When the Wolf Comes Home

by Nat Cassidy

He didn’t even feel the need to sneak out the window anymore. The book was his window now.

“Hey, I sent my HPV to college. Well, I guess technically, it came with me, but still…”

Fucking grief. Fucking stupid, unpredictable, illogical, unhelpful grief. “I’m never doing anything without a podcast to listen to, ever again, that’s for goddamn sure.”

This little meltdown in the bathroom has been a good thing.

She wishes they had a landline or something. If only it were the 1900s.

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

That the wolf always comes home. In fact, sometimes it’s already here.

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.

You get to be a certain age and they stop calling it scared and start calling it anxiety.

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? 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?