My Father and the Wolf

One summer my father decided he would no longer wear clothes within the walls of our home. He walked the halls naked and sang old hippie protest songs whenever we complained. I was six years old and had never seen a naked man before. My brother, age twelve, started dressing in button-downs and slacks. He learned how to tie a tie. My sister, seventeen that summer, now fit into our mother’s clothing, and wore loose, flowery blouses with her cut-off jeans. My father complained endlessly of the clothes they wore: too conservative, too revealing. He placed his hands on his naked hips and shook his head. He made our mother laugh. It was on one of these long summer days that my father opened the door and let a wolf into our house.

I remember my brother was lying on the couch reading a creased paperback of The Hobbit. My sister sat cross-legged on the rug sketching him with charcoal into one of her drawing pads. I couldn’t see the wolf, at first, from the edge of the empty fireplace where I played with a bottle of eyeliner I’d stolen from my sister’s desk. The back of the couch blocked everything below my father’s bellybutton. I watched him open the door and gesture with a wave of his hand. Then the wolf strolled into the living room. It passed between my brother and sister and, as my dad closed the door, it flopped down onto the carpet and sneezed.

My siblings and I disagree on this account, by the way. John, my brother, claims he was in his bedroom, and came out after my father slammed the door. I think he brings this up to stoke old jealousies. My sister Maggie and I shared a room, and did so until she moved out — or ran away, as our mom says — the day she turned eighteen. We both hated it. Maggie’s side of the room was was a miasmic jumble of art supplies and old magazines she’d picked up for free at the thrift store; I could hardly see the sketches she’d pinned to the walls for all the incense simmering in clay pinch-pots. When I felt brave, I’d venture into her mess and steal the things I knew our father forbade: makeup and cheap jewelry, candy, and the phone numbers of the boys who worked at the feed store.

I kept my side of the room neat then; I still do now. Spartan, my son calls it, and I wonder at where he gets these words. He’s still a baby, practically, though this year I let him choose the decorations for his room. So now it’s all superheroes, video games, and posters of sweaty wrestlers. He has a familiarity with pop culture that would have disgusted my father. We had no TV set growing up to watch superheroes or play video games. We never went out to movies, and we were homeschooled. We lived at the end of a very long gravel road where, it seemed to us, we were the only kids alive.

Our house was small, though that didn’t stop Maggie and I from begging for separate bedrooms. Where would we have gone? There was John’s room across the hall, and our parents’ bedroom through the unlocked door we never dared open, for fear of what my parents described as “dates.” Our kitchen, dining room, and living room were all one great space, and that was it. Out the sliding glass door was our large backyard, with the chicken coop and our orchard beyond. This is where my sister thinks she was when my father opened the door, in the backyard helping our mom gather the young roosters for culling. We’d had a bumper crop of chickens that year, but too many of them turned out to be roosters. Mom said one rooster was enough, though our father tried to save them. “Let the boys be, it’s no crime to be a man,” he’d said. But our mother was the one with the axe.

Mom was always a great believer in roles. My father was the gardener, and she was the cook. My father was our teacher, and my mother dealt with fevers and bad dreams. She was our nurse, and believed strongly in the medicinal power of proteins: chicken from our backyard, shelled beans from a bag, and tofu from the shelves of the health food store my parents owned. Mother was also the butcher of the family, and though my father’s role was to plate and serve the meat, he was a lifelong vegetarian and refused to eat any of the “girls” harvested from the chicken coop. Maggie has her doubts about our father’s vegetarianism. She swears she remembers our dad eating bacon. But I admired our father’s convictions. To refuse Mom’s delicious chicken, to eat only the carrots and potatoes we’d pulled from the yellow soil. It was a reserve I yearned for but could not match. I loved that chicken. I always ate everything on my plate.

Our father was surprisingly muscular for such a lean man. He’d do a little trick where he’d stretch out his long, thin limbs and then flex, and his muscles would curl like tennis balls beneath his skin. The three of us, Maggie, John and I, pounded at the dinner table until my father did what we called his “muscle dance.” Our mother never pounded at the table. But she loved to touch those muscles, and she had a habit of biting our father’s biceps and leaving half-circle welts for us to see as he reached across the table for the salt.

I don’t think Maggie was in the backyard when the wolf came in. I think she wishes she was back there, by our mother’s side, rounding up the young roosters where they practiced their struts in the shadow of the two-tiered chicken coop. Our mother would have been wielding her axe in one hand and a pillowcase in the other, to slip over the head of her next target. She might have sent Maggie in to see who was at the door. Mom doesn’t remember much of that day before her accident.

But once that wolf laid down on the living room rug before our empty fireplace, once John and Maggie and I were all there looking at it, that’s when our stories align. And no matter how many times we go over it, at family gatherings, or our trips to the lake, or over late-night texts, our memory of what happened next is exactly the same.

The wolf was facing the mantel, facing me. Its fur was gray, long and matted, silver at the ears and snout, and black around its eyes. Those yellow eyes. There’s a yellow of wolf’s eyes I’ve never seen anywhere else. The wolf had dirt between its nails.

Once, I sent a text to John and Maggie after my son had gone to bed. “What if Mom had been there?”

We’d talked about it before, but it was still a question I turned over at night. I played it out, imagining the scene reflected in the black glass of my study’s window. Our mother walks in with the axe. The wolf’s eyes go wide. It leaps to escape out the back door and she lops off its tail. She wears it braided into her long brown hair until the summer ends.

John replied that he thinks Mom would have let the wolf stay. “When did she ever tell Dad no?”

Maggie didn’t text back. She doesn’t like to talk about Mom. They see each other rarely, and only with John and I there to play as moderators. Otherwise they tear at each others’ scars, and our mom cries and asks if Maggie still hates her.

But Mom wasn’t in the living room. As the wolf rolled its yellow eyes from John to Maggie to me, we heard our mother scream. And suddenly there she was, walking in from the backyard, her dress turning red at the armpit from where she’d tucked her hand.

“The rooster moved and I cut off my goddamn thumb,” she said.

My father’s face blanched; he hated swearing and blood, he nearly fainted at scraped knees, and he loved his wife. Mom walked past him to the front door, saying as she did so, “Drive me to the hospital, dear. Maggie will watch the other two.”

She opened the door with her good hand and stepped outside. She hadn’t seen the wolf.

Our father darted down the hall to their bedroom and emerged moments later in sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt with the name of their health food store. He slipped his feet into worn running shoes and fished the car keys from the ceramic tray Maggie had made. “Everything’s fine, I’ll be back soon,” he said. He left, and we heard the old station wagon cough down the gravel driveway. A rooster, one of the young ones, crowed in the backyard.

The wolf stood, and growled.

Maggie backed her way towards the fireplace. She wrapped her fingers around an iron poker. The wolf bared its teeth. The fur of its back rippled as if a foul wind had passed through our home.

“John, Clara, go outside,” Maggie said. “Backyard. Now.”

The wolf’s growl sunk to a bass that seemed to rattle the seashells Mom had placed on the mantel. I was worried one would fall and shatter. I reached for them, but John grabbed me by the waist and lifted me away. There was a blur of movement behind us. John pushed me into the backyard and we fell together onto the hard-packed soil the chickens had pecked clean. A ripple of confusion spread through the chickens, who leapt and fluttered and clucked their worries.

John was back at the sliding glass door. “Hurry, Maggie, hurry!” he said.

I got to my knees and brushed dirt from my overalls. “Rosie?” I called out. Chickens were all around me, stirring the dust with their wings. Some fled into the two-tiered coop; others ran off towards the orchard. I looked everywhere for the little red hen my father had gifted me. “Treat her like a baby and she’ll be your baby,” he’d said, presenting me with a chick that, in my cupped hands, seemed lighter than air. He said her name was Rosie, somehow already knowing the red feathers that would sprout in the place of her sunlight fluff. Though our mother spent the most time among the chickens, collecting their eggs and choosing which to kill for our dinner, it was my father who was magic with them. He’d let out a high chuckle and the hens would come trotting from the coop as if it were their own idea to abandon their nests. The hens followed my father’s footsteps and the roosters bowed and fanned their wings. My father taught me how to hold Rosie, and through his teachings I turned her into a feathered doll. I could make her dance by holding her wings; she’d tap her feet in the dirt and bob her head. If I stepped into the yard and spread my arms, Rosie would run and launch herself towards me in that messy way that chickens fly. Mom helped me sew clothes for her; Rosie pushed her little head through the collars of the dresses and raised her beak for a kiss.

This was all when my father was a farmer, back before the health food store. We had the chickens, the orchard, three goats, a mean old sow, and a family of wild ducks my father had convinced to stay in a pond he’d dug. With a wink, my father could get the beasts to do anything: produce milk, produce young, my mom called them his animal choir. When I was five, my parents sold the sow, ducks, and goats, along with the small tractor John had loved. They used the money to buy out their friend’s health food store. But the chickens remained, by our mother’s request. For the protein, she had said.

“Maggie!” John cried as my sister leapt through the back door. John slid it shut behind her.

Maggie had her hands on her knees. She sucked at the air. “Are you okay?” she asked me.

“When are Mommy and Daddy coming back?”

Maggie shook her head. She looked around the backyard. “I don’t know.”

“Why did Dad leave us with a wolf?” John shouted. “Why would he do that?” His face was red, he kicked at the dirt. Chickens cried out and ran in circles.

“I don’t know,” my sister said again. She walked over to the stump and picked up our mother’s axe. She looked for a while at something on the ground, then picked that up too and slipped it into the pocket of her cut-offs.

Maggie hefted the axe. Her hair was wild, just grown from the short cut she’d given herself a few weeks before. She had some blood on her cheek. She looked, to me, like Mom.

Maggie said, “I think we’re going to need help. We should call the Bergsteins.”

Our closest neighbors were an older couple who always offered to watch after us kids. Once or so a year, we walked down the gravel road to their large, white house. Maggie, John and I ran up and down the stairs and hid from each other in the innumerable closets. My father and mother sat downstairs in the sitting room — they had a room just for sitting! — and talked money.

Mrs. Bergstein always found an opportunity to feed us. She said we were too skinny, and even at that young age I recognized how we always ate pastrami sandwiches and carrot cake in the back kitchen far away from our parents.

What the Bergsteins could have done to help us, I’m not sure. They weren’t hunters. They weren’t even farmers; they leased out their land. Mr. Bergstein liked to paint miniatures of famous explorers. He had a set of glasses for reading and one for looking beyond the tips of his fingers. Mrs. Bergstein was a formidable woman, taller and broader than our mother. But unless she planned on feeding the wolf pastrami on rye, I doubt she would have fared any better than we were doing.

Of course, the real question is why we didn’t call the police. There was a wild animal in our home. We’d been abandoned by our parents, the wolf had drawn blood. Years later, when I’d invited my siblings for a drink after a book signing, Maggie told me about the time a small government car had rolled up our driveway. Two polite workers from Child Protective Services spoke to my siblings. My mother was pregnant with me then. As a reaction, my father pulled John and Maggie from public school. He convinced our mom to register us for homeschooling. Father taught us algebra and food-webs, English poetry, a liberal history of the United States, and a smattering of conspiracies and homemade mythology that it took me decades to fully extricate from reality.

“What did CPS want to know?” I asked over my beer.

John said, “If we had shoes, if we had friends. If Mom and Dad hit us.”

Maggie counted off on her fingers. “Yes, no, sometimes.”

“When did Mom or Dad hit you?” I asked, nearly choking.

“Before you and John,” Maggie said. She smiled as if laying down cards she’d held to her chest since childhood. “Back before they were hippies. You know, all that peace and love shit came after John was born.”

“Did Mom hit you?” John asked. He was living with our mother then; he still does now. He helps with her frail and failing body, he mows the yard and collects eggs from the chickens.

“No, just Dad,” Maggie said. “I’d spilled a bucket of nails into the gravel, and he hit me. He yelled constantly then, his face all red. You never saw that.”

His face all red. To me, it described our father laughing to tears over something John had said, or red as he lifted me for another horsey ride around the living room. Still, neither John nor I suggested calling the police. Somehow, even then, we must have known the potential of his anger.

In the backyard, Maggie pointed with the axe to the corner of the house. She explained her plan. She would crawl through our parents’ bedroom window and call the Bergsteins from our phone in the hallway. “You’ll have to distract the wolf. Keep it at the back door. Make a lot of noise.”

John suddenly hugged Maggie. She raised the axe overhead as he squeezed her. John was nearly as tall as Maggie. Only a few years earlier, though, he’d spent every night in her lap as she read to him before bed. I joined in, squeezing myself between the two.

Then, we parted.

As Maggie ran around the house, John and I approached the glass door. Inside, the kitchen was dark. The afternoon light reflected from the glass. We saw our own reflections, clothes torn and with dirt under our eyes. John slammed his hands against the glass. I pounded with my little fists. What few chickens had remained in the yard cried out and ran away. I could hear their disapproving murmurs from the coop.

“Hey! Hey wolf!” John shouted.

I pressed my lips to the glass and screamed, “You dummy! You big dummy!” “Bastard!” John said. “Get out here now, you bastard!”

Hearing John use such foul language gave me a delicious shiver. “Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” I said. It was my first time swearing.

Then the wolf lunged from the darkness. It knocked against the glass door and we fell back. Its big paws scrabbled at the glass. It tried to work its snout through the door, leaving streaks of drool above our head. We could see its pink gums, its long teeth. Its whole body was pressed against the door. There was a terrible sound of bone against glass.

John and I charged back. We howled, we slammed our shoulders against the door. The wolf dropped to the floor then leapt again, growling. It had hurt itself somehow. Blood dripped down the inside of the glass. Its dirty fur smeared the door with mud and foul grease.

“I see Maggie!” John said. “She’s got the phone! Keep going!”

“Shit eater!” I shouted, jumping up and slapping the door with my palm. I said every dirty word I knew. “Piss! Crap! Bitch!”

But the wolf’s fury slowed. Its scrabbling calmed. It sat down on its haunches. As John and I screamed, it yawned. It licked at its injured snout with its long pink tongue. Then it turned and saw Maggie. Before we could say anything, it had poured itself across the floor and knocked Maggie to the ground. John slid the door open and shouted out Maggie’s name. She rolled with the wolf. Sunlight flashed from the axe she held between them. The wolf’s claws pulled at her blouse, made red lines down her legs.

Then the wolf turned its yellow eyes to us. It pounced from Maggie. John fell beneath it, but like a black wave it crested over him and chased me into the yard. I ran to the one place I felt safe: my father’s chicken coop.

My father had built the coop back before John, when our mother was pregnant with Maggie. He was a skilled woodworker, and had been a carpenter well-regarded around town. My mother had worked at a lumberyard; that’s where they met, and woodcraft had been an integral part of my father’s wooing. He brought her little animals carved from sandalwood, a handmade chair fitted together without glue, and when he proposed he did so with a lathed and polished wooden ring. The two-tiered chicken coop was my father’s masterpiece. The bottom floor was all arches, carved with twirling vines, squash blossoms, and dozens of hidden chickens. The top floor looked like a dollhouse: an attic of gingerbread filigree that was planned as both storage for chicken feed and a playplace for his future children. It could be accessed by a ladder propped against a circular doorway, or a trap door at the top of the chickens’ manor.

I slammed the chicken wire door behind me and fled between the warm, white bodies of the chickens. Some sat upon their nest boxes on the shelves lining the walls, but most had gathered on the floor to shiver and work their heads into each others’ feathered breasts. Sovereign, our eldest rooster, patrolled the chicken wire stapled to the inside of the arches. His spurs tapped at the dirt and he eyed the wolf nervously.

The wolf had paused in the yard. It seemed confused about where I’d gone. Perhaps the smell of the chickens cloaked me. “Rosie!” I hissed. “Rosie, where are you?”

A little red shape separated itself from the seething mass. A little red head looked my way.

“Rosie!”

She leapt above her sisters and flew to me. I held her quivering body to my chest. She tucked her soft head beneath my chin.

From across the coop, Sovereign let out a low and moaning wail. His pebble eyes were on me. He puffed out his checkered breast and beat the air with his wings. I’d forgotten how territorial he was. How he didn’t like anyone but my father touching his hens. He held his red crown aloft and pushed aside the other chickens, kicking at the wire floor.

“No, Sovereign, don’t!” I said.

Sovereign crested his head back and released a high, angry, wavering cry. I backed with Rosie away from the chicken wire. I saw the wolf’s gaze turn towards the coop. Sovereign swelled with breath again and suddenly there was the wolf, claws and teeth snapping at the chicken wire, a terrible growl like the engine of some horrendous machine, and Sovereign flew into the air and the chickens cried out and I held Rosie tight and found, at the back of the coop, the ladder to the trapdoor in the ceiling. One-handed, I climbed, and heard the popping of the staples that held the chicken wire in place. I pushed at the trapdoor with my head, with my shoulder. I tucked Rosie into the attic as the entire chicken wire facade fell in, the wolf on top. Sovereign and his flock were trapped beneath, pressed to the floor beneath the wolf’s weight. Other chickens tried to fly out. The wolf snapped its jaws and threw the chickens down, their dander and blood falling on those trapped below. I pulled myself into the attic, lifted by the heat of those horrible, desperate cries, and the happy keening of the wolf.

The attic ceiling was low overhead. At the center of the room was a small table and a set of stools my father had built and painted in bright Easter colors. Bags of chicken feed leaned against the walls, and all about lay old tools my parents had been meaning to repair. I scooped Rosie back into my arms and crept carefully towards the round doorway at the front of the attic. Down below I saw Maggie and John at the open back door. They stared, pale-faced, towards the lower level of the chicken coop. Maggie still held the axe in her hand. John pulled at her arm and pointed up at me. They both gestured for me to jump and I did so, immediately, my body wanting only to be close to them, to be far from the terrible sounds of squealing metal and gnashing teeth and the warbling death cries. I landed and screamed. My shin had hit a sharp rock, the pain numbed my entire leg. John grabbed my shoulders and pulled me towards the door.

“Rosie!” I shouted. She was still up in the attic, nervously balanced on the sill of the door. She leapt and fluttered through the air, flying much too slowly, like a red rag sinking through water. Behind her the wolf pounced and pounced on the chicken wire, snapping at the feathers that rose from the crushed bodies of the chickens. It turned at the red flashing wings of Rosie, who landed in the dirt, hopped back into the air, and passed through the back door just as my sister slid it shut. The wolf watched from the coop. White feathers settled onto its fur.

The house was quiet. Most of the lights were still off.

“Mom and Dad’s window!” John said. He ran down the hall, past the phone which was shattered on the floor. Our single phone, which only our father used. Who did the rest of us have to call? But the phone was our father’s singular connection to England, his distant, fog-bound homeland. Our father would pull our family into the hall and repeat some story he’d just heard about a cousin’s farm in the country, a lawsuit against an aunt or uncle. It was hard to keep track of his relations across the ocean, they all had nicknames like Old Bootstrap or the Little Britches. Our father had left England for a girl, he said, and he would say this in front of our mother. Only when we became adults did we realize the girl was someone he’d known before meeting our mom, and we wondered at how many girls there had been. There was an entire mythic past to our father, a fledgling form we did not know, a young man who crossed oceans and countries and fell in and out of love. Where would my father be now, I wonder. Would I know him by sight?

When we talk about this one summer day, as we did the last time my siblings came and stayed in my house, filling the empty spaces of the home that is much too large for just my son and I, Maggie and John swear all the events I just described took about ten minutes. My father opened the door to the wolf, my mother cut off her thumb, and our chickens were slaughtered, just in ten minutes. In my memory, it took hours. It’s been thirty years, and yet I remember that single day with more clarity than any of my school years after, or any of my adult years until the birth of my son. Online, an old classmate will find me. I’ll stare at their face, trying to place them, their eyes, their smile. And yet the face of the wolf, with its black mask of fur, with its crocodilian snout, and its tongue like something pink and living within the cage of its teeth, that face I remember, every little detail of it.

Eventually the wolf grew bored of the chickens. It followed our trail to the glass door and it stared at us for a while. It nudged the door with its snout. Feeling no give, it circled around the house. We heard it at the front door, scrabbling at the frame. We saw the crest of its shoulders pass below John’s window, then our parents’, then the window of the room I shared with Maggie. It returned to the backyard. Then it turned, and circled back.

As the sun rose and the shadows moved across the floor, we watched the wolf.

I remember getting hungry. Maggie cleaned my leg and put a band-aid over the cut. John checked the locks on the doors, and checked them again. The world outside dimmed towards evening. Rosie refused to leave my arms.

And then, finally, we heard tires on the driveway. The coughing of our car.

John ran to the living room window and pounded at the glass. “Mom, Dad!” he shouted. “The wolf! The wolf!”

We heard the car door open. We saw a flash of grey pass John. He screamed.

Then the door opened and our father passed through. He was laughing, his eyes lost in wrinkles. “Oh!” he said. “Oh! That tickles!”

The wolf leapt at him, nuzzling his jaw and neck, whimpering and panting, its tail dancing.

“Look who I found outside,” our father said.

John grabbed a heavy book from the shelf and held it overhead. Maggie raised her axe. I squeezed Rosie to my chest. Something passed over my father’s face, a zig-zag of tension, a realignment of his features. He dug his fingers into the thick fur of the wolf’s neck and forced it to sit at his feet.

“Your mother had to stay at the hospital. She’s fine, she just lost a lot of blood.”

My father’s silhouette in the doorway looked frayed, windblown. His thinning hair was raised in loose wings, his long-sleeved shirt bunched at one shoulder. When he stepped towards me, I heard his shoelaces dragging.

“Clara my dear, Mommy’s going to be alright.” My father opened his arms and Rosie screamed — screamed! — and Maggie stepped forwards.

“The wolf attacked us, Dad!” she said, shielding me with her body. “It attacked me.”

“Oh nonsense, he was just playing.”

John came to her side, still wielding the book. “Listen to her. It killed the chickens.”

Our father kept stepping closer. The wolf wormed itself between our father’s legs, rubbing its ribs against his knees. It had its yellow eyes on his face, it sniffed at the fabric of his pants.

“Well,” my father said, “boys will be boys.” He smiled and his teeth were very white.

“Quick,” Maggie said. She gestured with her axe and the three of us ran down the hallway into John’s room. She shut the door behind us, and together she and John blocked it with a dresser. I sat on the bed and tamped down Rosie’s bristling feathers.

“We’re safe,” I told Rosie. “We’re safe.”

“What the hell is wrong with him?” John said. He wrapped his arms around himself and rocked side-to-side. My sister put her axe on top of the dresser and pulled John to her.

“I wish Mom was here,” she said.

We heard movement out in the house, through the walls. Our father was opening the refrigerator, running the microwave. Drawers were being opened and not shut. He sang a song out there in the kitchen, one we didn’t recognize. The wolf’s nails clicked on the tile floor, like the distant ticking of a clock.

The windows darkened and Rosie fell asleep. She tucked her head beneath her wing and I matched my own breath with the rhythm of her little snores. I hadn’t been paying attention to John and Maggie. They’d been whispering near the door. Occasionally Maggie touched the handle of the axe. But now they both had turned towards me.

“We need Rosie,” my brother said.

Maggie’s face soured. “You’re as bad as Dad,” she said. She stepped forward and crouched so that our eyes met. “Clara, honey, can we borrow Rosie?”

I settled the sleeping chicken behind me on the bed. “Why do you need her?” I asked. But somehow I knew. A smell had snuck in from beneath the door and had grown stronger as the night deepened. It was a smell of wet soil and sour breath, of fear-sweat and urine. It was the smell of the wolf. It had stained our house with its smell, with its presence. We had to get rid of it.

Maggie said, “We need to get Dad away from the wolf. It’s making him act different. It’s making him weird.”

“No!” I said. I pulled the collar of my shirt over my nose and mouth, trying to breathe through the odor seeping in from the hall. “She’s my baby!”

John crossed the room. I flinched, but he opened his arms and hugged me. I set my face in his chest and cried. John spoke into my hair. “Rosie’s so special, Clara. She’s so good. She’ll lead the wolf away and we can rescue Daddy.”

I felt Maggie’s arms then as she hugged the both of us.

“You’re our baby, Clara, and John and I are going to do everything we can to keep you safe. So we’re going to take Rosie now and-”

“No,” I said again. “No, no.”

“We have to,” said John.

“She won’t go with you, she’ll fly away.”

“I can handle her,” Maggie said.

“No you can’t, no one can but me and Dad. We’re the only ones who know how to hold her, how to calm her down, no matter how scared she is. She’ll only come with me. I have to do it.”

John and Maggie looked at each other.

“If you can get the wolf down the hallway, we can trap it in Mom and Dad’s room,” John said.

“Be careful, Clara,” Maggie said.

I lifted Rosie from the bed, and John and Maggie moved the shelf and opened the door. The hallway was barely lit. A strange pale flickering light bled in from the kitchen. I followed it.

My father had pulled a chair to the middle of the kitchen floor and he sat in it now shirtless and with his bare feet splayed. He seemed to be asleep. A single light was on over the stovetop, a weak bulb that flickered back and forth between a stark, naked white, and a dim yellow like beeswax. I studied my father’s body. His arms hung down, and his fingers twitched as if carving words into the air. Drool had traced a snail’s trail down his stubbled jaw. His stomach was horribly distended, round and gleaming with little wet grease marks. I could see the remains of his feast all around the kitchen. The counters were a wreck of empty cans and cartons. A butcher’s knife stood straight from the rind of something whose insides dripped down the cabinets to the floor. Peelings and end bits littered the tiles, tracing my father’s path as he’d assembled whatever meal now sat stewing in his gut. On the stovetop still bubbled a full pot of water, in which bobbed a single large, white object.

It took me some time to see the wolf. It sat beneath my father’s chair with its eyes open.

“Dad?”

The wolf rubbed its snout against the leg of my father’s chair. A shiver passed through the muscles of its back. Fleas, I thought.

“Daddy?”

“I see you, my dear.”

As the stovetop light flickered from dim to bright I saw my father’s eyes, thin silver slivers under heavy lids.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I moved an egg carton with my foot. It tipped, and broken shells spilled across the floor.

“I was hungry,” my father said, between heavy breaths. “Can’t a man fucking eat?”

I’d never heard my father swear before. It was somehow more shocking than the mess of the kitchen, than the wolf rising from my father’s shadow and growling.

I lifted Rosie into the air. She woke and saw the wolf and I pointed her towards the hallway. “Rosie, go!” I said. Rosie exploded out of my hands and flew from the kitchen. The wolf leapt after her, barking happily. There was a mess of noises in the hall. I heard a door slam.

“I got the wolf!” John said.

“I’ve got Rosie!” my sister said.

“Come on Dad, we need to go!”

My father shook his head. The skin of his neck twisted like a rag being wrenched dry. He lifted his large hands and tried to smooth the wet strands of hair that stood from his scalp.

“Oh Clara,” he said. “You’re just a little girl. You don’t understand.”

He leaned forward, his elbows on the long bones of his thighs. His belly hung down between his legs. His chest sagged too, like breasts, but I could also see his ribs tiger-striped in the stove light.

“The store is failing, my dear. We owe so much money. Your mother hates me.”

The walls of the house shook as the wolf howled and slammed itself against the bedroom door.

My father still had his eyes barely opened. His heavy brow and long nose cast half his face in shadow. In the failing light my father’s stubble looked like a thousand black pits gouged into his hanging jowls.

I heard John and Maggie still in the hall, working to keep the wolf from breaking through the door.

Then my father said the last words I would ever hear him speak. He said these words, and did something no one has ever believed. John and Maggie tell me I imagined it. They say it was a nightmare I turned into a memory. They say it is a manifestation of my trauma, of our father’s abuse.

But I know my father loved me. I had always known it, I had felt it like a secret sun shining through the walls of our house. I even knew it then, there in the kitchen, as my father opened his eyes wide and stretched his cracked lips into a smile.

“Do you want to see a trick?”

And my father reached up with his long skinny fingers and he took the skin of his face and he pulled and it split apart like a spoiled paper bag, and he pulled and the two sides of him peeled away and he pulled and he pulled and something black and wet-furred leapt down on four silent feet and sniffed the air and—

“How did it get free?” my brother still asks me. “The doors were closed. It had paws, you said, not hands.”

“How did the other wolf get free?” I say.

“We’d left Mom and Dad’s window open,” Maggie says.

I shrug. I know what ran by. And I know that my father’s skin and clothes wrinkled up before me, drying like an autumn leaf and falling into the trash on the floor.

But John and Maggie think our father simply walked out the door. That he left me in the kitchen.

“He was probably an alcoholic,” Maggie says.

“Or a sex addict,” is John’s theory.

“Don’t be gross,” I laugh.

Then they tease me for being gross, for the grim and fantastic details with which I describe the final moments I shared with our father. I can’t blame them, for teasing. I’ve made a career of it now, writing gross and gory stories, going to interviews dressed all in black with a beetle shell clipped into my hair. They tease, but they do not turn from the benefits of my wealth, all the nice little gifts given by the murder and gore: my large and quiet house, the cabin by the lake, a generous college fund for my son and all four of Maggie’s daughters. The private chef who works twice a week in my large and orderly kitchen.

But of course, they’re part of it, too. Family, my critics say, is my most transparent and, to be honest, outworn repeating theme. That, and grievous self-injuries. I dedicate all my books to my family, to my devoted brother and brave sister, to my mother, or to all three. My fans make a game of it. They try to identify which character is who: John, Maggie, myself. Sometimes it’s obvious. My first novel, the one that made me famous, begins with a woman who cuts off her own thumb. It falls into the soil and grows into a shadow that stalks the woman, stealing all that she treasures. Mom loves that one, since she’s the star (or the villain, my sister says). There’s a male nurse I modeled after John in my fourth book. Maggie somehow sneaks into every single one.

I’m working on a new story, now. I haven’t written a word yet, which is unusual for me. I write my books by hand; interviewers always mention the cheap spiral-bound notebooks filling the shelves of my study. But this story, I’m just thinking it through. It comes to me when I’m not busy with anything else. When I’m driving my son to soccer practice, or checking the locks on the doors at night. That’s when the story is at its loudest, at night. I let it play out, over and over again. I think through every smallest detail. I imagine the sounds, the smells. The taste of the air. I stare out the window at the view my books have afforded me. Though of course in the darkness of the night all I can see in the glass is my own pale reflection.

 

Image by Erwin Bosman on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.