When the Wolf Comes Home

by Nat Cassidy

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t have insurance at the moment; is this visit going to deplete her meager bank account? Does it depend on what kind of horrible, lifelong disease she might’ve just given herself?

A slithering, ice-cold thought. Like a leech sliding into her ear. He could bring her back. All it would take is a thought. A little prompting and … That makes her break out in a nauseous sweat. She’s seen enough horror movies to know those sorts of ideas never end well.

That’s how he stumbled across a call from Burt Fallon, seventy-six, a resident of Monroe County. Burt swears he saw the Loch Ness Monster emerge from Munsee Lake. The 911 dispatcher asks him to repeat himself three times, and Burt swears, “It’s the damnedest thing.” He’d been in the kitchen of his lakeside cabin, looking out the window over the sink, and saw “the goddamn Loch Ness Monster come out, plain as day. Nessie herself! And, no, I’m not drunk!”

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