Lionesses & Lemmings

By Charles Jota Fenix

When Jackson grew tired of humanity, he made a flippant wish to be rid of them.

Little did he know that he would awaken in a world inhabited by anthropomorphic lionesses, where humans have gone extinct. Shown the way by an attractive young lioness and her motley crew, Jackson will be faced with some of the biggest decisions of his life.

What darkness is brewing in Pangreana? Will Jackson ever return home? If faced with the choice, how will he choose between his home world and his feline lover?

Lionesses & Lemmings contains moderately mature themes and some strong language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: Sep 16, 2022

Book preview

CHAPTER 0

BULLSHIT SHARDS & EXIT PATHS

The lionesses don’t appear until the next chapter. All of this is background information, but nonetheless stuff that I figured important enough to be part of the story in the first place. I do like to bumble my way through some aspects of life, especially on the academic side. I wonder if that’s a genetic thing.

If you want the truth, I still don’t really understand how I ended up in Pangreana; there are a lot of uncertainties in my story. I’m not a particularly fantastic liar by any stretch of the imagination, so you can rest assured about that. I am a pretty good storyteller though.

Anyway, if you’re here for furry tails, and romantic tales, then you’re more than welcome to skip ahead, but if you want to know a little more about my life before Pangreana, then I suggest you stick around and read chapter zero.

Before I knew that I could follow my brain and heart, I listened to that little voice inside you that tells you you’re not good enough, and that you should see things through because nobody will ever love you more than the person looking back at you in the mirror. Eventually, it nags away at you so much that all the goodness just leaks out of you, and you turn into a robot. Not cruel, but not kind. Without an understanding of how you came to be in the place, and without any clear way out of the pool of shit in which you find yourself.

Well, that’s exactly where I was all those years ago. Starting my story on the day that the last bit of feeling leaked out seems like the best place to start, because it’s also the day I both lost and took control.

Little shards of bullshit had been filling my lungs and lacerating my soul for a few years before.

The screams - coming from the kitchen but directed entirely at me - were shrieks of toxic control, repressed lesbianism, and a comical nonchalance towards potentially morbid obesity.

I don’t mean to distance anyone listening to my story who may happen to be lesbian, gay, or otherwise. I couldn’t care less about what people do - or don’t do - with their genitals, sexuality, and sexual life, but I do take issue with repressed homosexuality used as an excuse for poisonous behaviour, the same as I would say about toxic masculinity or overt gender assumptions, both of which are often expressed through atypical heterosexual males. I, myself, have had a great struggle trying to figure out my own sexuality, but I've never weaponised it.

Anyway, in a rather depressing manner of looking at things, I’d grown accustomed to the nightly berating. The demon squawks of a particularly difficult girlfriend at the time. The screams came almost every night at seven sharp. The manipulation usually started earlier. The violence depended on which mental train had left the station that day. That night, the violent outburst arrived at 7:51 in the form of three knives thrown in my general direction.

I know it was 7:51 exactly because the first blade struck the clock, stopping it dead in place. The second landed somewhere near the cat, who scampered off in a panic. He was a real soft thing, physically and emotionally. The third struck my leg. It was the handle that smacked into my shin. The blunt end. It hurt a little.

I picked up the knives, minus the one firmly lodged in the wall; I just gave that a little flick to hear the springing noise as it vibrated in the wall.

I was greeted by an overweight woman in her mid-twenties, holding a meat cleaver to her arm like the proverbial pig taking itself to slaughter.

I’ll do it, she said, moving the blade closer to her wrist, then bringing her arm up like a stout lumberjack preparing their axe for the fatal blow.

Go ahead, chop it off, fastest way to lose a few pounds, I replied, poking the bear.

It wasn’t usual for me to be that much of an asshole, but things had worn me down over time, and eventually, I’d just snapped; I’d figured that I deserved more. It’s not a crime to figure that you deserve more. I’d have taken Chinese water torture over another night with her at that point. No kidding.

Her response was a tirade of curses and oddly strung together insults. Syntax never was her strong point, despite speaking English as her native language. She had the finesse and appearance of a fat baboon. I wasn’t a GQ model by any stretch of the imagination, but I deserved more. Why hadn’t I figured that out before? Simple. I lacked any self-confidence whatsoever. Until that night. Whether it was an unseen spectre, a spark of information from an unwitting colleague, or even just an emotional overload, that day, I gained the confidence I needed.

She was still blowing hot air.

Shut the hell up, pull yourself together, and do some goddamn exercise, I said, walking towards the door.

She stared, dumbfounded.

You’ve lost me, I can’t hack it with you anymore, and I need a change. I suggest that you do the same before big Grim comes knockin’. With that said, I walked out the door, got into my car and drove away from a city that I used to love, knowing that the city wouldn’t really care and would go on regardless.

Look, before anyone gets all bent out of shape over so-called fat-shaming, let me tell you that there is a huge difference between fat-shaming and normalising a health epidemic. That night, and what I said, came after years of abuse of both my body and her own, after years of gentle encouragement from myself and various health professionals to just be a little more active and a little more health conscious. I would never have said or thought such things if she hadn’t used her insecurities as an excuse to be a horrible person.

I hadn’t been too active over the years, and I was a skinny, weak little thing, with zero back muscles then. I’ve always been of the mind that the market benefits from obesity. Just do enough not to kill yourself slowly, the minimum of thirty minutes exercise per day, and I promise that you will feel better within the week.

---

Anyway, after driving away from the city that I had called home for five years, or more, I realised I had driven to the small town where I had grown up. Saint Lenshe. The other side of the country … the town of my birth, and in a way, the town of my first death.

At the time, it seemed like a step backward to go back home to recover, but that’s just how the lioness bit. Sometimes it’s fatal, other times it’s not. At that time, the severity of the bite seemed uncertain.

One thing you need to know about me is that I like to make up my own sayings: it’s a quirk of mine. Possibly, an issue, I don’t know. I stopped noticing it too long ago to differentiate between problem and personality. Anyway, for whatever reason, the metaphorical feline had bitten and therefore, I stayed.

My parents were both alive and kicking but had a mutual understanding that our relationship functioned best with sufficient distance. They needed their space now. I’d intruded for eighteen years too long before. I can’t remember whether it had always been that way. I remember feeling the pressure of being the prodigy of the family, the sanctified, the saviour of a tainted bloodline, but I seriously can’t figure out whether I knew that at eight, or whether that came later.

With a quick conversation over an internet application, we struck a deal in which I could live in the attic for a small amount of rent. A couple of hundred pounds a week. The attic had a toilet, a small bath, weirdly small, which meant crumpling up like a hedgehog to bathe. It also had a stove, which was great. I barely had to leave my room to prepare anything. Enough to survive for a few months if nothing else.

It took around two weeks for me to land on my feet, or truth be told, flat on my face. I kept hearing news reports of low unemployment rates alongside an increase of job opportunities. The British government had been fudging the figures for a while now. The jobs were really all low-wage jobs with very little scope for promotion. What most people would call dead-end jobs. Although that phrase always seems a little harsh for me, there’s an implication that those jobs are pointless when they are essential for the system to work. They are undeniably shitty though.

There are a few things that buckle my nuts beyond belief, and one of them is the people who say if you don’t like it, just get a better job because they genuinely think it’s that simple. Morons. They’re usually about fifty-something too, born in a time when one could walk out of high school and into a decent paying job with high promotion opportunities.

Anyway, purely for the fact that I was puncturing my poor bank account daily, and as a side note that I tend to spiral when I’m alone and doing nothing, I decided to take one of those less than stellar jobs at a local fast-food establishment, a ten-minute drive from my parents’ house.

Chicken Universe was the biggest supplier of chicken in the universe, so the chain claimed, but I didn’t like repeating an unsubstantiated claim. How could they possibly know? Do they even have chickens on Vectron Twelve in the Syntaxia Galaxy? Who knows?!

The pay was enough to survive, but if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to slowly die from mundanity, I assure you that working in a fast-food restaurant is sufficient. The first week or so is fine, as you’re overwhelmed by information fired in your direction en masse. I had a bachelor’s degree and some market research background at this point, so don’t underestimate how complex those ‘menial’ jobs can really be. If there’s one thing that I learnt from the entire experience, it’s never judge a person by their job. We are our own masters, but poorer for judging others as below our step on the ladder.

The guy assigned as my trainer was a jolly, portly man in his late thirties called Stewie. One thing I really liked about him was that he would ask my opinion about almost everything. He doubted himself a lot and you could tell that, at heart, he just wanted some approval, and most of all, a little bit of love.

My manager was a pleasant enough girl in her late teens, becoming a fully-fledged twenty-year-old in the next few months. I remember this purely for the fact that she invited every member of the store, whether you’d worked there for a day or ten years to her birthday party - gifts mandatory. She did this despite knowing that we all received the same crappy salary as her. I don’t really know what she expected.

One morning a few months after starting, I was busy removing chicken hearts from the freshly delivered meat and wondering where I had gone wrong in my life, when I heard a faint purring behind me.

It wasn’t unusual to see the odd rat scampering about now and then, and even an occasional street cat looking for easy pickings, but the purring coming from behind sounded like it was emanating from something huge, something predatory. Almost like a lioness was stalking me, her eyes trained on my back, waiting for my next move. A fatal game of chess.

Then I heard the purring beast speak.

Jackson, I require your assistance, it said with a pleasant growl in the back of its throat.

The hairs on my arm stood up and the bumps over my body followed. The voice was recognisable, but the sensation surrounding it was not.

I turned slowly, remembering scenes from several nature documentaries, demanding slow movements when faced with a predator. Dammit, I was supposed to be providing the food, not becoming it.

The shape came into view. It was unmistakably Tasha, but it also wasn’t Tasha, at least not in the way that I had come to know her.

She stood in front of me with the same lovely brunette hair that waved its way down past her chin and mouth, resting gently on her shoulders. This time though, her hair didn’t fall past her chin but rather past her snout, which protruded from beneath two emerald eyes. Those jewels were portals into her soul. I could sense it. Her soul was a killer, but her attitude was not. Perhaps more worryingly was the way that those eyes darted back and forth, watching my every move, like a lioness scoping out her prey.

For all intents and purposes, that’s exactly what she was. A lioness. An anthropomorphised lioness. She still stood on two feet, still had two arms beside her. She still had what I would consider to be human hair on the top of her head, falling to her shoulders. Her ears had shifted to the top of her head and were covered with golden fur, as was the rest of her body, at least the parts that I could see. For all the craziness of what I was seeing, she had remained fully clothed and dressed in the same uniform. Weird.

Her ears, which resembled the type of ears one would wear as part of a sexy Halloween costume, twitched and flicked as if sensing noises all around.

She was still talking, words pouring out of her snout, but I was staring blankly, absorbing nothing bar the aesthetic details.

Jackson? Jackson! she repeated, waving a paw close to my face. It was a real paw, pads underneath, claws retracted for now, but clearly present and clearly dangerous.

I stood completely still. Unable to comprehend what I was seeing.

Then I spotted her tail, silently flicking the air behind her. Bizarrely, this caused a physiological reaction downtown for me. It stirred my loins. Basically, the sight of her tail made me hot.

This was a new thing for me, as I guessed it would have been for anyone and, later, I promise that I’ll delve deeper into what I came to know as tail-fetishism.

Tasha gave me a hard nudge with her raised paw, right on my left shoulder, although she was a few inches shorter than me. I recoiled, fearing that her claws were about to be unsheathed and dig deep into my flesh.

To my relief, the hand that struck me was human. Pink and fleshy. No claws at all. The air around me seemed to drop too, as though it had become heavier. There was a different sound around us. The colours had become less vivid and much less palatable. The drab greyness of reality had been restored.

Let’s go, Jackson, the now fully human Tasha said, gesturing towards some boxes on the floor with her unmistakably human hand.

While I had not been privy to everything that she had said during my episode, the general gist was easy enough to pick up now: grab boxes and move them. The complex manner of what I’d seen some few minutes ago was, however, much harder to comprehend.

The rest of the day ticked by without further events, and I found myself gravitating towards my usual coffee shop on the way home.

As I began to drive away, a familiar number popped up on my phone. A dark number. I let the call go to voicemail, knowing full well that the message on the other end would be filled with begging and regret. I had no intention of listening to the messages. Instead, I picked up the phone and texted one very simple line: I’m leaving forever. Moving on and finding something else is literally the whole point. Bye.

I wasn’t interested in gaining closure or rebuilding a life. Rebuilding wasn’t really a priority for me at that point; I’d become obsessed with escapism and getting away from everything.

In time, I’d come to understand what escapism truly meant … at an extreme.

As I pulled up to the drive-thru of the coffee shop and gave my typical order, which I knew would go right through me but deemed necessary anyway, another bright light overcame me and something in my head shifted the other way. Looking at my surroundings, I noticed that the colour palette had transformed. There were bright blues, profound purples, gorgeous greens, colours that I’d known before, but never seen with this level of detail and quality. Perhaps the most bizarre thing was that the birds had stopped singing; however, they chatted and gossiped. I could hear them discussing various things, whispering to one another about this and that. It got louder, and louder, until I couldn’t even hear myself breathe, and no matter how hard I tried to look, there wasn’t a single bird in sight.

Turning to my right to pay for my coffee, I was taken aback by a furry golden hand, outstretched and awaiting payment. I looked up at the girl in the window cautiously, not knowing what I was about to find, and worrying that I might get mauled by some sentient feline in an animal uprising. She was, most clearly, a lioness, but with some distinctly human features. Her eyes were huge, brown, and beautiful. Her snout was long and protruding from her face, but elegant and well groomed. She had long, curly, hazel hair that stopped just short of her shoulders, and she was bipedal, dressed in human clothes, with clear curves that told me she was female.

It would be weird to say that my worst fears were confirmed, because I wasn’t at all scared of her. In fact, she filled me with an air of calm that I hadn’t felt for years. I stared at her in amazement, locking my eyes with those big, brown discs of chocolate heaven and found myself stuck, unable to speak, or move.

Sir … sir … sir! she repeated, trying to get my attention.

Suddenly, the colour palette snapped back to much more of a greyscale. The birds were chirping again. There were sounds of cars and grinding machines and distinctly human conversation. I looked back up at the woman in the window to see a short, stout woman in her mid-thirties with a scowl on her face and an outstretched hand, no fur, no nail polish, and no predatory sense whatsoever.

Sorry, I responded, reaching into my pocket and pulling out my credit card.

She handed me the coffee and accepted payment, scolding me with her eyes as she watched me drive away. I could feel her gaze burning a hole in the back of my head. I understood. Customers are annoying. I took a sip of my coffee and began to think. Clearly, there were three options: I was either sick, just plain insane, or something else was going on. I did the typically British thing and uttered the same phrase repeatedly on the drive home.

Stress does crazy things to the mind.

"It does. But nothing that crazy."

I took my time with the coffee, using the sipping noises as a form of self-comfort. It worked. Until it didn’t.

The house was big and empty. The way I liked it, but also the way I hated it. I could never understand why we had a huge house for just three people. Until recently, it had been completely empty, a testament to an irregular and strange society that allows empty houses alongside extreme poverty and drug abuse. Odd.

I didn’t have anywhere to be, so I flipped through Netflix and got ready to immerse myself in something, anything, that would let me escape.

I’d kept in touch with a few people throughout my life but seemed to have a knack for never retaining friends in the local area. I could live in Madrid, Dubai or Ottawa, and no matter what, you could guarantee that my friends would be at least two-hundred miles away. That night, I received a message from Crypto. That wasn’t his real name, but he was good with computers and bitcoins, and whatnot, so Crypto just kind of stuck.

FREE TONIGHT? LIONS ARE OUT!

That was what the text appeared to read. I took a moment to blink and remove my glasses.

FREE TONIGHT? PARENTS ARE OUT!

That made more sense. Crypto was a weirdo, but he couldn’t know what was going on in my head, could he? We’d been friends since year seven.

He was a scrawny little kid who made friends with another scrawny little kid, who both grew up to be not so scrawny misfits. He was a lot taller than me, standing at around six-five, compared to my meagre five-nine. I’ve always been a little self-conscious about my height, which is somewhat weird since I’m neither tall nor super small, but I always felt like I was just a little bit short.

Crypto and I decided to meet at a bar that was a fifteen-minute walk from our respective houses. I wondered why we’d chosen to go to a bar when his parents were out for the week, as were mine, but I guess old traditions die hard. Our bar of choice was this tiny movie-themed bar, which had its fair share of memorabilia from various movies. Whether any of it was real was a fair question, but the atmosphere was good, and they played mostly Kansas, Kiss, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam on repeat. Fine by me.

What’s up with you recently, man? Crypto asked as he set his beer on the table.

I looked at him blankly and asked, What do you mean?

You seem so lost. It’s like whenever I see you, you’re off in some fantasy world. Maybe worse.

I’m not having ideations of anything, if that’s what you mean, buddy.

He didn’t like it when people made assumptions.

That’s not what I’m saying.

"Then what are you saying?"

Crypto’s eyes darted to the barmaid. She was undoubtedly my type. Short, probably under five feet, shoulder-length curly mahogany hair, deep brown eyes, Mediterranean skin, and an accent clearly not British. I had made a vow after the break-up to never go near British women in a romantic way ever again. It stuck.

You’ve made no effort to talk to this woman tonight. The Jackson I know would have been chatting her up all night.

I don’t need to define myself by screwing around, I snapped, probably more angrily than required.

That’s what I’m saying, you’ve never defined yourself like that. You’re a sweet, sensitive guy, who is almost always constantly looking for his true love. You used to believe in conversations with as many people as possible, because you once told me, and I quote ‘life is about the connections we make along the way, I want to make sure I’ve trodden a thousand paths before I reach the edge of the forest’… so what happened to that guy?

Fake love killed him.

Shut the hell up, Jackson. Two free beers if you can tell me her name, her place of birth, and her star sign in the next ten minutes.

I stayed silent and walked casually over to the bar, ordered two drinks, and started a conversation with the woman, who was friendly and polite all the time. I wasn’t flirting, I’m not sure I know how to flirt, but I was looking for a conversation. And, judging by the look on her face, I was evidently very lonely.

I walked back to Crypto, purposely leaving the beers on the bar.

Capricorn, Barcelona, Gabriella. Oh, and she’s married. To the bouncer.

Crypto smiled and nodded. Anything else? he inquired.

Yeah, she’s waiting for you to pay, I replied nodding to the beers which I had ordered at the bar.

Fair enough.

The rest of the night went easily … until Crypto began talking about how he’d found the love of his life over a mobile app. That’s why he travelled a lot. He had a way of falling in love with girls the world over. His first girlfriend was a Japanese origami pro who had given him the best week of his life in Tokyo, and the worst day of his life in Okashima, when she left him. His second girlfriend had been a South African accountant who was obsessed with video games and Korean drama. I think she became a pro-wrestler after they broke up, but the details are fuzzy. His girlfriend on that night was a Mexican civil servant who he was convinced was his one true love. I’d heard him say that before, but somehow, I really wanted it to be true for him this time.

I feel like I don’t belong here, Crypto.

What do you mean?

There’s another world calling to me.

You sure like to overuse personification, don’t you?

Can you maybe lay off being an asshole for twenty minutes while we talk?

Crypto giggled. That was his way of acknowledging that he’d been an asshole and took a large chug of his beer, indicating that he was ready to hear the rest.

I’ve been seeing this other place, I started.

Crypto said nothing but leaned forward in his chair.

Humans don’t exist there, but I do. As a human. I think. My hands are normal. I’ve looked in the mirror of my car and seen my face. The colours change and the sounds of the human world just sort of, well, fade away.

Do you think it means something? my beardy friend asked like an omniscient rabbi.

"Yes, and no. I think that we all suffer