Slipper Lying Face Down Beside Dead Campfire, In The Gloom

'For what I felt then, there, fireside, was patent rejection at the notion that my loved-one had been taken by a werewolf and I had been deemed, by this beast – which stank – unfit. Not tasty. Or whatever … I had been deemed unwanted, dispensable, unbecoming. Whathaveyou. And then, when I felt this little sting on my right ear’ – he touched his right ear – ‘and brought my hand before my eyes and beheld the blood, a little spatter on my finger, a little, ever so minute, smear, and realized that I’d been bitten, by the werewolf, ever so slightly, like a tiny nibble, like I’d been tinily nibbled on … that was when I felt my strongest sense of rejection. For, as you can imagine, I realized, logically, that the monster had nibbled on my ear, dubbed me untasty, unwanted, dispensable, left me for Sheryl … nibbled, in effect, on my ear, and then dissed me in favor of Sheryl, which I didn’t blame him for since I would probably have done the same, had I been a horrible werewolf, but all the same … had nibbled on my ear (the werewolf had) and found it wasn’t so good. I didn’t taste so good … but you have to understand that it was also incredibly bad then to have woken there in the dark in the blush of the dying embers and realized I was alone, that a monster had just passed through here, that it had picked around the campsite in search of something that tickled its fancy … had left then eventually and left behind what obviously hadn’t tickled its fancy … and it was terrible, you realize, to find yourself lying there left behind. The moon had settled behind the trees. The girlfriend, my girlfriend … gone; and, yeah, everything as before except with one or two things here and there amiss, and I … well, I just lay there. A discarded or overlooked entity. But, granted, it was bad to have realized that Sheryl was gone and that she’d been taken and the monster now obviously had her etc.’