Scent Notes: A smoky cedar fire, cactus flower, black currant, tobacco.

Heather Thompson was fuming. She’d been having a series of unfortunate events over the past week, and she was getting pretty tired of the universe kicking her while she was seriously down and out. Between emergency surgery for her cat, being passed up for the promotion she’d worked so hard for, and the sudden onset of a serious illness for her mom (and a possible related diagnosis for herself), she was at her wits’ end. “I can’t take it anymore!” she yelled in the general direction of her cat, who was hiding under the bed. “I’m so tired of everything happening all at once, all the time, always. I need a break.” She threw herself into bed, under the covers, and watched bad reality TV until she finally felt sleepy instead of angry. “I wish I was a dinosaur, or some kind of scary bird, then I could take on anything,” she thought as she drifted off to sleep. 

The next morning, she woke up to her alarm screaming. “Shit, I overslept!” she yelled, and reached out her right hand to shut off her alarm clock. Instead, she found her right hand was missing, and in its place was a raptor claw, which had punctured through the alarm clock and destroyed it spectacularly. She stared at it in confusion, rubbing her regular left hand over her eyes in disbelief. Did she … wait … these things don’t just happen! What is going on? She yanked her arm back, sending the broken alarm clock flying into the wall across the room, smashing it to pieces. Heather gingerly stroked the arm and claw; yup, this is happening. This is real. She was part dinosaur, just like she’d wished. She didn’t understand why it happened, nor how, but it clearly was happening. 

She called her office and said she had a family emergency and she’d be late to the office. Gingerly, she got ready, taking care to not use her right hand as awful as possible. Her cat took one look at her arm and ran back under the bed. Good thing his surgery wasn’t today; trying to put the cat in the carrier and take him to the vet would be impossible right now. She did accidentally puncture her walls in a few places, and one or two shirts were ripped in the process of getting dressed, but overall it wasn’t the worst morning she’d ever had. In fact, she kind of enjoyed the claw. Certainly it was odd, and she had to keep reminding herself not to, you know, accidentally slash the cat, or make sure not to try and rub her face with her right hand if it was itchy, but the claw made her feel powerful. Slightly embarrassed, sure, but also powerful. 

When she finally made it to the office, she didn’t apologize for her lateness. She walked with a sense of confidence she hadn’t felt in ages, although nobody seemed to notice the raptor claw itself. They all sensed the change in her behavior, though. Her un-fuck-withable attitude translated over the entire office, and she got more work done that day than she’d gotten done in months; or at least, that’s how it felt to her. She was staying late, fiendishly typing with her left hand only, as she’d nearly broken her keyboard when she first got to the office. But she figured out how to use the claw to her advantage, how to balance folders or documents on the claw while walking them across the office to a coworker’s cube. By the end of the day, she felt like a total badass … until she looked at the clock and realized she was supposed to be going on a first date across town in ten minutes. “Shit fuck damn!” she yelled out, slamming a hole in the desk with her claw. Eh, that can be fixed, she thought, throwing on her coat. She wasn’t sure how, exactly, she would break the news of this suddenly sprouted claw to her first date, but it didn’t matter. She felt fearless and ferocious; anything could be possible. Maybe he’ll also be part dinosaur? Stranger things have happened.

Scent Notes: A smoky cedar fire, cactus flower, black currant, tobacco.