When the Wolf Comes Home

by Nat Cassidy

“Because everyone in the comedy scene has daddy issues. It might as well be a rule. And girls with daddy issues know how to party. But guys with daddy issues? They’re just mean.” She gives a disappointed shake of her head. “Fuckin’ dads, Margie. They ruin everything…”

Why didn’t he want me? Why didn’t he stick around? Why didn’t he ever even call? Why was he so okay with cutting me out completely? What is it about me that not even my own father could love? It has to be my fault somehow, doesn’t it?

Conspiracy theories are basically just fairy tales for adults, aren’t they?

When he turns the corner around the side of the apartment complex, he runs straight into a slavering monstrosity that’s at least nine feet tall. It unseams him from groin to gullet, and he dies feeling the guts he always wished he had slide out onto the ground.

(it hasn’t happened yet, but once it happens, it will always be happening and will never not have happened)

The truth is, nowadays, mass shootings are so common they’re more useful to bury attention than gain it. You could basically call any massacre a mass shooting, and within a day or two, most Americans will have digested it and shit it out without so much as a faint aftertaste.

she realizes, this is reality; it’s her past that was the fantasy. Her life-that-was, full of sounds and feelings and sensations.

That grief so keen it made it hard to breathe, as if he himself were the one who’d actually died and was only slowly coming to realize it. That sense of unreality, that shrieking alarm in your head, telling you there’d been a mistake, this wasn’t right, you’re in the wrong reality.

Plus, this act of creation! This conjuring forth of ideas from his head, but at last, in a controlled, satisfying way! It’s bliss. It brings him back to that feeling he got, staring at those first images in his picture book, the ones that captured his imagination: the idea of there being a world of possibility at his fingertips—not to fear but to explore.

There are all kinds of different fears, he’s been learning. Sharp fear—the kind that usually follows hardnoise. That’s the kind of fear that makes you run, that tells you Something is coming and you need to hide. But there’s also soft fear. Soft fear wraps around you like a blanket. It doesn’t make you run, and that makes sense because where would you run to? Soft fear creeps in from everywhere. You don’t even know you’re feeling it sometimes. Until it’s all you can feel.

As talented as children can be when it comes to being afraid, there’s really no comparison to how they love, is there?

Our parents define so many things, she thinks. Love. Hate. Fear. Provider. Abuser. Abandoner. Monster. Mirror. They metamorphose. They mutate. They change. They are fairy tales with inscrutable illustrations.

Just a second of belief. Untainted by experience. Is that possible? To live in this world and not scare yourself to death? To feel turbulence and not imagine the plane going down? To experience hope as a grown-up with the same clarity a child feels terror?

Knowledge of behavior you can’t alter is the heaviest kind of knowledge, isn’t it? Knowing you’re a shape-shifter? It gets hard to remember what shape is really you in the end. Maybe the true horror of the werewolf is that the change is never permanent. Maybe the true beauty of the butterfly is that it is.