Excerpt: Five-Thirty in the Goddamn Morning

He stifled a yawn and right-clicked to find the correct spelling of "desperate," which is apparently spelt with only one 'a'. It had taken Joshua A. Waters all of twenty minutes to write the sentence for some reason, but how that the period had been placed, he felt another surge of desperate, late-night adrenaline. The small bursts of energy had become increasingly sparse during the last couple of hours, but the fact that he could now finally see the end of the essay in his head pushed him onward.

The weird thing was that he actually really enjoyed his "Rhetoric of Horror" class — it was one of his favorites because they got to watch and read, dissect, and discuss classic horror films and novels, but this paper... this paper just sucked. The prompt was stupid, rather pointless and required that he read several stiff and pretentious essays that were equally stupid, not to mention boring as hell, and pretty much everything about the assignment was contrary to the class because the class itself was awesome. But at least he was almost done with the paper now.

The conclusion concluded rather unceremoniously and Joshua rewarded himself with a wide open yawn. He didn't own a printer, but could print it tomorrow during class, so that wasn't a big deal. No, the only big deal left was that he needed to somehow manage to crawl out of bed in about three hours to get to said class. The lanky nineteen-year old stood up from his desk and noted the time emblazoned in red digital letters on his clock. Five-thirty in the goddamn morning. And that was the last thing he got to note before something big and black flew in through his window and crashed heavily in the corner.

Joshua yelled loudly, jumped backwards and tried to shield his face from the shards of glass that were suddenly flying in every direction. Even if his foot hadn't been completely asleep because he'd been sitting for the last few hours, he probably would have been thrown off balance from the sudden movement. As it was, he stumbled backwards into his chair and groped behind him for the edge of his desk, which was further away than he thought and he thus fell hard on his ass and hit his head against the underside of said desk.

The thing in the corner was large and furry, bleeding profusely, and apparently unconscious. Had it not been unconscious though, Joshua felt like it would have met him with gleaming yellow eyes and a whole lot of teeth, so vaguely, he was very grateful. His mind darted back and forth from wanting to conclude that it as a gigantic stray dog and that it was a gigantic werewolf. Unfortunately for both him and the creature, it was probably the latter, but just because it wasn't a terribly strange phenomenon anymore didn't mean that it wasn't still terribly inconvenient. Especially when the werewolf had just crashed through his dorm room window at five-thirty in the goddamn morning.