, matted fur. Desperate to get free, Melany puts all her strength in a hit that must hurt even a thing of this size.