The Man of the House

My sister was nineteen, and I was seventeen, when we noticed the hair on our father's knuckles change to fur. We were at the dinner table, he reached over for the salt, both she and I saw his hand, and she glanced up at me. That was the only recognition I would have from her that our father became a goat. She and our Mum pretended, until the end, that it wasn't happening. I was not willing to pretend.
During working hours, it was fine. He was at work, where they ignored it as long as he was able to continue with his job, and I was at college. Mum was at her part-time reception job. It was always at the dining table that the problems began to take shape.
He stank. It was bearable in passing, to begin with, but sitting at the table meant a sustained period of proximity to his physical being, which stank of animal goat smell. Being unable to hold one's nose, or turn away, made eating unpleasant. We rushed through our dinners, while he sat there taking as long as he liked, enjoying his meal. When I collected the crockery and cutlery, I had to wait for him to finish, trying to breathe through my mouth or in some other way avoid the stench. It got worse over time, instead of better.
Then at night, I would hear him snorting, as if short of breath. I would wonder if my sister heard it, but there was no point saying anything to her, anyway.
His eyes turned blue, and bulged, and he had a perpetually glassy-eyed, inscrutable expression. We all avoided looking directly into his face.
Then, when he was in the house, he began shitting in the corners. Mum would quietly clean it up and refuse to accept what was happening. I hated seeing her do it, but I didn't want to do it, and she would not allow my sister, or I, to help her. Of course, we were relieved we didn't have to. It was disgusting. All three of us began to dread weekends.
He had average brown hair on his head and body as a human, but slowly it turned white, thickened, and then spread over his arms and legs, with some darker patches on his torso. Mum vacuumed three, four, five times a day.
His fingernails hardened into hooves, and then finally he was on all fours, bleating and snorting and clattering around. Two grey horns grew out of his temples, curling around his ears. None of us could stop it. I saw my mother and sister crying. I knew why, without them saying. No one outside the family knew what was going on.
It went on and on like this, for a long while. 
Mum tried to keep him in the garden, but he wouldn't stay out.
I put a gate at the bottom of the stairs, so at least Mum could get some rest and peace. I often tried to put a rope around his neck and get him under control. He kept managing to wriggle out, roaming around, knocking things over, which we had to pick up. The cabinet ended up so smashed we had to dispose of it. He chewed on the leather sofa arms, pulling out the foam, and so we had to get rid of that too, which meant we had nowhere to sit. We perched on the kitchen stools, made of metal, resistant to his destruction.
In the evenings sometimes, when Mum hadn’t heard me come in, I would see her stroking his belly, making cooing sounds, being affectionate and loving in a way I could not understand. You’re still you, she would say. It seemed to me like a promise she was making to herself, not something she could truly believe in.
Months and months in, I got up at night to go to the bathroom, and I saw that he was snuggled in at the foot of their bed. Mum must have let him in, and I guessed that perhaps she did that most nights. Occasionally I would see her run her fingers softly over his horns, absently, as if they had always been there.
It took me some years, and many nights without sleep, for me to accept that I was the only one who was willing to do something about the situation. I never formally made a plan. I would lay there, feeling in my own body, that it was for me to fix things, for good.
One morning we were at breakfast, and I looked at the goat that was once my father for a few moments. I sighed. I reached over with one arm and pulled him by his left horn out the back, to the garden. I had a sharp knife in my hand from the breakfast table, and I knelt on his back, forcing him to his knees, before slitting the artery at his throat. The goat made pitiful animal cries as it bled out, and it was over. Mum got rid of the carcass and cleaned up.
Everything was alright for a while, we were free. My sister got her first real boyfriend. Mum was being pursued by a nice man at work. When I met these males, I could see the hard lumps under the skin, which I knew would become horns in time. 
Then I started seeing those same lumps on some little boys in the street. 
Then all male creatures had horns, wherever I went. 
When I went to sleep, I would wake myself up, my own fingers feeling nervously around my hairline.
At twenty-one years old, I lay in the bath and saw my own brown faint body hairs had turned white. When I got out, and looked in the mirror, my eyes were blue. I went to bed, and the next day I saw that my own two hard horns had appeared, curving at my temples.

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T.S.J. Harling’s writing has been published in numerous literary journals including Maudlin House, Litro Magazine, Epoch Press and XRAY. Based in south east London, England, Harling is currently studying for a Critical & Creative Writing PhD, at the Royal Holloway, on the 'New Woman' in Dracula. Harling’s print chapbook, Tower Block Ghost Story, is out with Nightjar Press now.