Karl had to be the fattest man I’d ever seen. He’d worked as a logger until the day a tree timbered the wrong way, and now he lay in bed like a beached whale, his massive rolls of fat spilling out over the sides. I stood in the small corner of his bedroom that wasn’t given over to bed, fat-rolls, bedpans, and the CPAP machine. He’d been on our waiting list for a long time, and I was overjoyed that we’d finally received a batch of rejuve that fit his genetic profile.
He wasn’t.
“I’ll be a white girl?” he rasped through the oxygen mask. He was thumbing through the artist’s impression of his post-treatment state, scowling.
“Ah, uh, female, yes,” I said apologetically. “The charity receives the treatments on an ad hoc basis - batches that are on the verge of expiry or are no longer needed. We don’t always manage to match the treatment to the patient perfectly, try as we might. Honestly, it’s normally the ears and tails that patients object to, haha,” I laugh awkwardly. “But the batch we have does expire in the next 48 hours. If you do wish to decline, we’ll need your answer now. We have quite a waiting list, you see…”
“My mamma would be spinning in her grave,” he grumbled, scrawling his signature on the form with fingers like sausages.
“There’s just one last thing. You’ll need to designate a, uhh, owner. It’s standard practice for, uh, any animal to-”
“Nobody is owning me,” he snapped. “Take me out to the hills. I’ll live rough until they change the laws. They’ll never find me.”
It was unorthodox, and the charity could get in trouble for letting an ‘animal’ loose without a human owner, but I wasn’t about to let a man die on a technicality. I signed off on it, and spent the next two hours poking his blubber with a needle until I found a vein for the IV.
He made such a pretty little thing. I couldn’t help but worry for him as I released him into the rocky mountains a month later. His fur wasn’t all grown in yet but he didn’t seem to mind the cold, his lithe body bounding away from rock to rock.
“I’ll bring you some food in a few weeks,” I call after him as his tail whips out of sight.