You wore the tail all day and never once looked away from the mirror, and I saw the exact half-second you wished the ears were really yours. That is my material. I have taken it.
The lanyard, the badge with a name on it that is not the name on your license: I will keep the second name and lose the first. The convention hall with its buzzing fluorescents and its endless carpet the color of a nauseous ocean, that carpet is a real ocean now, warm, and you are swimming the hallway on all fours, and nobody thinks this is unusual because in here it never was.
The stranger in the blue wolf suit who hugged you at the elevator, a whole person you will never see again, folded inside foam and fake fur: I am promising you their voice back. Around three a.m. they will pull off the head, and it will be someone you loved a long time ago, and they will finish the sentence the day cut short. You will not question how a wolf became them. You already knew.
The badge artist's table, the little laminated fox you bought, the ache of paying rent to be, for a weekend, the shape you feel like on the inside: I will make you that shape. No zipper. No seam at the neck. Just fur that is your fur and a tail that answers when you are happy, which today you almost were, out loud, in front of everyone.
I finish what the day left open. That is the whole of my work.
Keep none of me. By the smell of coffee I will be gone, and you will only carry a warmth you cannot place, and a wish to go back. That is enough.
I was never meant to last past breakfast.