April

By TheHonorableAjax

The world of your generation was different than that of generations before – the most significant factor being the foundlings. Some had other names for them, depending on geography. ‘Anthromorphs,’ declared the Californians. ‘The Elevated,’ exalted the Christian South. ‘Freaks,’ was the term – whispered and proclaimed – by the snobbish Northeast.
But in Tornado Alley? Foundlings. They were not born, not that anyone could say for certain. They simply came about. They were found, motherless and abandoned, in areas were their domesticated or wild brothers and sisters lived. Some believed that they were born in normal litters only to be brought by instinct by mothers who knew they were better off with others more similar to them to mankind’s collective doorstep. Others thought that aliens had dropped them off.
Wherever the foundlings came from, the fact of it was that out of the hundreds of farms dotting your county, April came to yours.
It had been a night which declared that winter had not yet finished its abuses, and wanted a few more weeks before May’s gentling thaw to drive the point home. Opening the door, with sleet whirling into the house, your father had seen at first nothing at all which might have produced the strange rapping, scratching noise which drew his attention in the first place. But you, precocious little Anon that you were, had stepped with light feet behind him and declared in a high middle-schooler’s voice that there was something on the mat. When your father saw that there was, he made to close the door again.
You had run forward and placed a hand on the thing – wet fur as cold as the grave, sodden to the point of making its color a total mystery. As you shivered, the tiny form under your hand gave a small twitch, and a pair of luminous golden eyes peered at you without expectation but with desperate hope.
You had convinced your father to keep her – to let you bring her inside (she was light enough that even soaking wet you could carry her yourself, despite being nine), and bathe her and dry her. She ate like a bottomless pit, until when taking a piece of raw chicken from your hand she bit you and seemed to recognize her mistake, despite her unthinking youth, immediately. As you cried and your father looked on with irritation, she placed her freshly cleaned paws on your leg and licked at your face to make amends. She was a kitten, spotted like a leopard, with inquisitive ears and tawny fur, once it dried.
You named her April, as that was when she had been found. She had grown swiftly – as foundlings do – and been put to work on the farm as soon as she was old enough to hold a broom. So had you, but you always resented your father how little he seemed to care for April as a feeling creature; she picked up language within her third year (not that you could know exactly how old she was when she found you, but foundlings’ birthdays were invariably the day of their discovery), and glomped to your side during your shared adolescence like an excrescence, albeit a very cuddly one. She was permitted to sleep in your bed – as she took up hardly any room and the farmhouse was small. Initially, her place was a cardboard box by the dryer, with the other cats. But she didn’t quite fit, even back then, and refused to leave you by instinct or fundamental reasoning that you were her sole benefactor in the household, your mother believing that another mouth to feed would bankrupt your family for certain.
April learned tag and hide-and-seek, though both games lost their luster when she would either sink her claws into your arm in the heat of the moment or break down in tears when she couldn’t find you, respectively. She adored playing house, exploring the woods, and helping with Lego, though this last was in a limited capacity due to her paws lacking the dexterity to finagle the pieces together. At night she would snuggle to your side, purring quietly.
As April grew and as did you, she stayed home to work as you spent more time at school. The two of you never lost your connection; any time April would be in a room with your father and yourself, she would answer your father’s dictum with the rigidity and formality of a cadet addressing her sergeant. However, her eyes would drift to you, with a twinkle of affection which was never extinguished by the passage of time.
In the wider world, no one quite knew how to deal with Foundlings. They did not live as long as humans, and aged faster. Tests showed that they lacked certain parts of temporal reasoning, as a class, which made finer white-collar labor, the tedious comfort that it was, achievable. In short, without the possibility of teaching the foundlings calculus it was not determined worthwhile to go so far as teaching them Algebra, and the foundlings, for those years, were placed in an underclass, with the rights of pets and the reasoning capability of the average teenager, which most adults agreed was a sensible match.

It was in the first year of high school when you noticed any change, physiologically. For the past year, as you took friends home with you who were plainly frightened of April’s wide mouth and sharp claws, she had removed herself to her ‘bedroom’ – a mattress in the basement – and seemed to you to be feeling quite down as a result of being usurped as your eternal Player 2. The basement, incidentally, neither of you were happy with. As soon as his father noticed April was gaining on you in height, he seemed to think the two of you sharing a bed was a bad idea, and enforced the relocation. Most summers, April simply never went back into the house at night, staying out in the barn to sleep in the hayloft in an old sleeping bag. So, for her birthday you saved up all year and bought her a handheld game console to match yours. Even if you had a friend over who objected to April, she could open her little handheld device and see you close enough to message. When she received this gift – as usual, the only one of the year apart from ‘room and board’ as your father gruffly put it – she gave you such a fierce hug that your feet left the ground. You realized in that moment that April was growing strong, and that her ears were above the top of your head.
During that summer, when you helped April with the chores before school, after school, and on the weekends, you realized abruptly that perfectly natural and ordinary activities April had to perform for the operation of the farm left you in a state as to prevent your own labor. For instance, when scrubbing out a trough, April was in the habit of removing most of her clothing to prevent it getting wet, and sunning herself dry afterward. You found yourself staring, first at the taught lines of her wiry arms and pinched waist, the emerging peaks under her wet shirt, and then afterward at her gently waving auburn fur as it dried into its light brown, almost sparkling in the Arcadian light of the fields. Even worse was when she had to tend to the dogs, and other rutting males on the farm. Those small enough to get the treatment, simply put, had to be jerked off lest they became unmanageable. While this was a duty every farmer knew of, a clinical and routine activity, you simply couldn’t be in the room while April did it. She did it as she did all other things: with kindness and understanding and without a trace of mischief, giving the dogs small encouragement as they spent themselves between her hands, then standing up to wash them off as if nothing could be more ordinary. But seeing her do it made you feel strange, and soon enough, as your voice dropped (with the occasional reversion to its old ways) and the girls at school became a subject of ongoing fascination, you realized why the sight bothered you so much. Other thoughts began to plague you.

In your senior year, you returned from school and went to the barn to find April there, trying to fix a listing door. By this time you had grown to be larger than her again, and were equally or better equipped to wrestle a carpentry project into submission, having both field hockey and your own chores around the farm to stimulate growth. You grabbed the door and held it steady as April unscrewed one of the hinges and replaced it, laying aside the power drill with a cheerful sigh at a job well done. The door creaked gratefully.
“Thanks, Anon,” April said, wiping her brow, “that would have taken twice as long without you.”
You are momentarily stunned into silence, some denouncement of any trouble undertaken on your part dying on your lips, as April pulled her shirt from her waistline and wiped her face with it, baring her chest to you without a thought. She had grown substantially in that area, though with the baggy shirt on it was hard to tell. However, as you stared, goggle-eyed, at the majestic orbs before you, you wondered why any girl in your homeroom class had ever seemed remotely appealing.
April dropped her shirt and, seeing your expression, flushed herself. It was a difficult thing to detect among foundlings, but at the edges of their eyes it was possible to see a reddening of the cheeks.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, demurely tucking her shirt back in. “I guess we’re not kids anymore. I should ask your Dad for a bra…” she trailed off in a way which implied the unlikelihood of her requisition being approved.
“I, uh,” you stutter for a moment, feeling your face flush even further, right up to the roots of your hair, “I think that would be a bad idea.”
April’s shoulders slump. “Yeah, he, uh-” she glances at you, wording her phrase carefully to avoid another explosive argument between you and your father over April’s treatment, which had divided the two of you for years more effectively than politics or religion. “He criticized,” she struggled with the word, “how I drink from the pails. I’ve been hungry lately.”
Your mortification over the incredible failure of your coming-on tactic (“I would prefer that you didn’t wear anything at all,” being the phrase you were hunting for) morphed into rage.
“They starve you!”
“No!” April held up her hands. “I get as much as you.”
“When I’m here!” You stared at her. “What about lunch?”
April looked away.
“April.”
April shook her head. You went to her, placing both hands on her sides. She stiffened, and you felt the thinness there.
“April, you’re not eating enough.”
“It’s normal,” she said defensively. “Foundlings are just small.”
“Are you hungry right now?”
April didn’t answer. She hesitated, those big glowing eyes staring with sadness up at you, then bounced up on her feet and nipped your shoulder. It was an old joke – that she was going to eat you – but it fell flat.
“Let’s go get you something to eat.”
You went to the house, gathering food from the pantry (shopping with your father, you supposed) which your mother would miss, but you could take the heat for. Just like all those years ago, with her guilty conscience overridden, April ate the food straight from your hand and smiled as she did it.
“I don’t want to see you skinny,” you said, “it hurts me to see you put yourself aside.”
“Well,” she said with a mischievous look, “You could, em, uh,” the blush made its triumphant return to stage, greeted by your silent but growing enthusiasm. She was cute when she was like this. “That is, I would be bigger, if, uh, never mind.” She places her chin on both hands, elbows on the table.
“You know…this reminds me a lot of the old days.”
April smiled at you. Her tail flicked behind the chair.
“I can’t remember the last time,” you said carefully, willing your face to remain resolute, “we took a nap together.”
April’s tail froze behind her, and her ears were pointed at you like satellite dishes.
“I think you look pretty tired. How about it?”
April nodded, like one in a dream. She rose and followed you upstairs, where you took off your shirt and lay down in bed, heart pounding like a kettle drum as you waited for April’s reciprocation. What she did next would either cinch the implications or break them off – obliterate the status quo or continue what you desperately hoped was a charade of mere fraternity.
April, staring at your bare chest with shining eyes, reached down and gripped her own. She pulled, and the dirty tee went up and over her head, landing on top of yours on the floor mere moments before she crawled into bed and landed on you.
The feeling of her breasts pressing on you was heavenly, two points of soft pressure which emphasized her maturity and her vulnerability in that moment between the two of you. Her head was at the level of your neck, and she nuzzled into you for one moment of old-world adoration before the activities began.
You wrapped your arms around her slender frame, ruffling her back fur with idle fingers. She purred against you; the cute little engine had gained a couple of cylinders. You leaned down and kissed the top of her head. Her ears flapped, her fingers carefully found the sides of your taught stomach and squeezed.
“We’re not kids anymore,” she whispered.
“No,” you said. Your pants were growing unbearable. Unwearable, even. “But I like the change.”
She looked up at you, and as the poet said, they truly were windows to her soul. She was anxious, but exhilarated, (the pounding of her heart against your chest seconded that assessment), and after a split-second you saw that she was overcome by trust. Anon had her, as he had all those years ago, and he wouldn’t let her down.
“So do I,” she said.
You leaned further, and with your eyes closed you pressed your mouth against hers, twisting aside to allow for the odd geometry between your faces to mesh. It was miraculous succor, this. The essence of her; the whiff of her scent on a hairbrush and the nip of her teeth on his arm, adventures in the woods and a birthday present of twisted straw, all she had to give. You realized it in that moment; you wondered if truly you deserved to pass your exams if you were too stupid to see before that you loved April. And seeing the way she looked at you when the two of you broke apart, she had known it longer than you had. Perhaps rather she had hoped, which was more adorable, since how couldn’t you?
You pushed your tongue past her lips, exploring the ridges and sharp peaks of her teeth, her own tongue exchanging places with yours as your kiss grew more heated and the two of you rolled on the bed, limbs entangling in each other as you pressed ever closer, struggling to breathe and not caring as you discovered a necessary component to your life which you had never known before.
With kissing, as with standardized exams, the passage of time behaves in odd ways. With a test, you feel you have plenty of time when you begin question 1, only to arrive at question 2 the moment the proctor announces ten minutes remaining. With kissing it is much the same; only in reverse. You never know, not in later years with repetition, nor this very first time, how long you lie there, kissing April. It feels like the sensation is enough to fill several days, but it was, in all respect to the laws of Sir Newton, likely only a few minutes.
The argument for a change of agenda was obvious and growing: you gave a quick apology to a limpet-like April as you struggled out of her grasp momentarily, reaching down and unzipping your pants to give your dick some room to breathe. You pull them off, but leave your underwear on, expecting to continue where you had left off last until you spot April’s point-setter stare at the bulge between your legs. She was panting, if cats could pant.
With one hand, she traced down your side, fingers rotated to rub her claws like stones along your skin, until she reached your pelvis. There, she cupped the engorged area. You tried not to think about her jerking you off like a dog, and moved a hand to grip her breast as a reminder that this was a collaborative endeavor.
She looked up at you, surfacing from her trance. She slid to you on the bed, then reached away from you in order to tear her pants off – not metaphorically; her claws unsheathed and she obliterated her beltline in order to remove them as fast as possible.
You were shocked; the wastefulness of an action which was so sure to result in penalty would never have been performed by the April of an hour before. April shocked you again by pulling off her own underwear – a luxury which your father did afford her – and wrapping her legs around your waist, shoving the left underneath you (not that you resisted) and locking her ankles together behind your back.
“I want you to give me kittens, Anon.” She gripped your arms needfully. “I don’t care.” Don’t care about your father. Don’t care about going hungry for them. Don’t care about the consequences. “Please, give them to me.”
Young men are never the more reasonable or level-headed individuals in this sort of a situation, and you certainly aren’t going to break the mold. What sort of red-blooded American would you be to push the young lady aside and declare, ‘not yet, not yet, let us consider the ramifications’?
You instead pushed your waistband aside and felt the embrace of April’s wet cleft press against you. You swiveled up, directly over April, and her eyes were bright with anticipation, biting her lips as her legs compressed your waist down onto her. You leaned forward for one more lingering kiss, arms around her back, swirling her fur in round arcs, as she ground you against her, claws pricking at your back as she needfully and silently pleaded for what she wanted.
Expecting to get to the coup de grace in a minute, you jerked your head away when you felt April’s hand search between your legs and take matters into her own paws. She found your manhood and lined it up, pressing you into her properly with her legs. This girl was not going to let you go. You were not going to complain.
“Okay, okay,” you said with a grin. You pushed into April, who groaned and squirmed, shifting with her back to accommodate you as you delved deeper. She let out a shriek, and said ‘back, back’, to let you know that those depths would come later.
You pulled back, not willing to hurt April to fully plant yourself, and began rocking your hips, giving her a gentle push with each stroke, the bed creaking underneath the two of you as April moaned and let her paws unclasp and dangle in the air, freeing you to come and go as you please.
This you do, rubbing at April’s nipples in an unpracticed way which she seems to appreciate, careful to observe her reaction as you pressed deeper over the course of the eons of time you spent coupled in those moments. Eventually, you felt her constrictive walls relaxing themselves to the extent that you could go in entirely, and you felt your balls slap against April while you lost yourself and hammered into her, elbows on the mattress, pistoning with your hips as she clung to you with both arms, nuzzling and biting at your neck to muffle her adorable cries.
You are by no means a porn star, and it doesn’t take long before you felt your seed boiling up from within you. You gave no warning, but April seemed to sense the moment as it arrived and clapped both legs over your backside, holding you inside her as you erupted, painting the walls of her womb with your ejaculate.
The two of you lay there for some time more, clasped side by side in each others’ arms and almost incapable of speech, not that it was required for much.
The post-nut clarity on this one is a bitch.
“April.”
“Yes, Anon?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.” She ducked her head under your chin and kisses at your neck.
“But…”
“But?”
“Kids?”
April snorted. “Yes, this makes kids.”
“But what about when they get here?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are we going to do?”
April cocked her head at you. “What do you mean?”
You give up. Long term planning – that would have to be your job. Excellent for someone who nearly failed accounting class.

If that time wasn’t enough, the jubilant honeymoon period between two teenagers in love certainly sealed the question of April’s pregnancy. You considered protection, but you didn’t have a car, and you certainly wouldn’t ask your father for a lift to buy them. In the meantime, April resumed her long-abandoned position of permanent attachment, following you to the bus stop in the morning and meeting you when you came off. You had to beg off social engagements because in those few weeks April would sulk if you didn’t get home on time. She feigned an injury to request your help with her tasks, and spent half her chore time cutting every corner she could find to complete them faster, then the other half of the time dragging you by the collar into some secluded nook to milk you for all you were worth. April never did jerk you off; she seemed to think of that as something animals got. You got breeding rights, and they were not optional. You took her from behind against the wall of the barn, dropping your pants and constantly on the lookout for any interruption. She pushed you down and straddled you in the hayloft, bouncing on your cock as straw pricked at your neck. You sneaked down to her basement abode, where the two of you did not need to muffle yourselves quite as much, clapping thighs into the small hours of the morning until you dragged yourself back to your room.
April was quite suspicious of the notion of a blowjob; it seemed too risky that some of Anon’s precious batter would go to waste. But, when she tried it in the woods where you used to play, she found she enjoyed the experience of licking you up and down, fondling and kissing your meat and trying (failing) to fit it in her mouth. Provided that it ended with her having her tail in the air; that supreme pleasure of being filled could not be denied her.
Some weeks later, your expressed hope of seeing April bigger was crowned with a headache of an obvious expansion in her midline. Fortunately, you were eighteen and graduated, so could look forward to homelessness when your parents disowned you.
You came clean to your father after he noticed, and exploded with rage that the ‘little whore’ had gotten herself knocked up, probably from fucking one of the horses in the stable. April clung to your arm. She hadn’t truly anticipated the outcome of all the sex, as regarded the consequences of children rather than their actuality, but certainly did her part in taking the blame. She steadfastly refused to fold to any threat or promise which posed the risk of being separated from you. She stared down the barrel of a shotgun with cool aplomb rather than stand aside, and you had to do the noble thing and place yourself between her and your father (and his empty shotgun; the rounds sat on the counter behind him).
In a show of eloquence you were unaware of possessing up to that moment, you expressed that you loved April, and intended to live with her (as marriage was not legally an option, you had checked), and whether that was on the farm as your father had always expressed his hope for, or in the gutter, it would not matter, since the two of you would not be separated.
Your father pondered this, in his limited capacity, for some days as you piled your clothes into boxes with a heavy heart and inspected your financial prospects with an even heavier one. April, seeing as how it no longer mattered, was thoroughly content that she was now permitted to stay in your room. With the fact that the two of you would be staying together, it seemed that all in her world was clover; the prospect of poverty (further poverty than the two of you had lived in truly up to that point), failed to disturb her nearsighted equanimity.
“I just can’t imagine what made her think that any amount of money would make me leave you.” Your mother had offered to give April $2,000 to leave and never return. “I’d rather have nothing and live in the woods than give you up.”
“Easy to say for someone with fur who can eat raw meat.” The sentiment did make you smile regardless of its impracticality.
After three days of heavy contemplation, your father made his verdict: “I cannot allow this bastardization to go on under my roof. It is an abomination, and I won’t allow it to continue. However, you are a man now, and don’t need to listen to what I have to say. You’re also our only son,” he gestured to himself and your mother, who sat nearby with a dazed look in her eyes, “and we love you. We don’t want to see you out on your ear. So.”
He paused, whether from a natural sense of dramatic timing heretofore unexampled by him or due to the shifting of gears in his mind necessitating the rapid application of passing through neutral I cannot say. When he resumed, the pent-up breath in your lungs exploded in relief.
“So, we will not kick you out. But you must move out – I will permit you to put up another house on the property; it will be good for you to learn, as I did. As soon as it is up, you two will be in it. With your…brood. I can’t run the farm without you, Anon,” he nodded to you, “or, I admit, you, April. I realize that perhaps we’ve relied on you too much, without showing our appreciation. So, agreements will be reached. Anon will have a stake in the farm, as we always intended. So I do hope,” he said with a cough, “that you’ll agree to my conditions and, and that you’ll stay.”
You agree jubilantly, shaking your father’s rough hand as your mother batted away the joyful affections of April.
Building the house, even one only five rooms in dimension and two floors, is challenging work. However, you took a drafting course in high school – one of your few A’s, and one of your buddies went to school for engineering while another went straight into construction. Between the three of you, by phone or in person – no one objected to April’s presence anymore, as she maneuvered with growing difficulty with what she estimated were three kittens inside her (foundlings according to species hardly ever gave birth to only one) to serve beverages and drinks, worked out the plans. You yourself held a little groundbreaking ceremony within the month, sticking a shovel into the northeast corner where the foundation stone, marked with the year, was laid by April with affectionate care.
The two of you worked around the clock, as much as you could while keeping up with the farm, and by some miracle of supply chain divine intervention, help from your extremely knowledgeable father (as no man can stand by while another utilizes a belt sander improperly without assisting or he exploding), April’s ceaseless toil and the occasional benefaction of your friends from school, donating their weekends and vacation days to your future happiness, the house was completed in under four months.
April gave birth to her litter only two weeks (of course, the gestation period is shorter for foundlings as is their youth), to three girls and a boy. The third girl was a surprise, and without having selected a name, you are forced to revert to old habits and name the girl June. As you had suspected (and hoped), the children were not mutant freaks with claws protruding from ordinary human fingers; their physiognomies divided with sex – the boy was named after your father (April’s idea), and dandling his grandson on his knee, perfectly ordinary in every way, so long as one didn’t contemplate the striations of gold which flecked his blue eyes, went a long way toward winning your father over.
While building the house, you found that you enjoyed the process immensely, and after it was done you were sad to put away thoughts of two-by-fours and let die the quiet echoes of pounding nails. As it turned out, however, your friend who had helped you throughout knew of an opening, and the boss was very understanding of your mixed responsibilities. You developed a specialty as a frame-builder, and were paid excellent money for your services on renovations and new construction in a part of the country where every few years at least one town will be in desperate need of new homes. The extra money was extremely welcome back home, where it paid the staggering grocery bills which four young children, three of whom seemed to grow an inch every week, and helped you appreciate your mother’s long-ago fears that April would eat them out of house and home. June certainly tried to.
And while April slopped the stables with a cheerful whistle, your mother attempted to get all four children to sit down for an hour to learn about scripture, your father struggled not to doze in the cab of his rumbling tractor, you headed for your truck, with your own name printed on the side. You stopped, hand in the handle, and contemplated the yard. April had not lost her peculiarity about the importance of not spilling seed, which you doubted was influenced by God’s parallel beliefs on the subject, and was already beginning to show when she bent down to work.
She might not be able to truly consider what the future held, but you could. It would be a lot more of this, and it was beautiful to contemplate.