Lionesses & Lemmings - Charles Jota Fenix

Lionesses & Lemmings by Charles Jota Fenix

Book excerpt

The lionesses don’t appear until the next chapter. All of this is background information, but nonetheless stuff that I figured important enough to be part of the story in the first place. I do like to bumble my way through some aspects of life, especially on the academic side. I wonder if that’s a genetic thing.

If you want the truth, I still don’t really understand how I ended up in Pangreana; there are a lot of uncertainties in my story. I’m not a particularly fantastic liar by any stretch of the imagination, so you can rest assured about that. I am a pretty good storyteller though.

Anyway, if you’re here for furry tails, and romantic tales, then you’re more than welcome to skip ahead, but if you want to know a little more about my life before Pangreana, then I suggest you stick around and read chapter zero.

***

Before I knew that I could follow my brain and heart, I listened to that little voice inside you that tells you you’re not good enough, and that you should see things through because nobody will ever love you more than the person looking back at you in the mirror. Eventually, it nags away at you so much that all the goodness just leaks out of you, and you turn into a robot. Not cruel, but not kind. Without an understanding of how you came to be in the place, and without any clear way out of the pool of shit in which you find yourself.

Well, that’s exactly where I was all those years ago. Starting my story on the day that the last bit of feeling leaked out seems like the best place to start, because it’s also the day I both lost and took control.

Little shards of bullshit had been filling my lungs and lacerating my soul for a few years before.

The screams - coming from the kitchen but directed entirely at me - were shrieks of toxic control, repressed lesbianism, and a comical nonchalance towards potentially morbid obesity.

I don’t mean to distance anyone listening to my story who may happen to be lesbian, gay, or otherwise. I couldn’t care less about what people do - or don’t do - with their genitals, sexuality, and sexual life, but I do take issue with repressed homosexuality used as an excuse for poisonous behaviour, the same as I would say about toxic masculinity or overt gender assumptions, both of which are often expressed through atypical heterosexual males. I, myself, have had a great struggle trying to figure out my own sexuality, but I've never weaponised it.

Anyway, in a rather depressing manner of looking at things, I’d grown accustomed to the nightly berating. The demon squawks of a particularly difficult girlfriend at the time. The screams came almost every night at seven sharp. The manipulation usually started earlier. The violence depended on which mental train had left the station that day. That night, the violent outburst arrived at 7:51 in the form of three knives thrown in my general direction.

I know it was 7:51 exactly because the first blade struck the clock, stopping it dead in place. The second landed somewhere near the cat, who scampered off in a panic. He was a real soft thing, physically and emotionally. The third struck my leg. It was the handle that smacked into my shin. The blunt end. It hurt a little.

I picked up the knives, minus the one firmly lodged in the wall; I just gave that a little flick to hear the springing noise as it vibrated in the wall.

I was greeted by an overweight woman in her mid-twenties, holding a meat cleaver to her arm like the proverbial pig taking itself to slaughter.

“I’ll do it,” she said, moving the blade closer to her wrist, then bringing her arm up like a stout lumberjack preparing their axe for the fatal blow.

“Go ahead, chop it off, fastest way to lose a few pounds,” I replied, poking the bear.

It wasn’t usual for me to be that much of an asshole, but things had worn me down over time, and eventually, I’d just snapped; I’d figured that I deserved more. It’s not a crime to figure that you deserve more. I’d have taken Chinese water torture over another night with her at that point. No kidding.

Her response was a tirade of curses and oddly strung together insults. Syntax never was her strong point, despite speaking English as her native language. She had the finesse and appearance of a fat baboon. I wasn’t a GQ model by any stretch of the imagination, but I deserved more. Why hadn’t I figured that out before? Simple. I lacked any self-confidence whatsoever. Until that night. Whether it was an unseen spectre, a spark of information from an unwitting colleague, or even just an emotional overload, that day, I gained the confidence I needed.

She was still blowing hot air.

“Shut the hell up, pull yourself together, and do some goddamn exercise,” I said, walking towards the door.

She stared, dumbfounded.

“You’ve lost me, I can’t hack it with you anymore, and I need a change. I suggest that you do the same before big Grim comes knockin’.” With that said, I walked out the door, got into my car and drove away from a city that I used to love, knowing that the city wouldn’t really care and would go on regardless.

Look, before anyone gets all bent out of shape over so-called “fat-shaming”, let me tell you that there is a huge difference between fat-shaming and normalising a health epidemic. That night, and what I said, came after years of abuse of both my body and her own, after years of gentle encouragement from myself and various health professionals to just be a little more active and a little more health conscious. I would never have said or thought such things if she hadn’t used her insecurities as an excuse to be a horrible person.

I hadn’t been too active over the years, and I was a skinny, weak little thing, with zero back muscles then. I’ve always been of the mind that the market benefits from obesity. Just do enough not to kill yourself slowly, the minimum of thirty minutes exercise per day, and I promise that you will feel better within the week.

Anyway, after driving away from the city that I had called home for five years, or more, I realised I had driven to the small town where I had grown up. Saint Lenshe. The other side of the country … the town of my birth, and in a way, the town of my first death.

At the time, it seemed like a step backward to go back home to recover, but that’s just how the lioness bit. Sometimes it’s fatal, other times it’s not. At that time, the severity of the bite seemed uncertain.

One thing you need to know about me is that I like to make up my own sayings: it’s a quirk of mine. Possibly, an issue, I don’t know. I stopped noticing it too long ago to differentiate between problem and personality. Anyway, for whatever reason, the metaphorical feline had bitten and therefore, I stayed.

My parents were both alive and kicking but had a mutual understanding that our relationship functioned best with sufficient distance. They needed their space now. I’d intruded for eighteen years too long before. I can’t remember whether it had always been that way. I remember feeling the pressure of being the prodigy of the family, the sanctified, the saviour of a tainted bloodline, but I seriously can’t figure out whether I knew that at eight, or whether that came later.

With a quick conversation over an internet application, we struck a deal in which I could live in the attic for a small amount of rent. A couple of hundred pounds a week. The attic had a toilet, a small bath, weirdly small, which meant crumpling up like a hedgehog to bathe. It also had a stove, which was great. I barely had to leave my room to prepare anything. Enough to survive for a few months if nothing else.

It took around two weeks for me to land on my feet, or truth be told, flat on my face. I kept hearing news reports of low unemployment rates alongside an increase of job opportunities. The British government had been fudging the figures for a while now. The jobs were really all low-wage jobs with very little scope for promotion. What most people would call dead-end jobs. Although that phrase always seems a little harsh for me, there’s an implication that those jobs are pointless when they are essential for the system to work. They are undeniably shitty though.

There are a few things that buckle my nuts beyond belief, and one of them is the people who say “if you don’t like it, just get a better job” because they genuinely think it’s that simple. Morons. They’re usually about fifty-something too, born in a time when one could walk out of high school and into a decent paying job with high promotion opportunities.

***

Anyway, purely for the fact that I was puncturing my poor bank account daily, and as a side note that I tend to spiral when I’m alone and doing nothing, I decided to take one of those less than stellar jobs at a local fast-food establishment, a ten-minute drive from my parents’ house.

Chicken Universe was the biggest supplier of chicken in the universe, so the chain claimed, but I didn’t like repeating an unsubstantiated claim. How could they possibly know? Do they even have chickens on Vectron Twelve in the Syntaxia Galaxy? Who knows?!

The pay was enough to survive, but if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to slowly die from mundanity, I assure you that working in a fast-food restaurant is sufficient. The first week or so is fine, as you’re overwhelmed by information fired in your direction en masse. I had a bachelor’s degree and some market research background at this point, so don’t underestimate how complex those ‘menial’ jobs can really be. If there’s one thing that I learnt from the entire experience, it’s never judge a person by their job. We are our own masters, but poorer for judging others as below our step on the ladder.

***

The guy assigned as my trainer was a jolly, portly man in his late thirties called Stewie. One thing I really liked about him was that he would ask my opinion about almost everything. He doubted himself a lot and you could tell that, at heart, he just wanted some approval, and most of all, a little bit of love.

My manager was a pleasant enough girl in her late teens, becoming a fully-fledged twenty-year-old in the next few months. I remember this purely for the fact that she invited every member of the store, whether you’d worked there for a day or ten years to her birthday party - gifts mandatory. She did this despite knowing that we all received the same crappy salary as her. I don’t really know what she expected.

One morning a few months after starting, I was busy removing chicken hearts from the freshly delivered meat and wondering where I had gone wrong in my life, when I heard a faint purring behind me.

It wasn’t unusual to see the odd rat scampering about now and then, and even an occasional street cat looking for easy pickings, but the purring coming from behind sounded like it was emanating from something huge, something predatory. Almost like a lioness was stalking me, her eyes trained on my back, waiting for my next move. A fatal game of chess.

Then I heard the purring beast speak.

“Jackson, I require your assistance,” it said with a pleasant growl in the back of its throat.

The hairs on my arm stood up and the bumps over my body followed. The voice was recognisable, but the sensation surrounding it was not.

I turned slowly, remembering scenes from several nature documentaries, demanding slow movements when faced with a predator. Dammit, I was supposed to be providing the food, not becoming it.

The shape came into view. It was unmistakably Tasha, but it also wasn’t Tasha, at least not in the way that I had come to know her.

She stood in front of me with the same lovely brunette hair that waved its way down past her chin and mouth, resting gently on her shoulders. This time though, her hair didn’t fall past her chin but rather past her snout, which protruded from beneath two emerald eyes. Those jewels were portals into her soul. I could sense it. Her soul was a killer, but her attitude was not. Perhaps more worryingly was the way that those eyes darted back and forth, watching my every move, like a lioness scoping out her prey.