Wilding

by Melanie Tem

  Chapter 16

  Heart.

  Mouth tingling. Tongue curled like a siphon and hanging out of her mouth, drooling. Brain pulsing. Heart consumed, still being consumed.

  Fresh and intimate heart. And brain, pulsing. The sources of exquisite power.

  Mary turned around and around in the cave, spun, howling, out of control, wilding, pushing the walls of the cave wider, stone cracking, dirt caving in, claws digging a deeper nest, a deeper grave.

  Mary raced.

  Away from the cave under the river, under the city where she’d lived for a hundred years. Where she’d buried her granddaughter’s body with the heart removed, the emptied skull of her granddaughter Lydia.

  Under the cold cradle moon, crescent moon, Mary raced. Healed now, and knowing: It was time.

  Snow in the air, not falling. Water in the cold air.

  Heart afire. Heart and brain afire. Heart and intimate brain transformed.

  Cruelty she hadn’t thought of before in her whole life. Cruelty that hadn’t presented itself before, but was now clear. Imagination transforming. Imagination widening the walls of cruelty, and cruelty widening the walls of imagination: She’d loved Lydia. Would always love Lydia, now more than ever.

  Had not killed her. Had refused. Had refused even to help her kill herself. Had insisted that Lydia think of it herself, do it all herself. Courage transforming for once in her life; rage and terror transforming at last.

  Had not taken her heart. Had been given it, presented it, by Lydia herself. The heart of a woman, small on the pad of her paw.

  Had taken the brain then, her right, the spoils of transformation, the reward for power and the power itself. The brain not of a woman nor of a wolf, she thought, but of some other creature, still transforming.

  Mary raced southwest through the city, following the river valley. Away from her own house and the sister houses, not even past them. Done with them now, with the hidden courtyard and the long room lit by moonlight and by blue candle flames in green sconces. Done, after a hundred years. Moving on. Racing. Wilding. Someone else now, something else. Always able to be something else, imagination gone wild, walls of her heart and her brain and her imagination pushing wider and caving in.

  Southwest through the city in long bounds, each more than double her own great length. Low to the ground. Big striated muscles of thighs, hips, flanks rhythmically stretching and contracting, lifting and lowering, propelling and, still, holding back.

  No wind; she made her own wind. Unfallen snow stinging and itching her eyes like unshed tears.

  City on both sides and above and below. Here in the valley it was city, too, trail of the city, city spoor. Changing as she raced through it. Changed because she’d lived in it for a century and was running through it now, was leaving it now. Lights, making shadows, making light. The whir of electric power under her feet, the humming loop of cleaned and contaminated water, the buzz of telephone cable. She knew what it all was.

  Prey everywhere, easily killed, but she was too full and in too much of a hurry to eat any of it. A pair of beaver, flat-tailed and slick-furred, teeth for chewing trees barely grazing her. Rats big as beavers, squealing in foolish rage. A man who never really woke up as she hurtled under his bridge and broke his neck in passing.

  Odors.

  Deborah.

  Somewhere. Here?

  Mary slowed unwillingly, did not stop. Somewhere. The baby, nearly born. Somewhere, not here. Deborah and the baby. Mary howled but did not stop.

  Mary raced between the river and the mountains, between the Platte River and the Devil’s Backbone. Buildings, their foundations above her head. Traffic above her. Voices, none speaking to her, a few exclaiming as she passed, crying out. She flung them all aside.

  Smells. Oil and gasoline smell. Smells of snow not yet falling, a baby not yet born. Smells of water and of things that lived and died in water, of the city and of things that lived and died in the city.

  Plunging through water, cold where it penetrated her fur. Swimming. Heart huge with pain and fury, huge with love. Lungs huge to keep her afloat.

  Cradle moon. Slightly higher and brighter in a slightly darker sky when she raced through Littleton and turned almost due west into the mountains. Then along U.S. Route 285 through smaller and smaller towns (odors, sounds, she raced and her attention went wild and almost free, her imagination almost free). Up Waterton Canyon. Higher. Herself higher, brain swelling toward explosion, lights exploding in her eyes, the crescent moon exploding. Lydia’s heart swelling toward explosion in her own heart, Lydia’s brain in her brain.

  Find her daughter. Find Ruth. Find her daughter’s heart and brain. Save her, or consume her.

  Mary raced.

  No highway now, and now no road. Enormous strides up steeper and rougher slopes, through scrabble of rock and thinning shrubs, over the red ridge of the Devil’s Backbone itself. Higher. Lungs swelling to render the thin air, heart swelling, brain swelling and hurting.

  Up Bitter Canyon, up Wolf Canyon, up to timberline. The river stopped.

  Across timberline. Snow now, not falling but forming hard and cold in the thin air. Mary breathed it in. Snow and wind and swelling cradle moon.

  Ruth.

  Daughter lost.

  Somewhere. Here? No sound or sight of her, no smell, only snow and pine and other life, other prey not worth the distraction. Deer. Chipmunk. Ruth. Lost.

  Mary raced. Less sure of herself up here, not trusting either her instincts or her thoughts. Dug deep but did not find caves. Followed canyons till they narrowed and closed. Sped across high red ridges, sat on the Devil’s Backbone, and lifted her mouth to the moon and howled.

  The moon rose higher, then sank and set. Snow fell.

  People who lived up the back canyon roads heard. People heard whose cabins nestled against the sheltered bank of the river or stood clear against the cliffs and the clear blue or clear black sky.

  Some people heard the racing footsteps and thought of bear or cougar, or of blizzards or avalanches scoring the mountains again. Some of them heard what they knew was the howling of the wolf. Some believed they were dreaming and did not wake up. Others stirred, sat up in bed, got up and went to their tall windows or went outside into the chill night where, by then, the points and curve of the crescent moon were nearly obscured by cold cloud. They looked and listened, didn’t know what they saw or heard, went back to sleep.

  Ruth heard.

  Marguerite heard, too, and the others, waiting. Mary slowed, slunk, advanced.

  Chapter 17

  Deborah woke up someplace too bright. Light hurt her eyes, sunlight. Got under her skin and made her itch. Her stomach hurt. Her vagina hurt.

  She was going to throw up. She was going to make herself throw up. She had to pee.

  Both her stomach and her vagina felt a lot bigger than they used to be. Stretched. A little panicky, she wondered how long she’d been asleep or unconscious or whatever she’d just been, and she wondered what could have happened to her while she was out that she didn’t know about.

  The baby.

  Deborah put her hands on her stomach and didn’t feel anything except her own thick and hollow flesh. Maybe there’d never been a baby. Maybe she was just fat. Or maybe the baby was gone, killed or stolen or lost. What would those assholes want with a baby?

  They’d raped her. Knives at her throat, fists in her belly. Dicks in her cunt, all the way up into her uterus, she was sure, where the baby was. How do you like that, baby? Daughter? You’d better get used to it. This is how you were conceived, you know. It took more than one man to make you. One after the other after the other, penises as far up into her as they would go, not far enough, not big enough for her. They hadn’t dared put them in her mouth. She wished they had.

  She’d raped them, too. Actually, “rape” wasn’t the right word for any of this. There wasn’t a word for what she’d done to them, what she could do, what a woman would do to a man. Perpetrator or victim,
it was violence, and it was also passion. Not love, she didn’t think it was love, but it was passion. It did transform.

  She’d taken them on. She’d pulled them in, and it hadn’t been hard to do. Whether they wanted to or not, they’d stiffened again and again to fill her, but they couldn’t fill her. They weren’t big enough. Nobody was that big. They’d yelled and tried to get away from her but by then she wouldn’t let them go till she was ready, not till she was done. She’d grabbed their tongues with her long front teeth and held on. She’d held on to their necks and heads with her long black claws when all of them together couldn’t hold her down or push her away.

  Under them and around them, she’d transformed, so that before it was over they were fucking a wolf. Some of them, all but one, had grunted stupid threats and curses and left her, run away.

  One stayed. Younger or older than the rest, smarter or dumber, something. Crazier. So stoned and so spent that he couldn’t move and didn’t seem to care what she’d turned into. She could have made him hard again, easy. She could have killed him, easy, or fallen in love with him.

  One way or another, she could easily have had his heart. But she didn’t do anything, and eventually he’d left, too. She didn’t know why she’d just let him go.

  Some man was sitting in front of her now, cross-legged, back to the bright sky so he didn’t have a face. On the sloping ground between them was a tape player, bright yellow with big square knobs like a kid’s, like one she’d had as a kid but she’d broken it the first day. Some weird music was playing. Not even music; chanting.

  It was Julian. “Julian.”

  He said her name at the same time. “Deborah.”

  He scooted closer. Now she could see that he was smiling at her. He was wearing a heavy, dirty black coat that was way too small for him. He looked dorky. His breath stank. But he also smelled familiar, pleasant.

  “What’s that shit?” she demanded.

  “Deborah, I’ve been worried about you.”

  “Why?

  He looked at her as if she was stupid or something. “Why, because you’re valuable to me.”

  “ ‘Valuable’?” she sneered.

  He nodded, satisfied. “Valuable. Yes.”

  “What’d you do, come looking for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is that shit? Turn it off!”

  “Oh, that is a Gregorian chant. Christian liturgical music from the thirteenth century.”

  “It’s gross.”

  “Really? I find it both calming and invigorating. The Gregorian chant has been most helpful to me in my spiritual practice, since I am not yet sufficiently disciplined simply to clear my mind—”

  “Sounds like devil worship.”

  He raised his eyebrows and chuckled. When he still didn’t turn the tape player off, she slapped the stupid thing with the flat of her hand and knocked it onto its side. It slid a little way down the bank toward the river, but it kept on playing. High men’s voices sliding under the drone of the city, up and down the river valley.

  “Turn it off!” she yelled.

  He looked at her some more with that irritating, peaceful, brown-toothed smile. Then, finally, he retrieved the player, pressed one of the big square buttons, and shut it off. For a split second everything was very quiet, before sounds filled the quiet up again. Sounds of the city. Sounds of Julian. Sounds of Deborah’s own heart, own thoughts. And of the baby’s.

  “Are you all right?” Julian asked.

  “Sure.” She curled her lip in dramatic disgust. They thought they were hurting me they thought they had the power they thought they had me but I had them instead the pricks. Her groin throbbed with excitement when she thought about them.

  Especially the last one, trapped inside her until she was finished with him and let him go.

  “Deborah?” It enraged her how much she liked the way he said her name. “Deborah.” Her name made her so sad. Her eyes ached for tears. Her throat ached. “Deborah, I’m so sorry.” And no matter how hard she tried to keep herself safe from him, Deborah couldn’t escape believing that Julian meant what he said. “Life expects a lot of you,” he said. She liked that, too.

  She didn’t know what she felt.

  What she felt was safe.

  She was leaning against him, turning her face into his shoulder. She hadn’t planned to do that. He put his arms around her and held her as if he could keep her safe.

  What she felt was loved.

  She woke up to snow. Every year when it snowed for the first time, it seemed like the first time ever, and she noticed every little detail. The snowflakes were tiny, more like ice than snow. They were falling so fast and hard and so close together that you couldn’t make out any shapes, couldn’t tell whether any two of them were alike or not.

  Up above, the wind was blowing hard. Deborah could see snow gusting, traffic lights swaying, people walking hunched over with their heads down into or away from the wind with their hair and clothes whipping. Down here, snow did fall, but not as much of it and not as hard, and there was hardly any wind.

  Julian had climbed the steps, limping because his knees ached in the cold but laughing and singing. Now he was standing on the top edge of the riverbank, right along the street. He was wearing his orange Broncos stocking cap; it had an enormous tassel on top with blue sparkles through it. He’d rolled the edge of the cap down flat over his forehead and ears. Altogether, the cap must have been two feet tall. It looked ridiculous.

  Especially the way he was standing now, with his head back so far that the cap stuck almost straight out behind him, practically level with the ground. He was holding his hands out in front of him to catch the snow; he didn’t have any gloves. He had his mouth open and his tongue out, too, to catch the snow, which of course would melt the second it touched him. He looked stupid. Watching him, Deborah couldn’t help smiling.

  “Deborah! Come play in the snow!”

  She scowled and shook her head. She moved her hands in broad gestures to show how disgusted she was, what a stupid idea that was, to push him away. But she did lean out, then scoot out from under the bridge just far enough for some of the snow to fall on her. It was pretty. It felt good at first. But then it was so cold it hurt.

  “It’s beautiful!” Julian shouted, not especially to her.

  He was dancing. She couldn’t believe it. In the middle of Speer Boulevard at rush hour, calling attention to himself and to her, not even caring that he was making a total fool of himself.

  Deborah crawled back up under the bridge, inside the shelter. Julian had made walls and half walls from wooden slats and cardboard boxes stacked and tied together. The baby was moving a lot right now. She wondered if it liked the snow or not.

  She’d been with Julian when he’d found the cap, on the bike path right outside their place as if somebody’d left it for them. Left it for him—she wouldn’t be caught dead wearing something like that, no matter how cold she got. Getting her head cold or her ears wouldn’t hurt the baby. Julian had picked the cap up with both hands and held it gently. “Oh, look,” he’d said softly, sadly. “Someone has lost this.”

  “You’ve been saying you needed a hat, now you’ve got one. An ugly one, but it’s a hat.”

  He’d looked at her with quiet disapproval and said, “But, Deborah, this isn’t mine. Someone has lost it.” Then—to her amazement and intense annoyance—he’d proceeded to stop every bicyclist, every jogger, every bum along the path, had even gone up to the street and asked hurrying college students with bulging backpacks and downtown businesspeople with briefcases. “Pardon me, sir. Excuse me, ma’am. Might this cap be yours?” If they looked at him at all, they looked at him as if he was nuts, which he was, and none of them would even touch the cap let alone claim it. So finally Julian had decided it was all right for him to keep it, and since then he’d hardly had it off his head.

  Now the cap sparkled with snowflakes. His beard was white and gray, full of snow. His face sparkled. Behind
and above him, snow made the city pick up all kinds of weird colors and tints, peach and blue so pale they were almost silver, purple so pale it was almost blue.

  Julian slid down the slope like a little kid, whooping, and came over to her. He was cold and wet and happy. She pulled away from him. He made no move to touch her, but she pulled away from him anyway. He wrapped his arms around his legs and, smiling, looked out over the whitening river. “Back east, where I come from, this wouldn’t be called a river at all,” he informed her, as if she cared. “A body of water this narrow and shallow would be called a stream or a creek. And this certainly wouldn’t be termed a valley.”

  Deborah waited, then snapped, “So what?”

  Julian hugged himself in appreciation. “Oh, I just enjoy all the many variations of human experience. Don’t you?”

  For a minute, hearing him say that, she did. Which was stupid, and dangerous. “Right,” she said with as much sarcasm as she could muster.

  “The time has arrived for us to move,” he announced.

  Deborah was instantly on the alert. “What do you mean, move?”

  “This is the first snowfall.” He spread his hands again and looked up at the sky. “This cold snap won’t last long and the snow will have melted within a few days. But it’s a harbinger.”

  “Move where?”

  “Aye, there’s the rub.” He chuckled.

  She had no idea what he was talking about. “Speak English,” she snapped.

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps we can strategize together.” He sat down cross-legged beside her, always ready for a conversation. “There are numerous alternatives, but I don’t believe that any of them will work for us. One year, for instance, I actually lived in an abandoned railroad car, just like the traditional stereotype.” He chuckled. “Then for three years I was able to secure enough math tutoring hours at the college that I rented a room at the Barmouth Hotel, but last week I spoke with the lady in charge of tutoring services, a very nice lady named Veronica McCormick, and she informed me that their funding has been cut and they will not be in a position to hire any outside tutors this semester. I cannot imagine how the students will manage. Some of them—college students, mind you—have not yet mastered basic arithmetic functions, and algebra, I’m afraid, is a complete mystery to them. A sad commentary on our educational system.”