Origin Story

“Never bite back.” That’s what all the parenting websites tell you. You will frighten and confuse the child. You will teach that violence should be met with violence, tit for tat. 

Karen had done the reading; she’d even made notes. Yet when her son bit her forearm during one of his tantrums, she crouched, took firm hold of his flailing arm, and bit him halfway between wrist and elbow. “Wystan, if you bite Mommy, Mommy will bite you,” she said. 

He bit her again. She bit him back. 

They had about three more rounds of this, leaving marks on each other’s arms like parentheses rendered in little red stitches, before he gave up: not just in that moment, but over the weeks that followed, it appeared he’d given up the behavior entirely. Such a relief. Biting had become a big problem with Wystan, never mind the fact that he was, at four, too old for this particular form of acting out. He’d already been expelled from one preschool, and he’d been stamping on thin ice at his current one, with several parents having already complained about teeth imprints left in their children. “If he ever pierces the skin,” the preschool director had said, “my hands are tied.” 

So while Wystan remained “spirited,” as one book termed it, prone to screeching and crying, apt to smack, to throw toys, or to assume what Karen and her husband, Roy, had come to call the “hell-no-I-won’t-go” weighted floppiness only to suddenly revive and pull hair and kick, he did not bite. Once, after Karen forcefully confiscated a Sharpie that Wystan had been using to plow black furrows through the oatmeal plush of the couch, he paused mid-scream to pull forward Karen’s dress and sink his teeth into the fabric like a cartoon Viking attacking a leg of venison at a feast. Karen felt a surge of affection for her son in that moment: he was clearly doing his best to control himself. She placed her hand on the boy’s blonde head, and the folds of cloth dropped out of his mouth as he smiled at her. 

 

Karen awoke to a crashing sound, and her first thought was that someone had broken into the house and was ransacking it. Furniture thudding against walls, something smashing, a percussive cascade of objects hitting the floor—all coming from … not downstairs, but from down the hall. She didn’t stop to wake Roy, still tethered to the depths of sleep by exhaustion. She ran to her son’s bedroom and flung open the door. 

Wystan’s bookshelf had been tipped over, and his lighthouse lamp lay shattered on the floor as if broken by some tremendous wave. His bed was empty. In the glow of the nightlight, in the midst of the fallen books and toys near the closet, Karen saw movement and heard rustling. “Wystan! What are you …” She stepped forward, then froze. 

A dark figure on all fours was shredding books, tearing pages from the spines with its teeth and paws. To Karen, it looked to be a medium-sized dog. Pointed ears. Thick fur. At the sound of her fumbling for the light switch, the animal looked up, its eyes two flashes of phosphorescent green. It made a low growl, and crouched as if to spring on her. Suddenly, it sniffed the air, then returned to ripping. Karen barely moved as she scanned the room, under the bed, the closet, the jumbled chaos on the floor. In the loudest whisper she could manage, she said, “Wystan, sweetie, where are you? Mommy’s here.” 

The animal had drawn closer and was growling again. Its teeth, now fully bared, slowly parted, almost seeming to grow larger—Karen fled. She yanked the door shut with a backwards lunge that nearly knocked Roy over. Through the warmth of his chest, he radiated adrenaline and alarm. 

The door began to thump. “Don’t let it out!” Karen said. Roy held the doorknob while she ran through the house calling her son’s name, upstairs then down to the basement and back up again. She found Roy standing in the open doorway of their son’s bedroom. 

The animal was gone. Wystan lay curled up, naked, profoundly asleep in the corner on a heap of tangled sheets, with part of a book hanging from his mouth. 

 

It was not a dog they’d seen that night, but a wolf. And it was not a wolf exactly, it was Wystan. There could be no denying it, however much they wanted to attribute what they’d seen to their own fatigue-induced misperceptions. Over the next month, the animal reappeared in Wystan’s room at night, and Wystan disappeared, despite the new grates on the windows, and the sliding bolt they’d installed on the door. 

One afternoon, Karen and Wystan were in the forest a few minutes’ drive from their house. They often went there: Karen had read that interacting with nature had a soothing effect on high-strung children. Wystan was walking some distance behind her, lobbing pinecones at trees and speeding them on with jet-engine sounds. He went silent, and as if in benediction of the respite, a rabbit crept-hopped onto the path up ahead. “Wystan, look!” Karen said softly. But when she turned, behind her was only a little wolf, gray and grinning. The wolf darted past her and ran the rabbit down, clamping jaws on it and flinging it around like a brown fur beanbag before disappearing into the bushes. Karen found Wystan hours later. He was near the bank of a stream, bloodied, sucking his thumb in a daze. 

Up until this daylight transformation, Karen and Roy had thought that the wolf would only come at night. They were thankful that Wystan had never turned while he was at preschool—that certainly would have tied the director’s hands. Tied her hands, her feet, too, and thrown her in the river.

They took their son to their pediatrician, Dr. Conliffe. When Karen was booking the appointment, the receptionist asked the reason for the visit. “I think he might be having a severe allergic reaction,” she said. She’d had to say something. Lately, reality had been rippling underfoot. She wondered if she also should have been booking meetings with an exorcist, a psychiatrist, a documentary crew?

And yet the pediatrician was quite calm. After examining Wystan and asking them a series of questions, she said, “Yes, I’d say this sounds like lycanthropy. He’s definitely on the spectrum.” 

“On the—? Wystan, please be quiet. Mommy needs to talk to the doctor.” The boy had discovered a basket of blocks in the corner of the examination room, and was now smashing them together in accompaniment to “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

“…of werewolf. Or bearnwolf, since he’s in infancy.” Dr. Conliffe tapped her pen against the counter.

“…WENT UP THE WATER SPOUT!”

“Shh, Wystan!” Karen said, too loudly: he would only get louder.

“… although you really don’t find that many cases of adult onset.”

“…DOWN CAME THE RAIN …” 

“Don’t hit Daddy with the blocks, Wystan,” Roy said, one hand shielding his face. 

“…but I’d like to run some tests, just to be sure. It’s kind of a fashionable diagnosis these days.”

Roy shook his head. “I’ve never heard of it. I mean, I’ve heard of it …” 

“And don’t go alarming yourselves with what’s on the internet,” Dr. Conliffe said. “It’s full of misinformation. Old wives’ tales. There’s treatment available. I’ll walk you through it.” 

 

The doctors did not shoot Wystan through the heart with silver bullets; they medicated him. 

Blue pills, twice daily on a full stomach. The drug was called Aconitem after Aconitum, the Latin name for wolfsbane. Only traces of the plant were present in the drug—Roy Googled this, notwithstanding Dr. Conliffe’s warning—and Karen said it made her think of her shampoos’ claims to being made of hibiscus or honey or what have you, even though they only contained some atom of these substances. Just shy of make-believe, but you bought it all the same. 

The Aconitem needed a few weeks to take effect, so in the meantime, Wystan was placed on a closed ward at the hospital. Karen attended visiting hours and brought her laptop with her while Roy was at the office. “It’s not a good idea for me to be taking time off right now,” Roy said, and Karen agreed. Aconitem was newly developed and very expensive. They were fighting their insurance company to cover it. 

“You’ll just have to persuade them,” Roy added. Karen wrote grant proposals for a living, but she didn’t see how that put her in charge. She said she’d look into picking up more freelance work to help with the cash flow. 

While Wystan was more likely to transform at night, there seemed to be no connection to the moon or its phases, no predictable triggers. When Karen finally did witness Wystan’s transformation, it was under the fluorescent lighting of the hospital’s glassed-in observation room, and it was not what she had expected—that he would drop to all fours, that parts of his body would bulge, stretch, and sprout fur like a time-lapse film of yoghurt moldering in a fridge. Instead, he kind of shimmered, and she was not really sure what she was looking at. When she found her focus, the boy was gone and the wolf was there. “Even when you’re watching a slow-motion film of it,” one doctor explained, “your brain resists processing the information, and your eye transmits a message of blurriness.” 

The doctor was young, with a movie-star smile. “It’s pretty cool, actually,” he said. He kept on smiling right up until the point the wolf hurled itself at the glass and cracked it. 

 

Several months passed with Wystan under treatment, and he stopped turning into a wolf. Instead, he turned into a different boy. So it seemed. He was no longer exasperating and defiant. He was listless and often cranky, but his behavior was far more manageable. His only lingering trace of aggression was a ravenous hunger. Karen fed him several times a day and made sure each meal contained some generous portion of animal protein, as they’d been advised. Also following advice, Wystan was staying at home with Karen, even though he preferred to spend most of his waking hours watching cartoons. So much screen time wasn’t ideal, but it appeared to be the only way to engage his interest—to see him smile! To see some light in his eyes, even if it was only the reflected brightness of animated figures on a screen. He would not play with his cars, his trains, his action figures. Take him outside and he would just lie down, with no wish to kick a ball or dig in the sand. He would not do crafts. One time Karen dressed him in a smock and propped him in front of a pallet she had dolloped with paint—high-quality acrylics, glistening like candy-colored snails. He sat, stared, and then smeared all the colors together to make a grayish brown. Slowly, he covered one page after another with overlapping brown stripes. 

“Tell Mommy about this picture.” Karen knew you weren’t supposed to phrase the question as What’s that supposed to be? 

“It’s a picture.”

“Yes, but can you tell me what’s going on in the picture? Wystan? Can you look at Mommy and talk to her?”

“It’s brown.” 

“I like the pattern, the textures. It looks a bit like fur. So what are those stripes? Is that a cage? It looks like—”

Wystan shoved against the table and pushed back his chair, causing the water glass to topple and flood the paintings. He pressed his palms into the murky puddle. When he raised his hands, little rivulets of paint bled down his wrists, disappearing into the cuffs of his smock. 

Karen put one of the salvaged brown paintings up on the fridge, although later, she took it down. Every time she looked at it, she felt something like sorrow. But really, it was closer to rage. 

 

“It’s not your fault,” Roy said. 

“Right. I know it’s not my fault, but it’s still a question of cause,” Karen said. They sat at their kitchen table, drinking beer on a Friday evening. Such leisurely rituals were possible now. They had been talking about the latest speculation in the scientific community regarding lycanthropy: some researchers linked it to a nascent gene, possibility activated in utero by environmental factors. “I thought I was doing everything right. Pre-natal vitamins, healthy diet. No alcohol, no caffeine. Exercise, but not too much exercise. No lunch meat. No Tylenol, no Nyquil, no Retinol. No BPAs.” Karen and Roy had already been through different versions of this conversation, dating back to Wystan’s implacable colic. In those early days, all three of them had done a lot of crying and very little sleeping. Karen and Roy had made many bitter jokes about the olden times when such children would have been left exposed on a rock. Those jokes gradually gave way to running gags about selling Wystan to a sweatshop as he passed through his “terrorist twos” and “threenager” years. 

“It’s nothing we could have prevented,” Roy said. The beer made a gentle sloshing sound as he tipped back his bottle to drink. Outside, on the lawn, fireflies drifted like cinders. 

They knew that contrary to popular belief, infection did not occur through a werewolf attack. At least, contact with bodily fluids didn’t appear to play a role, although werewolf-induced wounds could be severe and resist healing—the research was maddeningly murky. “It’s not like some supercharged form of rabies,” Dr. Conliffe had said, during one of their numerous office visits. “It’s more complicated than that. It’s in their DNA. That seems to be the case.” One controversial theory had it that children evolved into werewolves because of maternal ambivalence; that it was a mutation brought on by a “profound yet unfulfilled wish for sincere attention and consistent validation.” The author who had put forward this theory had been widely discredited as a crank with false medical credentials, yet the theory had persistent traction in certain circles. 

“Blame the mother, blame the mother. It’s so reductive,” Roy said. “Like the father doesn’t even exist.”

“Yeah, what about all those lousy fathers out there?” Karen said. “Blame everybody!” 

“I’m sure they’re doing the best they can,” Roy said. As he went to the fridge for another beer, Karen wondered who exactly was doing “their” best. And why that even mattered. She was familiar with the concept of “the good enough mother”: did “good enough” allow for yelling? How about the occasional spanking? Did it absolve a mother of resentment? She wished some invisible jury foreman could just finally read the verdict. 

 

The doctors could give no clear prognosis. For the foreseeable future—and perhaps for his entire life—Wystan would have to be on medication. “We’re keeping the wolf at bay,” Dr. Conliffe said, without smiling. She was drawing blood from Wystan’s arm while the boy observed, silent and still, pupils widening as the vial attached to the needle filled red. 

On the drive home, Karen said, “It’s usually ‘Wolves at bay,’ isn’t it? Wolves plural?” They were driving past a forest—the same forest where Wystan had his first daylight transformation. The scrolling sameness of the trees reminded Karen of the cheap cartoons she used to watch with recycled frames, every chase scene filled with déjà vu. 

“Same thing, really,” Roy said. He gave a quick glance to the rearview mirror to check on Wystan, who was now asleep. Earlier, they’d planned to have a picnic as a treat after the doctor’s appointment, but Wystan wouldn’t move from his car seat. So he’d eaten his lunch there, and now the whole car smelled like beef and ketchup. 

The wolves at bay. Karen imagined a pack of wolves, running along a beach, gray sand under a gray sky. Bay of wolves. And then she began to play a game with herself, making a list in rapid succession: Wolf at the door. Crying wolf. Howling like a wolf. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Wolf down your food. Wolf whistle. Big bad wolf. Lone Wolf. Thrown to the wolves. Pack mentality. Leader of the pack. Cub scouts. Karen almost laughed out loud at the last one. She pictured a little pack of werewolf boys, all dressed in blue and yellow, tearing into a scout leader. Would Wystan do better if he were with others who shared his condition? She wondered. So far, they had avoided support groups, along with any other kind of social interaction. There was danger, and there was pity, and they wanted neither, in any combination. Even before the onset of Wystan’s lycanthropy, playdates had been fraught. Each one of them a countdown to a tantrum, a showdown, a breakage, a breakdown, an embarrassment. 

 

The Aconitem triggered vivid nightmares. Yet another unpleasant side effect—but at least they provided some of the few times when Wystan would have a conversation. He always called for Karen. She would hold him and wait for him to be calm enough to speak. 

“Mommy. My legs and arms fell off. You had to sew them back on but you wouldn’t. They were all rotten. They’re back on now.”

“You’re okay, little man. It was a bad dream. I’ve got you.” 

“It hurts.” 

“What hurts? Please tell me.”

“I want to go home. When can I go home?” 

“I don’t understand your question, sweetie. You’re home now. Do you hurt now?”

“If I’m a good boy, can I go home?” 

“You are a good boy. You’re safe here. We’re doing everything we can to make you better, okay?” 

Sometimes, during these night disturbances he wouldn’t wake up—he would just moan in an octave that seemed much too low for a boy his age. He sustained sounds that were not quite like words. 

“Do you hear that?” Roy said. 

“Yes. I’ve heard him do it before,” Karen said. They lay on their backs in bed, speaking to the ceiling. The digital clock glowed 3:00 a.m.

  “It’s like he’s trying to howl. Do you think?”

“No idea. You have to work in the morning—just put in your earplugs. He’s fine.” 

He wasn’t fine. Karen didn’t think of Wystan so much as talking in the darkness as talking to the darkness. Could she intercept his messages? She wasn’t sure she even wanted to. 

 

As the insurance company continued to stonewall, Roy and Karen began to talk about taking Wystan off the Aconitem. They were draining his college fund, which they’d been building since before his birth, and next, they would drain their savings. But they knew stopping the meds wasn’t a realistic option. Wystan was growing and he would only get bigger, he would not get better. At least, he couldn’t get better on his own. That much they accepted as true. 

In any case, about a year in, the medication stopped working. From time to time, Wystan would flicker into a wolf, and then back into a boy—like a faulty broadcast or an old-fashioned flipbook, slowed down. The week before this began to happen, Karen felt particularly edgy around Wystan, and looking back, she wondered if those flickers had at first appeared so quickly as to be subliminal, or even superimposed: wolf/boy/wolf/boy. And then one night Wystan had a full blown transformation. Roy and Karen woke up to crashing and banging, followed by a long, cadenced looing. 

 

In Dr. Conliffe’s office, Wystan had one block in each hand and held them pressed together as the adults spoke. On the doctor’s recommendation, Karen and Roy had doubled Wystan’s dosage, which only increased his lethargy. The wolf was not held at bay.     

Dr. Conliffe confirmed the bad news. “This was always a possibility,” she said. Reminded them, really. The medical professionals had been clear, in a small-print kind of way, that while a developed tolerance was not inevitable, it was not exactly rare. “We’re going to adjust his meds and explore other options, but in the meantime it’s important to stay away from him when he’s in a lupine state,” she added. The “other options” included possible placement in a long-term treatment facility. “And take this.” She handed them a blue nylon bag imprinted with the Aconitem logo. “It’s a wound kit. I got a bunch of free samples.”

Back in the car, Roy pulled open the bag’s drawstrings. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he said. It contained a packet of Band-Aids, a roll of gauze, a small pair of scissors, and a tube of ointment labelled “Antiseptic Gel.” 

“What, no shower cap?” Karen said. “No shoe polish cloth? Cheap assholes.” From the back seat came a faint clacking. Wystan still had the blocks in his hands, and was tapping them together, like he was a baby. Except that as a baby, he’d never been so subdued. 

“We should watch our language,” Roy said. 

“Can’t have you turning into a little potty mouth, now can we?” Karen said. “Can we, Wystan?” She hadn’t meant to shout that last part. As she burst into tears, Wystan dropped his blocks and crossed his arms over his face, whimpering quietly.  

 

They’d counted on sending Wystan to kindergarten in the fall—a delayed entry, at age six, with a designated classroom aide—but there could be no question of that now. He was officially unfit company for other kids. “Well, it was never going to be easy with this kid, right?” Roy said. With a wistfulness that caught Karen off guard, she remembered the very last time, pre-wolf, that Wystan acted out in public. They’d been at a park where he’d been throwing sand into other kids’ faces over and over despite her reminders, pleas, and threats, and then he began screaming when she dragged him out of the sandpit and away from the park. He struggled so hard to escape her grip, she thought he’d dislocate his arm. She thought she’d dislocate his arm. The adrenaline flood she experienced was like euphoria wrapped in shame. From the strength of his struggle, you’d think she was abducting him. That her grip had the burn of acid. “What is wrong with your child? What is wrong with you?” No one actually said this, but she could hear all the other mothers thinking it as they ceased conversation with one another and looked on. At least now, she had an answer to those questions. Sort of. 

The treatment facility was relatively new, and during the long car ride there, through the city and past the suburbs, Karen constructed a soothing image of their destination. Something charming, ad hoc, with combined shades of academia and Montessori. A Victorian mansion, staffed by gruff but kindly eccentrics. This was not the case, she knew just by the look of the place as it came into sight. It resembled a concrete egg carton with windows, all business despite its bucolic setting—fir trees standing at a distance from the parking lot as if intimidated. And the whole place smelled wrong, Karen thought, inhaling deeply as they approached the front doors: not bad, but somehow neutralized. 

While the family sat in the lobby waiting for Wystan to be processed, three orderlies in white T-shirts passed by, large and stone-faced, like football players or bouncers, later followed by two doctors in lab coats, walking at a pace that did not invite conversation. Karen wondered if the staff members would all pass by again in the same order if she waited long enough. “I don’t like it here,” Wystan said flatly, without looking up from his iPad. Neither Karen nor Roy asked him to elaborate. 

Three other adults sat in the waiting area. Not a couch in sight, just armless individual chairs arranged around a coffee table laden with magazines that no one seemed inclined to read, even for the sake of avoiding eye contact. One woman stood by the service counter, arguing with an administrator through a hole in the glass partition: her daughter, she insisted, was vegan. The facility’s menu lacked appropriate alternatives. 

  “Yes, I understand, ma’am. But don’t you worry. No such thing as a picky eater in this place!” The admin was plump and jolly, with tinge of the officious—much like a shopping-mall Mrs. Claus. 

“She’s not picky. She loves animals.” 

“I’m sure she does! Don’t you worry, now. Please have a seat, and we’ll be with you soon.” 

The mother turned away from the glass with a look of immense fatigue. Karen could imagine an empty room, decorated with cat posters, teddy bears, glass figurines. All ripped and smashed to tatters and splinters. A little girl lycanthrope: now that was unusual. The afflicted were mostly boys. Karen was just working up the momentum to ask the weary mother about it when the admin lady called Wystan’s name. 

Karen approached the window and was handed various forms attached to a clipboard. At the same time, an orderly—a different one—came by with two boys in tow. He directed them to sit on a bench by a far wall while he paused and spoke into a walkie-talkie. The boys appeared to be twins, a bit older than Wystan. One had an eyepatch, and the other had his arm in a cast. Both had fresh suture marks zig-zagging their faces. Karen realized she was staring, and quickly looked away, only to be intercepted by the orderly’s gaze. He stepped close to her and said in a low voice, “They turned on each other.”  

The twins giggled. Wystan raised his head from his screen to glare at them, and the older boys stuck their tongues out in his direction, then pulled their lips back into wide smiles. Wystan grinned in return—it was like a grin: Karen flinched at the thought that he must be out of practice. Then Wystan tipped his head to the ceiling and began howling. 

“Indoor voice, buddy. No! Get down!” Roy said. Wystan had jumped onto the table, scattering magazines; the two other boys were on their feet and howling too. Wystan leapt from chair to chair as Roy tried to catch him. The boys’ first few yelps sounded like jokey imitations of wolves and of each other, but within seconds, it was as if they were lip-syncing a recording of actual animals, ululations overlapping, distorting. All three of the boys began to shimmer. An alarm shrieked, accompanied by the sound of doors slamming shut, and Karen had just enough time to grab the back of Wystan’s hoodie before her vision went misty, then black.

In the next moment Karen and Roy were side by side, propped up on gurneys. A nurse in purple scrubs was tapping Karen’s arm and handing her a cup of juice. 

“What happened?” Karen said. 

The nurse explained that they had been subject to a safety measure: at a moment’s notice, the inmates could be gassed into a stupor. All staff and visitors were equipped with respirators, fitted snugly right inside their nostrils. 

“Why didn’t you tell us? Why weren’t we given respirators?”

“They’re a ‘purchasable option,’ if that’s something you’d like to look into.”

“They’re expensive.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

 

The blazer-clad facility liaison who chatted with Karen and Roy as they walked to Wystan’s room assured them that the facility was “state-of-the-art.” While Wystan would be kept stimulated with educational toys and videos, he would at all times be isolated from the other children (who were in turn isolated from each other) and his primary points of contact would be with health-care professionals. Karen and Roy had thought there might be classes, group activities, even occasional outings—something more along the lines of a traditional boarding school. In the middle of a long corridor lined with doors, the liaison stopped and swiped a keycard. “Here we are!” he said. “Your son appears to have settled in already.”

 They all observed from the doorway. The room, filled with light from a large window, was painted a rosy beige and furnished with a bed and a desk-chair-computer that looked to be all of one piece. Wystan sat at the desk, tapping away at the keyboard. Onscreen, a pixelated figure leapt through a conveyor-belting landscape, vaulting from oversized mushrooms to elevated platforms. “We’ve been working on ways to help with their socialization,” the liaison said. “We’ve had some success with monitored online interactions. Structured, goal-oriented play. Avatars and proxies.” In one corner of the ceiling, a surveillance camera made a discreet, whirring pivot. 

The video-game figure was dodging arrows thrown by a wolf floating on a cloud. Wystan was so deft in his keyboarding that Karen and Roy never got to see what happened when one of the arrows made its mark. 

 

Back in the lobby, Karen could feel Roy watching her as she dug through her purse for a Kleenex. She wasn’t crying anymore, but her nose wouldn’t stop running. As she searched, Roy muttered a speculation that they’d been kept in the dark about the details of Wystan’s care so that they’d be more likely to comply with the treatment. The very expensive treatment, which remained very expensive despite the government subsidy they’d received, thanks to Karen’s grant-writing finesse. 

“Well, we’re not leaving him here,” Karen said. “I don’t trust this place.” 

“We have to at least give it a try.”

“I don’t want to give it a try. We can’t leave him here.”

“No, we can’t. But we have to. What’s the alternative? We can visit him, right?” That’s what the liaison had said. And he’d told them that it was best not to say goodbye, since “It might set him off.” Wystan, that is. They needn’t have worried: eyes locked on his video game, Wystan had all but ignored them, and had shrugged off Karen’s attempt at a hug with an irritated little growl. She didn’t persist. 

 

From the living room window, Karen watched a neighborhood cat traipse across their front lawn. The cat was large and orange, and sometimes still left dead birds on their doorstep. Karen used to feed the cat tuna whenever it came to the door and meowed. She’d cut off all such encouragement around the time of Wystan’s transformations. Now she wished Wystan were here, so she could show him “Fat Kitty,” consequences be damned. In the late afternoon sun, the trees’ shadows stretched onto the road. Karen wondered what Wystan had eaten for dinner, what he would be having for his late snack. He’d been in the facility for several months now; almost a week had passed since she’d last seen him. The visiting hours were restricted, the drive long, and with her current workload, it was hard to squeeze in trips to the facility. She told herself these were the reasons. Each time she had visited Wystan, he’d barely acknowledged her presence, and yet she felt in him a deep, coiled unease, felt it through his very skin when he allowed her to touch him. If I’m a good boy—

Roy’s faint reflection appeared beside hers in the window. “I was thinking we could get a pet,” Karen said, without turning around. The ginger cat flopped down under a shrub and stared back at Karen, then began licking its paw, washing its face. 

“Don’t we already have one?”

“Hilarious. You know, a cat.” Outside, the creature suddenly swiveled its head, then bolted. 

“Yes, we could get a cat. But I think we could do better than that.” Roy circled Karen’s waist with his arms and gently pressed his face against her hair. She leaned her head away. 

“Don’t you think our resources are at the absolute limit?” Karen felt Roy’s arms unbuckle themselves, and she turned to face him. “Even if I can bring in more money. It’s not just the money. It’s too much of a risk.” 

“And so we should only have one like Wystan? I think that’s a risk, too.”

“What exactly are we risking, Roy?” 

“I don’t know. Our happiness?” 

  “Because we’re so incredibly happy now,” Karen said. She could see from Roy’s face that her words tasted as burning-sour to him as they did to her. “Sorry. Sorry,” she said. “I’m just so on edge all the time. It’s like I’ve forgotten how to breathe properly.” 

“I hate bickering like this.”

“So let’s not.” Karen gathered up her coat, her purse, and said, “We need a few things from the store. Milk, eggs. Text me if you think of anything else.” 

 

Karen slept in the car, waiting for the facility to open. Her phone, with the ringer turned down, had buzzed through the night. Karen assumed that Roy knew where she was and was angry with her. He’d be angrier still if he knew what she was about to do. Or maybe he already knew that, too. For the past half hour she’d been watching staff arrive, and now at 9:00 a.m. she crossed the parking lot and walked through the doors herself. 

“I’m discharging my son,” she said to the admin lady, the same lady the vegan-advocating mom had tangled with. A primal intuition whispered through Karen that she’d need to draw upon the deep core of her female self that was immune to bureaucracy. 

After much waiting, argument, and repetitious but tirelessly polite referencing of regulations, procedures, and impossibilities, the admin made a series of calls, produced papers for Karen to sign, and finally released Wystan into Karen’s custody. “As I say, we really don’t recommend this,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to sleep on it? He’s going to be a real handful.”

It took Karen and Wystan twenty minutes to make the short distance from the lobby to her car: he kept slowing down and stopping, like some toy with dying batteries. Karen was tempted to just pick him up and carry him, but he was a heavy boy. A big boy. She was determined not to be provoked. 

“Get into the car please, sweetie, and I’ll buckle you in. Wystan? I need you to get into the car now.” The boy stood by the open car door. Karen gave him a light nudge. He reacted by swatting at her hand and moving farther from the car. 

“Car’s over here, buddy. Wrong direction. Wystan? Get into the car. We can’t go home until you get into the car.”

“No!” He stamped his foot, and his face turned pink. 

Karen felt her own face flush as they continued to argue and she found herself laying hands on him, pushing him and feeling him push back. 

“What, you want to stay here? Why is it so hard for you to just do what I ask? Get into the FUCKING CAR, Wystan!”

“NO!”

He pulled free of her and ran. Karen pelted after him, cursing her choice of high-heeled boots. He was surprisingly fast. Letting her weight fall onto the balls of her feet, she chased him across the parking lot, along the road, and then through the roadside ditch and into the woods. 

Among the tall pines, she slowed to a walk and began calling his name. She’d lost him in the woods before, that morning of his first daylight transformation—she’d searched and searched, and then, for a moment, just a moment, she had stopped searching. She had closed her eyes and stood still, listening to the shush of the wind in the trees, the air rolling over her skin with the softness of powder, and she had let herself feel what it would be like to not ever find him. 

Karen saw the wolf as it leapt upon her, knocking her to the ground. The creature snapped at her and then sunk its teeth into her forearm, raised in defense over her face. The creature’s teeth were like burning nails and it would not let go. Wystan, if you bite Mommy—

Karen tasted blood and fur and dirt when she bit into the wolf’s front leg. She pressed her jaws together as hard as she could but did not—could not—bite deeply. And yet the wolf yelped and released her. Karen lay on the ground, feeling moist breath, cold muzzle, wet tongue upon her wounds. The canine whimpering gave way to a little boy’s sobs. Eventually, she was able to look at him. Despite her torn flesh, she picked Wystan up and carried him, with his arms wrapped around her neck and his legs around her torso, all the way back to the car. 

 

No one at the emergency room wanted to treat her, but at last some intern wearing three pairs of gloves was able to throw a few stitches. “I don’t touch those wounds,” Karen overheard one nurse saying. Everyone wanted to send her to the facility, but Karen refused. She didn’t mention that she’d just come from there. She only told them she’d been bitten by a werewolf, that she’d seen the creature shift shape to a young man right after it attacked her and fled. But that she may have been hallucinating. 

“I’m supposed to file an incident report on this,” the intern said. His tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth as he taped gauze over the sutures. He hadn’t scolded her for driving in her condition, but he did say that she and her son were very lucky—at this Karen laughed, with brief, bitter giddiness. She said nothing about how she’d briefly lost consciousness, and snapped to with the car rumbling along in a shallow ditch. She’d even forgotten to fasten Wystan’s seatbelt. The intern had insisted on examining Wystan, ignoring Karen’s assurance that the blood on him was all hers. He found no bite marks on Wystan—she’d made sure there were none as she’d shakily swabbed him with Wet-Naps outside the hospital. Throughout, Wystan had sucked his thumb with an intensity that bordered on theatrical. Now the intern looked from Karen to Wystan, and then back to Karen. “I’m just going to step out for a few minutes, okay?” 

 

Back at the house, Karen locked Wystan in his room. He was asleep even before she pulled the blankets over him. She marveled, as she always did, at how beautiful he was in repose: long eyelashes, elegant, faintly etched eyebrows, velvet baby doll skin. He was exhausted. She was exhausted, but she still owed Roy a long explanation. A discussion of what she’d done, why she’d done it, and what they would do next.

Roy was waiting for her at the top of the stairs, apparently no longer content to seethe patiently in the living room. 

“I fucked up,” Karen began. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

She turned her head. Through the open bathroom door, she could see herself in the mirror above the sink, shimmering. 

“What do we do?” Roy said. “What do we do!?”

For a few seconds, Roy stood motionless, mouth open, and Karen was afraid that he was too afraid—for himself and for her—to leave her. She wanted to say something, to scream at him, but her mouth was overtaken with a sparkling pain, like a foot fallen asleep now forced into service. And then the moment unstuck and Roy did flee the house, double-timing it down the stairs and out the door. Which he left wide open. Karen, Karen the wolf, ran right through it. 

 

Karen would not be charged for her assault on the woman who’d been out walking her dog, nor would Roy be held to negligence charges. The woman likely would have sustained far worse injury had she not been carrying mace, and had her dog not insisted on standing its ground. If Karen were a rabid animal, she’d have been put down. If she were insane, she’d have been evaluated, then incarcerated. According to public opinion, according to the law, she was neither; she was both. Ultimately, Karen decided that she wanted nothing to do with pills, with doctors, with medical opinion and intervention. She was offered placement on a special, privately sponsored reserve, and she took it. Wystan would go with her. Roy agreed to this, though not easily, not happily. 

“You’ll kill each other,” Roy said.

“No, we won’t.”

“Please don’t do this.”

“How could you handle us both? How could you handle him on your own?” 

“I can’t be apart from you.”

“You already are.”

“I’m right here.” 

“Here for me? Or for me and Wystan? I guess we both know the answer to that question.”

 “Stop snapping at me. Just because you’re—”

 “A werewolf.”

“It doesn’t mean you have to play the part. You don’t have to be so goddamned awful to me.”

“I’m not, and I wish you could see that. If I were in your place, I’d be helping pack the fucking bags.” 

 

Karen and Wystan roamed their patch of the reserve. Their transformations had fallen into synch, and as a mother-child pair, they were compatible, or at least equally matched. They had a rudimentary cottage with spare furnishings: steel beds and chairs, some grubby blankets. Two separate bedrooms, each with a lock and a reinforced door. A small bathroom with a shower. Possessions were kept at a bare minimum because they would only get destroyed. Besides, the founders and benefactors of the reserve believed in the palliative effects of meditation and simplicity. Electric fences divided up the land into discrete territories, each separated by narrow corridors of no-mans-land. Occasionally, at a distance, Karen spotted a lone figure in khakis, although aside from that, she never saw anyone else, wolf or otherwise. If Wystan ever saw anyone, he didn’t mention it. Every three days, at a designated time, Karen and Wystan would have access to a hut at the corner of their territory, which was stocked with food. Soup-kitchen-type odds and ends, Karen thought, that might be cobbled into passable meals. Karen and Wystan often supplemented the supplies with hunting rabbits and squirrels; she worked this out from the messy evidence left by her wolf-self. The hut also had a few supplies for “creative work” (yarn, paper, fabric, paint), perhaps the idea being that they might produce handicrafts for their own amusement or for sale—Karen was not so sure. She thought it all had the feel of an experiment that people were too embarrassed to abandon, even though enthusiasm for it had waned. A well-meaning but half-assed affair, run by moneyed hippies. She didn’t mind. For the first time in many years, she felt free of judgement, expectations, and consequence. 

 

And when I say “she,” understand that I mean “me.” I began this as a story about my little boy, but the maternal ego casts a long shadow, try as we may to be objective, to be selfless. And I wish I were writing this, but this is essentially a work in translation. Not that I’m writing this down in some werewolf-speak, or barking this out to some transcriptionist—no, I am trying to think of how to say this, to translate thought into coherent words that others may touch and see and feel. I have tried to put pen to paper, in the little hut, but as soon as I get there I forget how to hold the pen, I forget how to form the letters. I have memories of writing in that hut, but when I return to the notebook, it’s blank except for a few words that I’ve written before. No one’s taking it, I’m sure of that. No one comes here. I refuse all visitors, even Roy. I think I’m a little more wolf-like each day. Hairier. My fingers are curling inwards. I’m hunched. Time moves along like scenery flowing past a car. 

But Wystan—he’s thriving. Quite the chatterbox, although half the time, I’ll be damned if I can remember what he talks to me about. I just know, in the moment, that I’m very proud of him. Or annoyed at what he’s asking and that he won’t shut up. One or all of those things is true. A while back, I agreed to let him spend extended periods of time off the reserve with his father. It’s only fair. And clearly, it’s been good for him. He has fewer and fewer instances of transformation. We didn’t know it was possible that lycanthropy could recede—it’s kind of news to the medical community—but apparently, it’s been known to happen. Such facts stick to my memory, like burrs in fur.  

Wystan’s talking to me right now. 

“Mom. You don’t have to stay here. I don’t blame you for anything. Why don’t you come home?”

He’s such a lovely boy, my son. His hair has turned a golden brown, and his cheekbones have emerged, lightly fuzzed. I can see that he’s going to be tall like his father. I tell Wystan that he should not have come here so close to nightfall, when I’m more likely to change, but he’s not afraid of me. He never has been. That used to make me angry. 

A big white moon is hanging in a corner of the sky, watching us. If I could find the words to tell Wystan, I would say that the moon has always been a symbol of barrenness, cold and dead. But tonight, I think it looks like a breast full of milk. As a baby, Wystan couldn’t drink enough of my milk, and the more he drank, the more I made. He would cry, and when I went to feed him, milk would spurt from my nipples onto the floor, such abundance. The “letdown” it’s termed, like it’s some disappointment, but it wasn’t: it felt like electricity, like a live current I could share. The moon—she’s alone up there. More like an idea, like a phantom, than a massive celestial body in perpetual orbit around something even bigger than itself. 

  “Want to howl at the moon together?”

Wystan knows I’m just kidding, because howling together even in jest might set us both off, and he’s been doing so well. There is no ironic howling among the werewolves, you see. He asks me one more time to leave with him, and I say no, I won’t. I can’t. Not right now. I ask him to sit with me, out on the fresh grass, in the warm night air, so he can hold my paw/my hand/my paw/my hand until it’s time for me to go back to the cottage and sleep.