by Melanie Tem
As antidote, she told herself savagely that he didn’t know what he was risking when he used her left hand like that on his private parts. But she tugged obediently at his zipper. It wouldn’t come down. She didn’t know how to do this. At the party she hadn’t had to do anything except lie there. Embarrassment made her sick to her stomach, and all of a sudden the heat and glare were worse than ever, and she was hearing noises outside.
He was panting and sweating. He took one hand away from her to hold the top of his zipper together. The place on her back where he’d been touching her and now he wasn’t anymore felt raw, as if there’d been fur there and he’d worn it off.
He pulled up while she pulled down, both of them laughing self-consciously, until finally the teeth of the zipper separated and his fly came open. Then he made himself more comfortable on her bed and waited.
Deborah took a deep breath and stuck her hand inside his pants. At first, his underwear confused her, the extra layer of cloth in front that she thought was a pocket for his penis until she realized it didn’t lead anywhere. Then she edged her fingers inside one leg opening, and guessed from the way he caught his breath and whispered her name that that was the right thing to do.
It was warm and damp in there. She’d never had her hand inside a guy’s pants before, and it wasn’t quite the way she’d fantasized. For one thing, he had quite a bit of pubic hair. That surprised and repulsed her. Her little fingernail tangled in the coarse, curly hair, and she imagined, just for a second, pulling some of it out by the roots, scratching the foreskin.
Worried, she held her hand up in the bright hot sunlight to inspect it. He stiffened. “Jesus,” he hissed, “you can’t stop now.”
It was okay. The nail on her little finger was still short and carefully shaped to look like the others—rounder than most people’s, but not so different that anybody would really notice. She’d trimmed that nail yesterday when she’d shaved her legs and under her arms and her upper lip, a daily routine for years now. Under the scarlet polish, you could hardly tell that the nail was black, and the reddish-brown cast of the others didn’t show through at all.
He was mad now, and Deborah wasn’t sure why. It scared her and made her mad, too. “Christ, don’t tell me you’re a tease.”
Hastily she put her hand back inside his pants. His dick felt bigger than before, longer and thicker, and it was trembling.
“God, Deborah, you’re good!” he said out loud. She cringed. You were supposed to whisper. She didn’t know what to say back, so she didn’t say anything.
He pulled up her shirt and laid his hand hard on her breast, thumbing the nipple. Slightly panicked, Deborah wondered if she’d plucked out all the long, bristly, black hairs that ringed her nipples. Where his thumb stroked, the tender skin still tingled from the tweezers. He didn’t seem to notice the bruises on her stomach, and that made her mad.
He got the drawstring of her shorts loose with one pull and plunged his hand inside. She wasn’t ready for this. She was afraid it would hurt the baby. She was afraid it would hurt. He massaged her crotch, and she hoped desperately that there weren’t any holes in her underwear. His fingers went inside the elastic waistband, and even as she felt herself rising to meet him, she dreaded his reaction to how much pubic hair she had, and she knew she definitely was not ready for this because she was feeling dirty already.
Apparently he didn’t notice the hair. Deborah didn’t understand how that was possible, and it unnerved her. Hair covered her genitals, the lower half of her belly, six inches or more of her upper thighs. It was like an apron, like what they used to call a girdle. It was as if she had on the heirloom wolfskin all the time.
He was in such a hurry now that he wasn’t noticing anything. “I want you!” he kept saying. “I want you, baby!” His voice was rough; his attempt at a snarl was so pathetic that Deborah wanted to laugh. She liked hearing what he said to her so much that she wanted to say she loved him, but she stopped herself.
“No,” she said finally. “I’m not ready for this. Stop.”
He didn’t stop. He didn’t even seem to hear her.
“Stop it!”
“Too late,” he muttered, and pushed her knees apart with his fists.
Rage took shape. Her strength gathered. “No!” she yelled, and tried to bring her knee up into his groin, but he had her legs pinned.
Deborah wasn’t entirely sure what happened next. A sparkling blackness flowed in front of her eyes, she smelled blood and heard chanting, and from somewhere so deep inside her that it seemed to come from some other creature, a savage growl started. She dug her nails into his back; the little finger of her left hand, trimmed as it was, was still long and sharp enough to cause real damage, and the others scratched. She couldn’t reach his neck with her teeth, but they caught his earlobe and she bit down hard.
“Fuck!” He flung himself off her, scrambled to his feet, backed away. “You fucking little bitch!”
Deborah sat up. She was itching all over, and her vision was still blurred. “I—I’m sorry.”
“Get out!”
“Listen, I—”
“Just get the fuck out, bitch, before you get hurt.” He grabbed her by the hair, dragged her out of the room, threw her out the door of his apartment, and locked it behind her. The only thing she did to try to hurt him was she twisted her head to get at his hand with her teeth, and missed.
It was late. She had no idea how late it was. She also had almost no idea where she was, except that she could tell by the lights where downtown was. She was livid, and she could read the street signs across the busy street, but she’d never heard of these streets before.
There were too many people, too many cars. The lights hurt her eyes, and the itching all over her body was driving her crazy. Her nails drew blood and made tracks in her flesh, but the itching kept getting worse. She turned off on smaller and smaller side streets until she was on a gravel alley that sloped sharply downward under the highway. She followed it down.
“Hey.”
Deborah was intensely irritated. She didn’t want to look up. She was tired and furious. And a little scared. Not much, but some. She didn’t want to have to deal with anybody.
But she knew she’d better pay attention. So she stopped, looked around, turned around. Then she was staring right at the jerk who’d spoken to her from under the viaduct. She’d heard about bums who lived under the viaducts, street people, but it had never occurred to her that one of them might talk to you or anything.
She was pretty sure she knew more or less where she was going. Becky’d said more than once the greenbelt went from right near Deborah’s house to right near her house, so it shouldn’t be that hard to find. She could take the bus—but she had no idea which bus went where, so it was simpler to just walk. It might take a long time, maybe all night. That was okay. She didn’t have anything better to do.
Becky’s brother Armando had liked her for a long time, according to Becky. So tonight was her chance.
She hadn’t exactly planned on running tonight. Sometime, for sure she’d always known she’d run sometime. Actually, for a while she’d thought this initiation thing might make it so she wouldn’t have to run, at least not so soon. Her mother, of course, didn’t know anything about it. She’d never even come close to being initiated. Her mother didn’t know shit, didn’t know even who she herself was let alone what Deborah was turning into, woman or wolf.
Nana knew. And for a while Deborah had let herself think that getting knocked up and then getting initiated would make her just like Nana. Which was better than not being anybody at all.
But Nana didn’t want her. Nana said she wasn’t ready. Shit, how “ready” did you have to be? She was fucking pregnant, and she was transforming, whether anybody else in the family believed it or not.
Her family was just too weird. She might as well run away and stay away.
If she’d ever thought before about what it would be like to be talking to a bum under
a bridge in the middle of the night—which, of course, she hadn’t—she’d have imagined her eyes taking a while to adjust to the gloom, maybe never collecting enough light to see him. But now that it was actually happening her vision was, if anything, better than usual. Right away she picked the guy out. Dirty overalls, bright blue parka that looked new, filthy floppy hat, hands with huge knuckles and rough cracked skin, a glowing cigarette butt and a brown bottle with about an inch of booze in the bottom.
“Hey.”
Actually, she couldn’t tell whether this guy was talking to her or just making noises. That made her nervous. It also made her mad, because he was trying to trick her. Haughtily she demanded, “Hey, what? You talkin’ to me, asshole?”
His fire—for cooking, she thought, and wondered what he cooked, maybe cats; maybe it was for making sacrifices, too—reflected back at her from the middle of his right eye. His left eye didn’t reflect anything. Maybe it wasn’t there. Maybe it wasn’t an eye.
She’d never liked Armando. He was sexy in a sleazeball kind of way, and he said sexy stuff to her, but she knew better than to trust him. Becky, his own sister, said not to trust him, and Deborah wouldn’t have anyway. She wasn’t that dumb. She didn’t trust herself, either, but that was beside the point; she never had trusted herself.
“Hey.”
She guessed it was a man. A woman wouldn’t be hanging around some viaduct in the middle of the night. A woman would have a home. Women could always make their own homes. Except her. She was definitely homeless. Always had been, always would be.
“Hey,” the bum said again, as if he couldn’t stop saying it.
Deborah wondered what the fuck that was supposed to mean, what he wanted from her. The story of her life. She never knew what anybody wanted from her, and they all wanted something.
“Hey.”
She couldn’t be sure if it was a man or a woman, young or old, or what race. She didn’t like that. But it was definitely human. Nothing more than human.
“Hey, hey, girlie, spare a quarter for a cup of coffee?”
On the spot like that, Deborah couldn’t come up with anything mean enough to say back. So she just laughed, as scornfully as she could, and started past him. The sidewalk down here was wider than most sidewalks, for joggers and bicyclists. There weren’t any joggers or bicyclists now. There wasn’t anybody around but Deborah and the disgusting bum. The shallow Platte River, slightly below her on her left, made a noise like traffic; on her right, slightly above her, traffic on Speer Boulevard made a noise like a river.
Coming from beyond her peripheral vision, his arm reached out, and he grabbed her shoulder. If he hadn’t touched her, she’d have just gone away and left him alone. “Hey, girlie, spare a quarter for the bus? Hey, spare a quarter?”
If he hadn’t touched her, she’d have left him alone. But he laid his filthy hand on her, wanting something, and when she tried to pull away he wouldn’t let her go.
Her skin itched and hurt now, and she couldn’t stand it. All the places where she’d cut into her skin were like seams now, turning her skin inside out, turning the hair outward so it could grow. She smelled the bum’s curiosity and need, then his fear. She tasted her own blood as her teeth pushed into her lower lip, and knew how his blood would taste.
She was seeing things she hadn’t known were there: colors there were no human names for, the play of one shape across another. She was hearing sounds below and above sounds she’d heard all her life. Her thigh muscles thickened, lengthened, deepened, and the muscles in her shoulders spread. Thick drool coated her usually dry, cracked lips. She leapt for the heatless point of fire in the bum’s one eye.
He put up a fight. Dimly, it surprised her that somebody this disgusting, with such an awful life, wouldn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die. In fact, he tried his best to hurt her, and he did hurt her. He hit her shoulder hard with his bottle; she felt the blow and was aware of the pain, but it irritated her more than it hurt. He ground the end of his cigarette into her flesh, but it was as if she had some kind of padding over her skin because she hardly felt any of the burns, although there was a faint acrid odor. He kept crying out, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” hoarsely, making no sense. Then she saw the switchblade, felt her own blood spurt, and Deborah lost control.
She tore through the bright blue parka and the overalls, ripped the chest and belly and groin open with her nails. It was a woman. The breasts were big and firm, but they didn’t have any milk; she checked. There was no penis; the mound of pubic hair was wet. It was a woman. That infuriated her, frightened her; she didn’t know if it was all right to kill a woman, especially the first time. But she couldn’t stop now. The woman was screaming obscenities and filthy pleas when Deborah got to her throat.
She took a long time to die. That embarrassed Deborah, frustrated her, made her sorry. She sat with her. The wound on Deborah’s shoulder stopped bleeding before the bum was dead, and the burns had started to hurt. Her mouth tingled from the film left by the street woman’s gushing blood, and she wasn’t hungry—it suddenly occurred to her that she’d been profoundly hungry for most of her life, and now she wasn’t anymore. Her head swam, as drunk as the woman had been. Rage slaked and a hunger satisfied that she hadn’t known she had, Deborah crouched beside the bum on the hard-edged sidewalk that didn’t take her imprint, between the rushing river just below her and the rushing boulevard just above, stayed without touching her again until the woman was all the way dead.
She was so sorry. She was crying, gagging. But she knew she couldn’t leave the body, so she ate what she could and then pushed the remains into the river, where the water didn’t even cover it. Then she went on her way. She was badly distracted now, so that a lot of the time she didn’t completely remember where she was going, only that she had to get to somewhere and away from somewhere else. She tried to follow the river, the smell and taste of it distinct in the complicated city air, and she stayed as far as possible from the denser noise overhead. She tried to follow the lead of the moon; it kept appearing and disappearing among the buildings, some of which were designed to reflect its light and some to absorb it. The moon had one flat edge tonight, and Deborah didn’t know whether that kept it from being a true full moon or not.
The rest of the night she walked and ran, sometimes upright and sometimes on all fours. She kept getting lost. A couple of times, thinking she must be there, she went up steps or ramps out of the greenway into the upper city, which grew quieter in the middle of the night and busier as morning approached. More than once she stood quivering at a crosswalk, staring across the intersection at the green, yellow, red, green, yellow light. Not quite comprehending the signal anymore, she’d be afraid to take a step and afraid to stay where she was. Deborah had never been out all night before, had never been alone all night either.
She got hungry again. This was weird. She didn’t like food much, and after a few forced bites at any meal she always got so full she thought she was going to throw up. Often, to relieve the pressure, she made herself throw up if it didn’t happen by itself.
But this was a different kind of hunger, the exact opposite of that terrible stuffed feeling that all her life had kept her from eating much. This was a terrible emptiness, a craving, that she couldn’t imagine living with and couldn’t imagine ever filling up.
Furiously, she remembered the taste of the throat, heart, brain of her first kill. She was so sorry, and just thinking about it made her feel so full, so powerful. The baby kicked inside her, powerful, too, and Nana was like the moon, appearing and disappearing, pulling at her.
Then she lost the moon. It went down behind buildings, she thought, though she didn’t see it go; she just found it gone when one time she looked up at the sky for direction. Maybe it had fallen off the edge of the world someplace. Maybe somebody’d cut its head off to make sure it never rose again. Deborah couldn’t see it anywhere, couldn’t feel it either.
She was exhausted. She struggled up out of the greenw
ay again, into what must be the start of rush hour, and looked for a street sign. She had to force herself to read it, but this time the letters and numbers made sense. She knew exactly how to get to Becky’s house from here, and a bus was coming.
There was a long line of people waiting to get on. Deborah wasn’t about to let them all get on ahead of her, leaving her standing in the cold. It didn’t take much to push past the kid with the baby in his arms and the big woman who’d thought they were going to be first. The young guy swore at her under his breath. The woman didn’t say anything, but she pushed back, tried to elbow her way ahead of Deborah onto the steps. Deborah won.
She fumbled nickels and dimes from her pocket into the fare box. “Dollar,” said the driver.
She stared at him blankly. He had his chin on his hand and his elbow on the steering wheel, and was staring at her as though she were the scum of the earth. She said, “Huh?”
“Fare’s a dollar.”
He was trying to rip her off. Anger tightened her chest, made her cough. She coughed right at him, didn’t cover her mouth. “Fifty cents,” she said stubbornly. “I rode the bus before. It costs fifty cents.”
“One dollar. Peak hours. Pay or get off.” “I already put in my fifty cents.”
“Pay or get off,” the driver said evenly, “or we’ll all just wait right here for the police to come.
“Oh, for Chrissake,” said the woman behind her, and Deborah stiffened and turned, ready to take her on. But the woman reached around her and deposited coins into the fare box. It beeped and the driver nodded. “All this fuss over fifty cents. Go on, now. Get on.”
Stunned by the kindness, Deborah ducked her head and went all the way to the back of the bus. She squeezed herself between the wall and a guy in a business suit who folded his paper into an even smaller rectangle to make room for her. She put her feet up on the arm of the sideways seat in front of her and wedged her shoulders at an angle so she could see out the window. Feeling the suit edge away, she wondered if she smelled bad, and furiously hoped so.
