My daughter’s teeth no longer fit in her mouth and at night she scratched at the fur that grew on her shoulders and back. One minute she’s hot, pressing her face against the cool edge of the dining room table. The next minute, she’s hotter, saying, “Look, watch the skin,” melting icecubes so fast they cracked on the inside of her arm.
She’s bloodthirsty, wanted to eat her steak raw, chased the rabbits in our garden. Her sister tried to take the television remote from her and my daughter snapped, baring teeth and big eyes bleeding yellow out the edges.
"Where did my baby wolfling go?”.
My daughter sunk fangs into a boy at school who pushed her against the lockers and she was sent home early. I walked in from work to hear them both growling at each other, my daughter crouched on the table, my wife with her back pressed against the refrigerator. All hackles raised. My daughter like a static ball of anxiety, the red fur on her shoulders ready to discharge electricity. My daughter with the blonde dreadlocked hair, matted and unwashed, a dog collar around her throat, her body once chubby and pink now pale and stringy and mean. Her shadow inside the body of my wife, still lean from years of running packside, chasing down deer between snow-burdened trees, but a little bigger with her father’s blood, with experience, her presence taking up half the space of her skeleton.
“I don’t care if he started it, Aisha,” my mother said.
“It’s the half-moon tonight,” my daughter said. “I have to go out.”
And despite being wolves, they argued like all daughters and mothers argue, with words scraped from television and books constructed from hurt feelings.
Aisha growled and retreated to her room. My wife poured herself a whiskey on the rocks and sat the kitchen table smoking, listening to Pantera over her laptop speakers. She stared at the window like it’d display an answer on the glass.
“I don’t know how to deal with her,” she said to me.
“You don’t remember,” I said.
She smiled for the first time in days, in sudden recognition.
“What?” she asked. “That I’m just like her?”
**
I thought back to the days when we first knew each other - when I was a boy with glasses that didn’t quite fit the bridge of my nose, the kind of boy who kept his head down, read too many books, went to the high school engineering club. And I’d see her in the parking lot, scrap fighting with boys, a machine of a girl. At the time she was well over six foot, with muscles that seemed to roar like car engines. Two boys were out near the car lot puffing up their chests, threatening each other with half-cocked fists. She picked up both them in her wide fists, pried them apart by lifting them off the ground.
She followed me one day after school, nearly nighttime, as I walked alongside the path next to the river. A shortcut made for a sentimental movie, the big boughs of trees coming down heavy to dip into the water, catching stars in their nets of leaves, glasswater in
“Can I have a cigarette?” she asked.
“I don’t smoke,” I said, keeping my head down.
“Well, what time it is?”
“I don’t have a watch.”
She stopped, her heels dug into the dirt path. I almost heard the heat of her halting motion. Of the pull of her demand. I stopped and turned around.
“Well,” she said, tossing her hair back, her fangs shiny and hard and bright even in the dark, “What have you got?”
She had a growl in her chest and a pale ribbon of pumping blood in her throat. She was smiling, so wide that the corners of her mouth peeled. And she was shining – like someone threw a spotlight on her on this dark path. As if to say: “Here I am.”
“Well?” she asked, in mock impatience.
I stammered.
“You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?” she asked.
Something about the way she said – you’re afraid – like it was the easiest thing in the world, a statement of fact, made my muscles stop tensing and my face ease into an easy half-smile.
I held my hand out.
“I can walk you home.”
I walked her home to her little, two-story home nestled cottage like in the woods at the end of the path. The lights came on.
“Walk me home again?” she asked, in a way that wasn’t a question, before bounding into the house.
We spent the next few weeks together, just as summer approached. We took a bus to the beach in washed moonlight and she took her shoes off in the sand to reveal her feet covered in a thick layer of fur. I was only human and I reached out to touch her feet, to run my hands along the tufted ridges. She laughed.
“It’s like you’ve never seen a wolf before,” she said.
I shook my head.
She caught movement alongside the edge of the beach, and with a flash she was gone, chasing after it. She returned with a limp rabbit between her teeth. We were the only ones along the beach, so we built a fire despite regulations and cooked the rabbit.
I was a suburban boy, squeamish of her ruggedness and the way she smiled sometimes with a little blood still on her lips, unused to the rough edges of her fingertips and the way she leapt sometimes on my back digging her newly-born baby claws into my chest and the back of my neck.
She offered the rabbit to me, to taste, meat on her fingers. On impulse, I thought I’d grab the rabbit from her.
She had me in the dirt with her teeth around my neck.
“You should be afraid of me,” she said, smiling, as I chewed and swallowed.
The moon caught in her hair and the moon caught in her eyes, and they grew big, like sinkholes. Or perhaps it was not her eyes growing bigger but the way she leaned close to me, pressing her shoulder to mine, her smile fading to be replaced with a strange and unfamiliar longing. Her hair swept across my face, she touched my shoulders with her fingertips, nuzzling my chin.
You know what happened next.
She did not answer her phone the next day. Or the next. The full moon was approaching. Clouds surrounding its exterior like, smoke, I thought. The moon almost ready to eat.
Her kisses lingered on my face like burns. I kept checking mirrors to see if she’d scarred me.
I called some of her friends. They hadn’t seen her either.
As night swung low I grabbed my backpack and walked across town to where she and her wolf parents lived. The lights were on, but the house was too low, too quiet. She wouldn’t be there.
Her mother, darkened fur growing up around her cheekbones, answered the door. She smiled with teeth that seemed so familiar.
“You're him, aren’t you?” she asked. “The quiet boy?”
I nodded. She laughed.
“She’s in the valley,” she said.
And she pointed. Out beyond the trees. Past the sloping hills. Out there in the place where the dark intersected with the floodlight of open sky. Out there.
I ran.
I found her laying in the weeds, heaving, her skin flushed a bright red. She glanced up at me through the tall greenery.
“Stay away,” she said, but she’s smiling as she said it.
“Should I be afraid?” I asked.
And I’m smiling.
She stood up. Taller, I thought, taller than should’ve been possible. She stretched, throwing her shadow. I reached up to grab my glasses, instinctively, as if the force of her presence would have blown them off my face.
Her skin cracked and peeled, unrolling itself from her elbows, her shoulders. Underneath the skin, her wolf glowed. She stepped out of her clothes. She was more than naked this time. She stepped out of her skin, bursting with fur, eyes violent, a golden and tender and wild thing.
For the first time since the beginning of summer, my bursting girl, my heat comet girl, seemed to breathe and relax. She clamored to me.
**
My wife drank the rest of her whiskey, checked the time, even though full moon time was a clock imbedded into her blood. I already saw the rippling pulse of wolf night under her skin.
“Aisha!” she called, no response.
“You think?” she asked, and then without finishing her sentence, raced upstairs and back.
“Yeah, she went out the window,” she said.
“I’ll get the car,” I said.
We drove out to the valley. That familiar valley, rippling like a seed of memory underwater. My wife was already transforming by the time she got out of the car, leaving little pieces of her on the car seat, the door handle. Pieces of wolfsblood and human skin.
I cut the engine. She stood for a few minutes, looking out across the valley, as if to catch sight of our daughter. She sighed, her body simultaneously buzzing and soft, caught between two states of being.
When she turned to look back at me, for an instant I could not tell if it was the wife or the daughter, the eyes reflecting back on each other.
“Let her run,” my wife said, taking off her clothes and throwing them in the car, no longer able to hold back her transformation. “I got to when I was her age. You go on.”
I turned the car back on,
In the rearview mirror, I watched her transform. My wife ran alongside the car, keeping pace as I drove back home, bursting into long limbs.
A figure appeared over the curve of the hill. Something running fast. And as it got closer, it began to take shape. Something small, lean, and golden. She quickly caught up to us on the road.
They both raced alongside the car, in the quiet of a midnight in a small town. Keeping pace. Mother and daughter, nipping at each other’s heels, yipping. Their paws pounded against the pavement, eyes bright.
I circled around the house, passing it by. Once. Twice.
They were bigger than the moon, bigger than each other, a colossal, mad, roiling, howling sea of legs and fur. More than women. More than wolves. They were hunters with the sky, the earth, their bones laced with woodland and bloodlust and shattered fragments of memory. Running and running, until they were pack.