When the Wolf Comes Home

by Nat Cassidy

Love is a shape-shifting monster, she thinks, dizzy and horrified and exhausted and devastated. A werewolf with a bottomless stomach.

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.

How do you not call forth the things that will devour you and give them teeth? How do you protect? Especially when the danger is you?

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.