Mongrels

It made the world creak all around us, into a new shape. This moment we were standing in, it was a balloon, inflating.

Inside of ten minutes, we’d have the bed of the El Camino piled with cardboard boxes and trash bags, Grandpa’s house burning down to the cement slab, the three of us stuffed into the cab of the El Camino, to put as much distance between us and this dead cop as we could in a single night.

Now, though.

In this moment where everything went one way, not the other.

Because of that dab of shiny black on my aunt’s inner forearm, I was listening to my grandpa again.

This is one of the first stories he ever told me, right before Darren rolled back into town to keep Red off Libby. His left eye then, it was probably already pressuring up to burst back into his brain.

The story was about dewclaws.

And none of Grandpa’s stories were ever lies. I know that now. They were just true in a different way.

He had been telling me secrets ever since I could sit still enough to listen.

On dogs, he told me, dewclaws, they’re useless, just leftover. From when they were wolves, Grandpa insisted.

Dewclaws, they’re about birthing, they’re about being born.

Just like baby birds need a beak to poke through their shells, or like some baby snakes have a sharp nose to push through their eggshells, so do werewolf pups need dewclaws. It’s because of their human half. Because, while a wolf’s head is custom made for slipsliding down a birth canal, a human head—all pups shift back and forth the whole time they’re being born—a human head is big and blocky by comparison. And the mom’s lady parts, they aren’t made for that. You can cut the pups out like they tried to do for Grandma, but you need somebody who knows what they’re doing. When there’s not a knife, or somebody to hold it, and when the mom’s human, not wolf—that’s the reason for the dewclaws. So the pup can reach through with its paw. So that one flick of sharpness high up on the inside of the forearm can snag, tear the opening a bit wider.

It’s bloody and terrible, but it works. At least for the pup.

And now I understood, about Grandpa’s tick. That smooth divot of scar tissue he’d shown me on the back of his arm.

It was so I would look at my own arms, someday.

On the inside of each of my forearms there are two pale slick scars that Libby’d told me were from the heating element of Grandpa’s stove, when I’d reached in for toast when a piece of bread was still as big as my head.

Grandpa had been telling me the whole time, though: dogs?

I’d seen dogs through the window driving to school, but there’d never been a dog at Grandpa’s place.

Dogs know better. Dogs know when they’re outmatched.

“No,” Libby said, looking across to me, looking at my inner forearms with new eyes, matching my two scars up with her dewclaws.

It wasn’t a dog Grandpa had to drag out by the fence.

I can see it now the way he would have said it, if he could have said it the way it happened.

A fourteen-year-old girl starts to have a baby, a human girl starts to have a human baby, only, partway through it, that baby starts to shift, little needles of teeth poking through the gums months too early. It’s not supposed to happen, it never happens like this, she was the one of the litter born with fingers, not paws, she’s supposed to be safe, is supposed to throw human babies, but the wolf’s in the blood, and it’s fighting its way to the surface.

My mom, I didn’t just tear her open, I infected her.

Werewolves that are born, they’re in control of what they are, or they can come to be, at least. They have a chance.

If you’re bit, though, then it runs wild through you.

“We’re going to go far from here, so far from here,” Libby was saying right into my ear, the rest of me pressed up against her, both of us trembling.

Her breath smelled like meat, like change.

Darren wasn’t there the night it happened, when I was born. But she was.

The real story, the one she saw, the one Grandpa was trying to say out loud finally, it’s that a father carries his oldest daughter out past the house, he carries her out and she’s probably already changing for the first time, into an abomination, but he holds his own wolf back, isn’t going to fight her like that.

This is a job for a man.

He raises the ball-peen hammer once—the rounded head is supposed to be kind—but he isn’t decisive enough, can’t commit to this act with his whole heart, but he has her by the scruff, and she’s on all fours now, is snapping at him, her just-born son screaming on the porch, her twin sister biting those baby-sharp dewclaws off for him once and forever, and for the rest of that night, for the rest of his life, this husband and father and monster is swinging that little ball-peen hammer, trying to connect, his face wet with the effort, the two of them silhouettes against the pale grass, going around and around the house.

We’re werewolves.

This is what we do, this is how we live.

If you want to call it that.

CHAPTER 2 (#u5989fd7d-eb87-5c08-a6c3-b905105a4715)

The Heaven of Werewolves (#u5989fd7d-eb87-5c08-a6c3-b905105a4715)

I vant … to bite … your neck,” the vampire says, tippy-toeing to see himself in the mirror again.

“No, no no no,” the vampire’s uncle says for the third time. “It’s ‘suck your blood.’ That’s what vampires do. They suck your blood.”

“Then what do werewolves do?”

“They buy their sister a reasonable costume, for one,” the vampire’s aunt says, trying to get elbow room in the tight bathroom to adjust her habit.

She’s a nun tonight, all in white.

The vampire’s uncle is in a rubber werewolf mask, CANDYWOLF traced onto his bare hairless chest in blue marker.

This is Florida, where it’s so wet that soft green fuzz grows on the guardrail posts. They only stopped driving away from Arkansas because of the ocean, not the El Camino. The El Camino would have kept going, probably. The vampire is eight, now. His uncle says that’s the perfect age for Halloween, except for all the other ages too.

Halloween is the one night of the year werewolves go to church.

To get there, they have to drive through the edge of town. There’s mummies and zombies and cowboys and pirates up and down the sidewalks.

“They going to church too?” the vampire asks from the backseat.

“Different church,” the vampire’s uncle says.

The vampire’s uncle is in the passenger seat in his mask, and about every third time a princess or a soldier looks over at this big long four-door’d Caprice creeping past, he lunges half out the window, growling and clawing.

“You’re going to get us pulled over,” the vampire’s aunt says.