When the Wolf Comes Home

by Nat Cassidy

bad he does improv.” “You do improv.” “Girls that do improv are cool. Guys that do improv are … the opposite of that.”

Fucking grief. Fucking stupid, unpredictable, illogical, unhelpful grief.

Somewhere in the soup of its consciousness, it knows the song is called “More Than a Feeling.” The wolf might not have been able to remember this—its primal instincts were far more overpowering, leaving less room for thought. But this new shape, with all its many inputs, offers a sharpness … even though something internal keeps begging to stay looking at the dead woman’s fear-stamped eyes.

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. It’s like money laundering but for slaughter.

It’s unnatural. Surreal. Like a dream. Only, she realizes, this is reality; it’s her past that was the fantasy. Her life-that-was, full of sounds and feelings and sensations. Full of people she cared about, people who cared about her. Full of promise, of joy. That was the dream. She’s awake now, in the cold, quiet, numb present. This is all existence will mean from here on out, until the day it’s finally, mercifully over.

you know what? I’m still scared most of the time. I’m just like you.” “You are?” “Oh yeah. I’m always scared of stuff. You get to be a certain age and they stop calling it scared and start calling it anxiety. But it’s all the same. Sometimes I even get so scared I accidentally make the thing I’m scared of come true too.”

For a moment there, she’d thought grief was done with her, at least for today. No such luck; the tears were just waiting, right behind her eyes, to begin their assault anew.

Nearly half his life now, but he’ll never forget those days in the immediate aftermath. 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. That desperation for one more minute together. One more second. Even just the sound of their voice.

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.

The boy has just begun to see his father as a human being. There will be plenty of time for the man to show his true colors again, fuck everything up, get mad, get impatient, get self-pitying. If he truly is a monster, monsters don’t change. But sometimes fathers do. Right? Sometimes?

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?