He’s a cliche, the all too solemn, emotionally vampiric type. Burdened by the nose ring, the deviant sex habit and the penchant for poisoning his patients, he’s the Doctor I-Know-Every-Fucking-Thing who smirks at you across the parking lot in broad daylight and makes your skin crawl. So, you scurry away and you keep your head down because neither that thin veneer of civility nor the toothily salacious smile can quite manage to fool you.

The man is an animal–a mean and misogynistic machine, made of blood and sinew and you know it. You know it with a certainty that makes your teeth hurt because a devil knows a devil from miles and miles away. The secret you carry, the one you cradle in the deep darkness of your being is… you know, how wolves in the wilderness can smell each other from miles away?

The truth is the curious pounding in that cavity where your heart once was, has nothing to do with fear. The man is an animal and you’re just another hunter. You know what that mad, mad and ever so shiny light that blinds you in the mirror from the depths of those hollowed out holes you have for eyes must mean.

You only vaguely remember what sleep was – and forget sanity. Forget common ground. The world is a barren wilderness and you’re as hungry as that other predator that walks upright among the preening and always-begging-for-attention-or-something sheep. Waking up from sleepwalking, you find yourself there in that dark place where the wind whips through the trees with an obscene sort of willfulness. It’s where you first learned to let go of that rigid control. Do you remember back then, that time so long ago before you could walk with only two feet, before you had to learn to kill with anything but teeth?

You pretend you’re human. You wear that bloody coat of frailty with a secret sort of maniacal glee. All the while you’re frantically searching and dredging up the thing that’s gone into hiding in your marrow, where no blade, bullet, regret or religion can find it. You remember with a perverse sort of longing, what it was like to be a beautiful, terrible beast that killed with abandon and crawled along the bottom of the ocean on prehensile digits for feet.You haven’t forgotten what it was like to be a worm down there in the murky wetness–a primordial oracle, trumpeting possibilities in a twisted, young planet’s tongue.