Chapter 26 Him/Other
Him/Other
a day, two days, to bear the human brunt
of confession, to watch for fear and see her flinch
like prey and then contain herself, love
like a shield and a restraint. but after that wolfing
comes easily, lost skin and a fractured mind –
she knows – still the rituals, the chapel, the woods
a sacred space and a holy of unholies –
what does it mean for me that she knows? –
the same as any other day or any other loss,
all the colours and the scents of a world changed
and a night spent in sleep and hunger and absence
until the morning sun burns the wolf away
like mist – let me come back let me go home –
And he is human, momentarily, hands rough – cut – bleeding from the impact against the bark of the tree. He fell. No time to catch himself. Not enough legs. Too many hands. But dear God, he has hands again. Bisclavret lifts them to his face, trembling, ecstatic, and then—
the cold shakes free the wolf from the man –
I am just wolf I am just wolf –
unclothed and unremembering of how it feels
to be human – perhaps if I had my clothes
I would remember – abandoned and feral –
I left them at the chapel I must get back to the chapel and
—he opens the door with human fingers, bare feet like a pilgrim’s pale against the stones of the nave.
Nobody comes here. It’s long abandoned, the monks who once sang psalms within its walls long since left for living orders: grass and tree roots have made a home of its paving, and weeds curl around the font.
But there, near the old altar – now chipped and puddled with rain from the leaking roof – is a dry space, a quiet corner where he keeps his clothes.
There’s hardly a glimmer of moonlight creeping through the overgrown windows, but he can find his way there as easily by touch as by sight.
He crouches to pick up his clothes, and his hands close on nothing.
The carefully folded garments that he left there, where are they?
Perhaps they’ve fallen further back. Perhaps the wind – the draught is fierce – has swept them out of reach.
His fingers twist and shatter into something curled like claws as he scrabbles at the ground, looking for them – no – but once he finds them he’ll be able to settle back into his human skin.
And they must be here. He always leaves them here.
But the wolf is waiting to heave itself out of his skin, to shed him like dead leaves, and he cannot find them, he cannot find them – but they were here.
He always leaves them here. Extravagant though it is, he had a tunic made just so that he could hide it here for the nights when he loses himself suddenly, without warning, so that there is always something to find his way back to. How, then, can there be nothing?
And he is—
falling again
—barely human. Momentarily unmade. He snaps back into his own body with the ricochet of a broken spine locking into place and knows he doesn’t have long before the shift comes again, this time for longer. If he cannot dress, if he cannot find his clothes, he will—
stay like this I cannot stay like this
I need to know that I can always come back
because if not I am nothing I can only
—stagger forward. He gasps and steadies himself.
The clothes are gone. He’s naked beneath the Heavens and his body threatens to dissolve into beast at any moment, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
The chapel that was once a refuge becomes a cage, the damp grey stones imposing enclosure around him when what he craves is space. To run—
—but that is the wolf’s heart in him. Like he didn’t come all the way back this time.
He makes a small, frightened sound in the back of his throat, somewhere between a man’s keening and a hound’s whine, and then—
why does it have to feel so much like being ripped apart
—he is gone and back and gone and back and—
like falling like being unmade
like losing everything all over again
it is too much like despair
the wolf eats my heart from the inside out
consumes everything about me that is real and good and
—his clothes are still gone and he cannot remember how to stay human.
He tries to fix his mind on it, on what it means to feel present in his own skin.
He tries to remember words, to snatch at prayers; he clutches the altar as though Eucharistic stone will bind his skin in place, but the only holy water in this chapel is the rain seeping in, washing away the sacraments and ritual.
There are birds nesting in the walls, mice curled up in the corners, and—
a wolf in front of the altar, shuddering and violent
with the effort of trying not to become
—it has the air of an abandoned thing, that cloying desolation that chokes the surrendered, leaving behind—
despair – that’s it that’s the taste
in the back of my mouth – is a little like bloodlust
and a little like rage.
full of emptiness. made of loss
—nothing to hold him, nothing to keep him real, and in the end—
I slip out of my skin one last time
leave the man crumpled by the altar
invisible and unremarked except to ghosts
but I know he’s there I saw him fall
and I am just wolf and I cannot undo the shattering of my bones
and I cannot repair the sundering of my flesh
I am just wolf even if I remember being something else
—it feels like grief, being wolf – it is so much like grief, so much like loss, so much like kneeling abandoned beside the body of something destroyed—
I am just wolf just grief just wolf just grief
all lost