When I was ten-years-old, I dreamt I was a wolf. In my eyes I ran the miles of thicket behind my mother’s house, down the uneven porch steps, through the back gate and into the brush, for years and years. I traveled, down forest paths by dying firefly light and the winding of river beds, along the jagged western cliffs with weathered faces and open mouths. I went to where I could not be found, to crawl inside the bony ribcages of trees and hide under their weeping boughs, until crying so loudly they blocked out the sun above me with their arms. I cried with them.
The moon was my halo, my eyes sharp and teeth like white daggers in its full blush. It held my secrets and my face. I was no longer a child and I would never be a woman, even when my breasts swelled in the following summer and I first felt the flush of adolescence between my thighs. Boys would never look at me like a cheap distraction, with their knobby bodies and hungry hands. My father would never look at me.
As the wolf, sheep and white rabbits lay down with me. They bowed their heads before me as my supper and I knew no fear. The sparrows picked clean the seeds and insects from my fur. Their beaks pulled out the stitches that held my human skin together, sewn in pieces of my mother’s smile, my grandmother’s eyes, and the bruises on my elbows and knees. These things were forgotten, shed like a winter’s coat with the purple outline of my father’s rough palm across my cheek. The forest held me as I slept and made me forget them. As my father had forgotten me, my face and my eyes, when he closed the door to my mother’s house and never returned.
When I see my father again I’m twenty-four-years-old. I wear heels and a short yellow sundress that looks like summer, and find my father in a phone book, like a ghost or a memory that shouldn’t be. Ghosts shouldn’t have names in phone books, but I follow the trail he leaves behind him to a bar on the edge of town. My father stinks of cigarettes and cheap whiskey and old sweat. He stinks like this bar stinks, looking at me under the flicker of blue neon signage, and smiles, greasy, all teeth. He doesn’t know me anymore.
“You’re a pretty girl,” my father says. His eyes squint when he looks at my hips instead of my face, and he licks the corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. It’s a nervous habit. “I can show you a good time, you know.”
When he touches my arm and asks me to come home with him, I only smile. He doesn’t recognize my mother’s mouth on me. I’m glad.
Home is a trailer down a bumpy road in a dusty red pick-up truck. It is the same truck I was laying in the first time my father was inside of me, in the thicket down the road from my mother’s house. Time doesn’t change him. His trailer is small, tired and beige, filled with cheap wooden furniture and old photographs on bookshelves. There are no pictures of me.
My father takes off his jacket and takes me to the bedroom. He puts his hands on my waist and squeezes the bones under my dress, licking his lips again. He isn’t nervous.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” I ask when he tries to put his hand beneath my skirt. I feel sick, my limbs heavy, thin and useless. I hate him for it.
My father is almost laughing. “Does it matter, baby?” he asks. “I know a lot of girls.”
From across the room I see the swollen white moon in slits of light through the bedroom curtains. I can smell and taste his blood through his skin. He tries to kiss me, which he never did before, and stops when he sees me beginning to change.
My fingers extend, followed by my toes, the bones in my arms and legs lengthening under my skin, which gives in the rip-tatter-pop of fresh stitches. The shaggy gray pelt grows into place as my mouth stretches into a muzzle, my teeth growing and vision sharpening. I drop to all fours, my skeleton contorting to fit the shape of the wolf’s body, ligaments tearing, snapping, realigning, and making me more than what I was. I’m no longer my father’s daughter. I’m something else entirely.
He runs and I give chase, out the front door, down the ramshackle wooden steps and dirt driveway. The clearing around the trailer gives way to a sparse patch of forest, the earth soft and cool beneath my feet. Into the thicket I find him, following the scent of his blood and sweat and fear, sticky-sweet and hot in my snout and on my tongue. He’s pathetic, now as he has ever been, towering above my head and in my dreams in his sickness.
I move between the trees. The moon is my cover, to hide my face and keep my secrets in silhouette on the forest floor. Its light cuts through the brush and swallows us whole. He doesn’t see me coming. When I find him, crouched, panting like a frightened rabbit against a tree trunk, I open my jaw. I snare his throat between my teeth, hearing the sick twist-crunch of bone and sinew as I tear it out. He doesn’t scream. There is no time, only his blood in my mouth and on my fur and the moon above my head.
What my father takes from me dies with him, and for it I’m free.
–
©2009 Magen Toole
Magen Toole is a student and odd-jobber from Fort Worth, Texas. Her work has appeared in Every Day Fiction, MicroHorror and The Battered Suitcase. She can be found online at http://magentoole.wordpress.com/
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September 22nd, 2009 at 12:45 am
Welcome to Flashes, Magen.
Excellent story.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:20 am
Wow! Nice story Magen. Your descriptions are almost poetic, the story both conveying the visual and emotional elements very well. Great voice, great flow!
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:55 am
Excellent piece! Loved your style.
September 22nd, 2009 at 8:37 am
[...] Under The Wolf. [...]
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Enjoyed the story, Megan. Quite a tale of vengence.
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Now that’s one sob that deserves his throat torn out. This story has such a creepy subtleness to it. I wasn’t sure if she was indeed a werewolf or if it is metaphor/ surreal? Either way, a great spin on situation and circumstance.
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:34 pm
Wow - great stuff, the horror so subtle. Nice elegance to it.
September 25th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Beautiful and introspective, with some truly elegant imagery. Welcome, looking forward to more.