When the Wolf Comes Home

by Nat Cassidy

More than that, this conversation is doing Jess a world of good. This companionship. This distraction. It’s allowing her to forget about the static that’s been buzzing inside her skull for the past several days. Margie wouldn’t know this, but there’s a reason Jess has dads on the brain right now. Hers was just found dead a little over a week ago, and she still has no goddamn idea how to feel about it. Fuckin’ dads ruin everything.

It’s a little kid. Two huge, yellow, bigheaded birds follow the kid, pecking and cawing. The kid bats at them in a distinctly little-kid way, begging them to stop. Jess rushes forward, whipping at the birds with the blanket from her shoulders. They squawk at her, and for a second, Jess thinks she sees what looks like human teeth in their clown-orange beaks. Then, thankfully, they disappear back into the bushes.

Things are gonna be okay. Looking at the diner, though, one more unbidden thought pops into her head. That old nonsense graffiti that had bothered her for weeks. NO ONE WILL BE SPARED WHEN This time, some random synapse or other completes the fragment for her. Still nonsense, but somehow fitting. A dubious gift from her overheated brain. No one will be spared when the wolf comes home.

“You wanna know the real reason I need it?” He nods. “Because improv is scary. Really, really scary. When I first started doing it, I was terrified. I would get this awful feeling. What if I can’t think of anything? What if my words don’t come out right? What if I’m not funny like everyone else? I’d feel it in my stomach, and I’d think, There’s no way I can go onstage and do anything. But then? I’d go onstage and do something. And the more I did it, the less scary it became. It helps remind me I can be brave.” “I hate being scared,” he says. He doesn’t seem skeptical anymore. He seems grateful that an adult is talking to him like this—maybe for the first time in his life. “I know it, kiddo. I don’t like it either. And 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.” So many examples she could share. All the ways fear has shaped her life. Fear of rejection. Fear of failure. Fear of not being lovable. Fear of not being enough. The shitty situations she’s accepted because that’s less scary than doing something about it. Call it what you want; it’s all just the skeletal shadow of tree branches on the wall. Fear is fear is fear when it’s slithering in the dark.

“He’s gotta disappear,” she says to the boy. Santos’s and Jess’s voices begin to tumble over each other. “Jess, don’t you dare. Jess! I’m warning you, I will fire, you have three seconds, two—” “Get him out of here, make it like he was never here, like he never found us, it’s the only way—” The crescendo of their overlap is interrupted by the boy’s screaming. He throws his hands over his ears, squeezes his eyes shut. “You’re not here!” he shouts. “You were never here! You’re not real and you never were!” And then it happens.