By Rae Zalopany
My father is a wolf.
Mother jokes she’s his scratching post. The deep red grooves on her neck poke out from her shirt collar while she fries us eggs. I trace sad faces in the spattered oil on the backsplash.
Mira and I roll around the floor like cubs. We’ve known each other since before we got secret belly button rings. She has a barbell with a bunny dangling and mine has a fairy on the moon. Only I can hear her jingle when she walks, my left ear twitching imperceptibly.
My father is a wolf, so that makes me part wolf. I can smell you a mile away. I can smell my twelve siblings and the meat between their gums. I smell my mother’s laundry and the soup in her hair. I smell the tobacco on my father’s shoes and the incense that dampens his whiskers. Mira, I smell her too, doing laps at the Y.
Still, I cannot claw or scratch or even howl like him.
I’m not allowed.
Mother says I’m too hairy, too thick, that I reek of moss and birch brush. Father laughs and tells me I’m built like a clawfoot bathtub. Mira is frustrated, wondering how it’s possible that mothers don’t know how genetics work. She touches my jaw and calls me her 늑대. We write other girls’ names on bathroom stalls and touch pinkies.
Father likes to pick and choose when he remembers I’m a wolf.
Take it, he tells me.
We stand at the bottom of the ravine ankle deep in the river. I’ve always hated the way my feet stand awkwardly on river rocks. Slick and black, I wobble across them as my father seems to skate. I’d be perfect prey, if not for the predator in me.
We haven’t been out alone together since I was young. Since before my eight nipples swelled. My yellow eyes had widened as I touched each bud like flowers frozen in ice.
He points to the middle of the river, and we look at a mother bear and her cubs. They sense our presence but don’t want to leave their rocks to cross back to land.
We’re faster in the water than they are.
I will get the mother, and you go for her cubs.
My father forgets I’m human too.
I shake my head and say, No I can’t do that.
This is part of the life cycle.
We can just go to the grocery store.
You forget where we come from.
I hold the baby’s neck in my mouth, hoping I made my father proud. Years later he won’t remember this moment before he died. Brush your teeth my mother clucks, taking the meat to be cleaned. My gums bleed red like they’ve been stitched with thread. My father already left the room, the house, he’s somewhere in the mountains. Mother ignores his absence. We all do. He is a wolf. They pretend to shrug it off but aren’t wolves monogamous?
He doesn’t come home to eat the bear.
Sometimes I walk outside when everyone’s asleep. Moving silently over the clumps of quilts and mattresses that my siblings sleep on, my heart falls to my butt. Mira is not allowed over anymore. I delete every silent text she sends once I’ve responded. Animals, mother once said when she saw us in the barn.
I snap my acrylic nails at the lightning bugs, Mira watches one glow in her hand. They blink like dying stars. We strip and lie shivering in the woods. We are wild girls. Mother would call me bad, bad, bad. I think good, good, good. We howl like girls at our navels.
If I were to be stuffed and put in a museum one day let it be set in this moment.
Rae Zalopany is a writer, visual artist, and teacher from St. Petersburg, Florida. She holds an MFA from the University of South Florida. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Southeast Review, The Boiler, and elsewhere.