Half A Life Taken

The Republic had decided the “werewolf” question. Reading the detailed account in the paper did not make me feel any less disgusted than the short version on the radio had.

How many of the people actually affected had the lawmakers listened to before signing their names to that bill? Three? Well, they had talked to three, but they obviously had not listened. Must have been hard to hear about the media clamour, granted. That rampage in Mearen apparently had been too good for sales to pass up.

Following a morbid impulse I looked up some websites of sensationalist papers. Yep, right there was the rant about the pressure from the League of Nations that had led to that ridiculous “compromise” of classifying werewolves and similar shapechangers as animals for two weeks a month. Only.

At least nobody in my town knew I was one of Them. That tiny taste of it-could-have-been-worse turned sour when I came across the “perfidy of monsters hiding among us, ready to strike”. The rag had been crass enough to use a scene-of-crime photo of one of the Mearen victims at the end of the column. A young girl, I didn’t look too closely. Even a publicity still from Blood Moon Hunters or a similar pre-emergence horror flick would have been in better taste, and consistent with their habits.

I feared meeting people I knew. Who would be overjoyed being within their rights to shoot someone like me dead on sight in the right half of the month? For a long moment I considered looking into emigrating, but for all I knew it was only better on paper elsewhere. And I had to get ready for work, anyway.

Based on the prompt "Laws governing lycanthropes (like in that story where they couldn't hunt her once the moon changed), particularly their origins" by Clare K. R. Miller