cat."
She stared at him a moment. The poem she would write was already taking shape in her mind: something about broken light in caffeine, a play on the word pussy. She clenched her teeth.
“I’m going and you can’t stop me,” she said, and even that sounded scripted. She said, “I’m tired of being fucking pasteurized,” and that was a little better, and so she turned and vanished into the woods.
She shivered through her first night as a tree: the cold, the dark, the sounds of cicadas and tree frogs and owls and lynxes and things that had not given up their voices. She thought that it was the worst. But then there was the next night, and the next one, and the next one.
II.
The pencil-maker’s wife was leaving him.
It was not her fault. She was being slowly eaten by wolves. It was difficult to maintain domestic bliss with pups teething on her tibia.
“It’s curable,” the doctors said. “We saw a case like this in Idaho last winter. You just need a firm voice and a newspaper to the nose.” They kept their eyes on the husband’s, ignored, as hard as they could, the ripe vinegar smell of the gray alpha pissing on the pulmonologist’s leg.
That night, in bed, the pencil-maker reached for his wife. He pawed through the writhing of muzzles, found her hand and gripped it tightly.
“The doctors—” he started.
She said, flatly, “They’re idiots.”
The pencil-maker stared at the ceiling, reminding himself, This is not her fault. Harshness was a common side effect of wolves gnawing on the frontal cortex. Memory loss, too. But still, he thought. Couldn’t she just tell them to go away? There must be something.
His wife moaned and stirred beside him. The pencil-maker looked at the square panes of moon cast over the ceiling and breathed the hot stink of pelts.
Kendra Fortmeyer | 23