The Wolf

He lost his virginity on a bed of pine needles, in a forest dense with evergreen trees. He was fifteen and she was a year or two older, one of his classmate’s sisters. Her name was Molly and her breath was stale and hot against his ear and her eyes were shut tight, like she was imagining herself anywhere but there. She took three deep, shuddering breaths before rolling over on her side and pushing herself to a cross-legged position, her skirts splayed in front of her, hair askew and tangled with pine needles.

“So that’s what it’s like,” she said.

He nodded, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at the tree trunk nearest them, which had a large knot glistening with sap. She was taller than him with freckles and eyes not quite symmetrical enough to be pretty. Her fingers were long and white and the knuckles protruded like little boulders. As she stared at the tree trunk he stared at her right hand and her short manicured fingernails. They were a soft pink, which didn’t seem to fit her at all. At school she wore long skirts and loose blouses in monochromatic blacks and grays. She wore dark lipstick and eyeliner that made her eyes seem larger than they were. In the forest, most of the eyeliner was smudged away and her eyebrows were hardly there at all.

Back at school you could hear Molly coming from a mile away, her voice loud and sharp and always angry. She complained about the size of the lockers and the food and the popular kids who were too good for everybody else. She complained about the homework and her brother’s nerdy friends and how early they had to be at school. Her voice was a screech of disdain, a red hot burst of flame down the halls of the school. Most lower classmen avoided her; nobody wanted to be caught in her path by accident.

But in the forest she was quiet. Reflective. Sitting next to him with her back slouched over her crossed legs she looked smaller and more vulnerable. She didn’t touch him or look at him, but kept staring at the knot in the tree. She wiped her running nose with the back of her hand and sniffed.

“If you tell anyone about this, I’ll castrate you myself,” she said. A long-legged spider took slow, searching steps down the skin of his left wrist and he flicked it away. He pushed himself up to a seated position beside her.

“Do you want to—do it again?”

He hated how desperate he sounded, and the little crack in the middle of the question.

She turned to him and glared.

“Fuck no.”

She stood abruptly, and held her skirts gingerly away from the space between her legs. They picked their way back to her beater car in silence, with only the bird calls signalling their departure. She drove him to his house and slammed on the brakes on the road, not bothering to pull into the driveway.

“I mean it. You tell anyone about this–”

“You’ll castrate me. Got it.”

He shouldered his backpack, which he had thrown in her backseat when they’d ditched school. His mother was waiting at the door when he came up the walk.

“Who is that?” she asked, nodding in the direction of the beater, which gave off a sputter and a pop as Molly pulled away.

“Rowland’s sister.”

He slipped past his mom and moved down the hallway, wanting to change out of his clothes as quickly as possible.

“Why was she driving you home?”

“I needed a ride,” he said and retreated to his room, shutting the door with a firm click. His mother had not come into his room for close to a year. She said it was better not to know what it looked like.

It was dark and he could barely see the floor from all the clothes piled on it. He sniffed a few shirts and pants, finding the ones with the least offensive odor. He stripped down and added his dirtied clothes to the mountain on the floor, pulling out the last clean pair of boxers from his drawer along with an oversized t-shirt and joggers.

He laid back on his bed with his hands folded across his chest and looked up at the ceiling with a grin.

***

The following Monday, he plucked four jet black hairs from his torso. When he looked at his reflection in the smudged mirror of the bathroom he shared with his brother, he could have sworn that his eyes had lightened by a shade or two, going from a deep chocolate brown to a golden amber. His mother was at work by the time he woke up, but she left him a note on the kitchen counter signed with Xs and Os.

Molly ignored him at school, and he followed her lead. He found himself staring at other girls, wondering what it would be like to bring them to the bed of pine needles he’d shared with Molly. He found it difficult to concentrate in class, and more than once he was startled to find that a teacher had been calling his name. In the evenings, he caught his mother staring at him with a quizzical look on her face, and his brother punched him hard in the shoulder at dinner when he tore into the pork loin they were having one night.

“Dude, where are your manners?”

By the end of the week, fine black hairs had sprouted all over his body, and he spat two teeth out into the sink. He felt dizzy when he stood for too long, and his back began to ache. His eyes grew steadily lighter until they were an unnatural yellow and the pupils had shrunk to a fraction of their original size.

“You don’t seem like yourself,” his mom said, “I’ll check at work and see if we can get you in to see one of the doctors next week.”

His voice dropped a whole octave, and he stopped dreaming at night. He spent hours shaving the hairs that were sprouting faster and thicker over his body and stared at his reflection.

He stalked girls at school and flirted with them. He convinced a few to skip school and go to the forest with him, walking the long way there and back just to spend a half an hour coupling among the spruce trees. He ignored each of them afterward.

The principal called home and told his mom there had been some complaints from other students, and could they schedule a time for him to come in to meet with the school counselor?

When he showed up in the school office, he tapped his foot nervously against the thin carpet and didn’t meet the counselor’s eyes. The woman had brown hair and he focused on the subtle cleavage visible from her fitted floral blouse. His mind was filled with sex–the pursuit of it, the mechanics, the raw need. He could think of little else.

“It’s normal for young men to have urges, Josh. But part of growing up and becoming an adult is learning to control them. Have you been given any tools to do that?”

An hour with the counselor didn’t help, and two new teeth began growing in the caverns left over from the teeth he’d lost. When he felt the tips of them with his index finger, they drew blood. The hair on his body grew so fast that even his dad’s old electric razor couldn’t keep up. He stopped going to school, and when his mom asked about him through the door of his room, he told her he was sick..

He fell into another dreamless sleep. When he woke up, he was back in the forest and it was dark. He was covered in fur from his head to his toes. A soft undercoat beneath, with hairs that were coarse and thick on the outside. He opened his mouth to let out a scream but a long howl released instead. It was a yearning, terrible sound and at first he didn’t connect it to himself. The teeth that had grown from the ones he’d lost were now long enough that they rested against the outside of his lower lip, and his bones ached like each one had been regrown. He let out another long, agonizing howl before stepping forward on what had once been his front arm. The first few steps in this new form were shaky, but he grew in confidence. He wetted his lips and lifted them up into a kind of snarl. He squinted his eyes, marveling at how much he could see.

It wasn’t long before he was bounding through the forest, sniffing for prey. He practiced running quietly on all fours, and stopped every so often to inspect a cluster of wild mushrooms or a rotting log. Smells layered one on top of another and he found he could separate and identify them, and could learn from following a particular scent to its source.

When dawn was just beginning to break and the first sparrows were calling to each other across the forest, he noticed that his back was no longer aching. He felt alive, each cell shivering with anticipation.

The air was clear and cool and the ground was solid beneath the pads of his new four feet. He knew then that he would never go back. To be a wolf was to have freedom, to take hold of the world and make it his. He would never be asked to control his urges in this form, would never have to worry about embarrassing his family. His appetite could be satiated with no repercussions or consequences. He lifted the edges of his mouth in a grimace that would have been a grin if he were still human. Then he bounded off into the forest, eager to fill the hole that had opened deep in his belly.

BIO: E.B. Sommer's work has been featured in The Daily Tomorrow, Manawaker Flash Fiction Podcast, and The Stygian Zine. She is an Associate Member of SFWA and a full list of her published works can be found at her website, www.ebsommer.com. She resides in Minnesota with her family and their two dogs, Sam and Sally.

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