Fur
By Alison Rumfitt
fiction | 11.07 min read | TW: murder, violence, sexual violence
The version of me that looked back from the shop windows I walked past in the cold or from the mirrors of cars always looked strange and unlike the version of me which lived in the mirror in the bathroom, which also seemed unlike the version of me that lived in the camera of my phone, which also seemed… unlike the version of me my friends saw, or the version my parents saw, or the version I would have seen if I was a kid again and looking at adult me now. He would have asked; who is that? He would have questioned. Interrogated. Climbed all over me like a dead tree in the overgrown area he walked through to get to school. His school was on an industrial estate, and the overgrown area, the salterns, they called it, had been the site of a murder, and kids used to run around at night pretending to be the ghost of the woman who was killed, strangled with her own scarf. A scarf she knitted. Did they catch the guy? I guess. I think. It wasn’t part of the story of the place. She died beneath the dead tree and he climbed it like he would climb me, up to my shoulders, peering into my ear. There’s something in there, he would say. I’d shake my head. Are you me? Yes. How? How can you be me? A lot changed, I’d shrug. A lot changed between where you are and where I am. An impossible distance and twelve hundred different versions of the self.
I was lodging in a strange little room that nestled at the top of someone else’s house, overpaying because it was the only place I could get – no one wanted to live with me and all the other opportunities had faded so it was lodging or running home to my parents, proving them right when they had said I would never make it. So I took the room and paid the rent. I don’t know how. The room looked out on train tracks where drunk students mingled sometimes and I wondered if it ever happened, if any of them ever stumbled out in front of… I sat there drinking chamomile late at night looking out of my window like a spectre thinking well, if it happens, I can be your witness, can’t I?
And I worked here and there. I was still reeling from life. Still finding out what life was and what it was all about, and I didn’t like the answers I had come across so far. I worked as a cleaner for offices until they fired me for not getting deep enough behind the toilets where the real filth was. I worked in a bar until the bar died after only a month of me being there. I couldn’t help thinking it was my fault that it shut down. It had been doing so well beforehand but suddenly I started pouring drinks there and the termites moved in and the finances fell through and I felt a horrible guilt even though really I hadn’t done anything at all, it had just been the owner, he was going to prison apparently.
And I drew. I drew things. I drew as a kid, spaceships and aliens that looked like girls who were boys, and I kept drawing, even if my art teacher told me I had no real talent. When I came out I drew myself as a girl for the first time, or what I imagined I would look like, ten years from that point as an adult girl with an adult life, carrying coffee, charming and confident and going to her real job in an office with grown-ups who respected her, found her cool, the way she walked on heels like they were nothing at all, just soft earth. I drew lots of things.
It was after the bar job collapsed that I started to draw what people wanted, for money. A friend suggested it. You should take commissions. The idea had never occurred to me before. Art had always been a space of reclusive privacy. I had bought a digital pad and pen a couple of years now, second hand, and they were grossly out of date but they still worked, even if my laptop sometimes struggled at registering my lines until three seconds after making them. But at this point I needed something because before I knew it rent would come around again, ringing its bell, and there would be no more bar money because the bar owner was going to prison. He was going behind bars, I thought, and chuckled even though it wasn’t clever at all. I said I’d think about it. Drawing for money. But who would want to pay for my art?
Well, lots of people want to pay for your art when you’re a half-competent digital artist with, more importantly, malleable enough boundaries that they can be pushed at until they give in.
You probably know what furries are, right? Maybe you are a furry. That’s cool. It’s like, completely fine. I’m not one but I pretended to be one for the purposes of selling my art because, it turned out, furries are the only thing keeping the digital art economy from crashing down on everybody’s heads. Furries are the lifeblood of every starving artist like me. It didn’t take long to find that out. I just had to google around to see who was commissioning people. Every single time, without fail, it would be someone with a cartoon Tony the Tiger profile picture, or a skunk smirking, or a stoned sloth. I made a fursona. It seemed easier. If I was a furry, I would want to buy art from other furries. Keep supporting the community, right? From the inside. My fursona – yet another version of me – was a white cat with a pink nose and green eyes. I drew her leaning against the counter of a coffee shop, smiling sweetly at an unseen barista. I thought, well, there are worse ways to be seen than this. Worse versions of me than this.
Someone who represented themselves online with an avatar of a cheetah was the first one to message me. They typed in a way that told me they were using google translate to get from their native language to mine. It was strange to read, like looking at English with your eyes half shut. Their handle was spottedamber95. Hello, the Cheetah said, I saw that you received orders for drawings and I am interested if you can draw something for me?
Hi spottedamber, I wrote back. I am taking commissions yes! I told them my rates and asked what they wanted me to draw.
It was difficult working out how much I should be paid. How much I valued my own art and time. With regular jobs, the pay is set, the hours are what you are given, your relationship to your own labour is enforced and strictly controlled. Here I had to do the maths myself. Try to think back about whether anything in Capital could help me. I came up with a number based on cursory research but I felt worried that it was either too high or too low at the same time, maybe both. My time and my energy and my creativity had a value. The pad and the pen and the laptop had a value each, too. The internet, the electricity that powered everything. Value upon value upon value. But I set my rights to the Cheetah, then, feeling like I was sat in the dark of a bar, muttering prices to some hooded stranger with amber eyes that glowed out beneath its cowl. How much for it? That much for it. Take it or leave it.
spottedamber95 replied. I want you to draw me a cheetah that stands proud on the savannah with a new kill at my feet.
I didn’t know much about cheetahs but this didn’t seem entirely correct with my image of them in the wild. The vision, as I pictured it, seemed more appropriate to a lion, or a panther, but they wanted what they wanted. I was just a means to an end, for making this image reach something closer to reality. The fresh kill... the pride… I wasn’t sure if this was sexual. I knew that furries weren’t necessarily fetishistic about their status as furries. But the image felt sexual, to me. I didn’t mind. I didn’t see myself making fetish art, but I could do it. Of course I could. I said I’d do it. I’ll do it for you, Cheetah. I’ll make that image real for the right money and I’ll make it fucking beautiful.
I did, too. It wasn’t half bad, and Cheetah paid me, with a tip, too, a sizable tip. The tip itself covered my food shop for the week, and the pay for the piece covered just under half a month’s rent.
The piece took me a couple of days, and spottedamber told me they would buy from me again. I sat looking at the forum spaces they frequented. I found their other accounts easily, all of them personified by the cheetah, sometimes art, sometimes real pictures from nature documentaries. I found their twitter, where they just tweeted old clips from Big Cat Diary, with no additional comments. Their likes were the same. Cheetahs, running at top speed through the long grass. Cheetahs, pouncing on gazelle.
The commissions didn’t exactly pour in, but I had a few more. spottedamber seemed to be friendly with some others, and, I guess, had recommended me. Someone who represented themselves as a koala bear smoking a joint bought a picture from me. They were very complimentary, and friendly. Too friendly. They kept trying to ask for my real name. They wanted to know what I looked like. I was friendly but put up my boundaries. They responded by misunderstanding. Sorry if spottedamber has been weird btw, they said, he’s a friend but he can be a real creep. To which I wanted to say no, that’s you, Koala. But you tip well so I’ll still draw pictures for you. If you want me to. Pictures of you chilling in a eucalyptus tree smoking weed with your eyes bloodshot and red. Another version of you working at a weed dispensary.
Every time the tip comes through, I purr like the cat I am, and my heart is a little less anxious for the week.
I draw so much my hands cramp up. I bend my fingers backwards gently to get them to stop hurting. I use one hand to pull each finger back, wincing, and then swap over. Pulling them right to the point where my brain thinks, okay, is that going to happen, are you going to break it? Could you do that if you really tried? I draw late into the night, the only light in my room the blue light from my laptop, and the glow from the train station beneath my window, the soundtrack to everything night birds and drunk people singing and laughing and crying and screaming at one another but I don’t think anyone gets hit by a train, not under my watch at least.
Draw a cheetah with blood around its mouth. spottedamber likes me, he says. He wants to know more about me, too. I tell him I live in England but that’s as far as I can go. I feel him gathering his own image of me, and I let him because his money gets me through the months. I draw him with blood and gore on his teeth, I draw him hunting, I draw him, once, in a modern setting, on a city street, and then its back to the savannah again. I draw for others, too, but never as much. The Koala comes back a couple of times before vanishing. Maybe I was too hard. Maybe my boundaries were too tough, if I had been friendly, if I only I had been friendlier… given up more of my life. But the money is okay for now. I eat a little better. I see sunlight. My landlord sees me and nods whenever he does, but we don’t talk all that much. I think he resents having this thing in his house, even if it pays for the privilege of being there. I wonder what he would think if he knew where that money came from, the secret channels it has flowed down to get to him. I draw the cheetah with an erect penis. And I don’t even flinch really. I just separate it off. It’s not a real cheetah. It’s just a drawing. It’s more of a person than an animal, right? But once I do that it’s like the floodgates have opened for spottedamber. He knows that I can give in, for enough money. So he starts to ask for more explicitly sexual images. I ask for more money for them, and he provides. Can I draw a cheetah and another cheetah fucking animalistically beneath the savannah moon? The dust blowing up around them in clouds like… a haze, an unreal haze that settles on everything softly only to be disturbed again.
Can you draw a cheetah raping a koala for me? Bite the koala's neck with a bloody mouth?
No. Fuck off, no I can’t. Of course I can’t. Okay, I say, but for more money.
Later. The next week. That drawing made me feel bad. I could tell a whole other meaning behind it, behind the already disturbing frontloaded parts. Cheetah being a bit of a creep, as the Koala had told me, smoking another joint. But the money… if I went back to the world of bars or cleaning or anything else now, I would feel so much worse. What about drawing that picture was more upsetting than the things I’d see working in a pub on any given week? All the dates going wrong, all the women I’d be worrying about, all the drunks stumbling towards home, towards their trains, unsteady on high heels. Women beneath dead trees.
Can you please draw the cheetah eating a human baby that is still alive and crying?
I don’t know. Can I? Maybe. Yes. For how much?
You are the best person I really wonderful buy from
Thank you, Cheetah. That means a lot. I’ve been drinking tonight. I’ve been drinking and I’m done with drawing for now. I’m going to take a walk. It’s late here but the cold air will feel really good on my skin I think. I’m going to take a walk down from the room in the house to the outside. Look at the bats circling in the streetlights, and in the lights above the station. Some drunk girl there is crying. Her friends left her. Can you believe that? She looks like she wants to talk, walks up to me, tries to tell me something but I must look like a corpse so gives up and walks off. I don’t know where to. Her train is coming but she walks away from this oasis, leaving me here, the only one on the platform. There is a fox squealing unnaturally. There are animals all around me fucking and dying and killing. The night train speeds towards the station, faster than you could ever be, but just as sharp.
about Alison Rummfitt (she/her)
Alison Rumfitt (she/her) is a writer and semi-professional trans woman. Her debut novel, Tell Me I'm Worthless, was published by Cipher Press in October 2021. It is a radically modern take on gothic horror, spanning gender critical feminists, sissy porn, the intellectual dark web and incels. Julia Armfield said that the book "holds a gruesome mirror up to the way it feels to live now." Her debut pamphlet of poetry, The T(y)ranny, was a critical deconstruction of Margaret Atwood’s work through the lens of a trans woman navigating her own misogynistic dystopia. It was published by Zarf Editions in 2019. Her work has appeared in countless publications such as SPORAZINE, datableed, The Final Girls, Burning House Press, SOFT CARTEL, Glass Poetry and more. Her poetry was nominated - twice! - for the Rhysling Award in 2018. You can find her on Twitter @hangsawoman and @alison.zone on Instagram. She loves her friends.