Mongrels

I was up with the television on by lunch, my stomach as empty as it had ever been. That’s what being thirteen’s about, Libby had told me. It didn’t mean I was changing, it meant I was normal.

She didn’t know everything, though.

Darren was dead to the world on the other couch, his mouth open, one skinny leg hooked over a scratchy pillow. The big bad werewolf in his natural state.

I could have drawn any number of mustaches and eyebrows on his face, and since the light bulb in the bathroom was dead, he wouldn’t even know for a day or two, if Libby could keep from cracking up. To commemorate my right guess on Wheel—“Where’s the Beef Pudding”—I arced a line of pee out the back door, imagined I was telling all the other dogs to stay the hell away. That they didn’t want any of this.

When we’d moved in, there’d been a bobcat living under the kitchen, raccoons in the pump house, coyotes yipping out in the scrub.

Once they got a good whiff of who’d moved in, they all found better dens. Even mice and rats know better than to hang around us, and forget horses. Dogs’ll do their back-hair-snarling-and-barking number, ringing the alarm for their humans, but horses, they just watch with their big eyes. Track your every step. And if there’s no place for them to slink off to, then they come in hard, front hooves slashing.

We’re in their blood, I guess. Or, we’ve been in their blood, anyway.

Go ahead, horse. Run away.

Catch you later.

To keep Libby from Darren’s throat, I pulled my pants on and policed the backyard for feathers. The owl’s leftover beak was neat, all black and shiny. I puppeted my fingers behind it, pretended it was an octopus, snapped at the air with it.

Like I’d ever seen an octopus except on a nature show.

The way werewolves won’t go up a tree, even though we’ve got the reach, got the claws, we also won’t go in the ocean. Evidently Darren had tried once our first time living in Florida, while he wasn’t even wolfed out, but he’d lost it, had to splash back, halfway hyperventilating. How far he’d made it was his knees. Among werewolves, making it even that far meant you had nerve to spare.

Leave the water to the fish, the trees to the cats.

Everything between, it’s ours.

Waiting for Jeopardy!, I scoured the kitchen for a sandwich, finally had to make do with store-brand peanut butter on a plastic spoon, sugar sprinkled on top after every lick, the licks shallower and shallower.

Darren just slept, and slept deeper.

I licked my peanut butter and watched him. His index finger was shiny. Not from the stretched-out swollen-up skin so much as from the antibiotic cream he’d finally slathered on, because wolf saliva wasn’t cutting it.

Jeopardy! was a repeat. I knew all the answers, said them in my head to prove it.

An hour later I was in the bathroom with a lighter, stretching my tongue out in the medicine-cabinet mirror.

Was it blacker than usual? Flattening out just a little? A dark stripe down the middle? Were my words getting thicker?

By three, Darren still wasn’t awake.

I turned the second Wheel of Fortune up louder, so that every tick of that big wheel filled the living room like a roller coaster coasting to a stop.

Nothing. No response.

Not even from the back bedroom. And Libby kept a mop handle by her bed special for banging on the wall.

On ghost feet I crossed to the front window.

No number 14 Datsun pointed east. No number 41 Datsun ready to watch the sun set.

I looked down the hall to Libby’s bedroom, flared my nostrils like I’d been training.

She wasn’t going to be there, I knew.

Just like I’d been right at the game shows all day, I was right about this as well. It made my heart hammer in my chest, made my mouth dry out even more.

All her ways to die were flashing through my head faster and faster, until I was sure she’d been scalped for bounty, netted for a sideshow, kidnapped for science, and the hair that had been left behind from her last desperate fight, it was waxed under in the lobby of her office building now.

I paced from the kitchen to the front door twenty times, fifty times, practicing what I was going to tell Darren. Practicing what wasn’t going to make me sound like a scared baby. Finally I just sat down on the sun-bleached cable spool we called a coffee table, shook him by the shoulder.

It didn’t change his breathing, didn’t make him roll over.