When the Wolf Comes Home

by Nat Cassidy

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

“Shock,” she says. “Just a little shock. That’s all. I’m okay. Shock-a-doodle-doo. Boom-shock-alocka.”

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

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.

Cookie isn’t above being petty. She didn’t earn her nickname in high school because she was sweet. She was called Cookie for the ways she crushed her enemies into little bits, after which her friends would remark, “That’s the way Cookie crumbles you.”

What’s the point of running for your life if you’re just gonna let something else kill you?

Stop thinking about death. Stop feeling its oppressive unfairness, its finality, its unpredictability.

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.

She has her first clear thought in hours. I don’t know if I even want to survive this anymore.

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.

Nobody hides like tears, she realizes. We could learn a thing or two from them.

For now, a strange sort of peace settles around her heart. The least peaceful peace she’s ever known. This must be what air feels like in the middle of a hurricane: acceptance of what’s to come.

Fear has come upon her again, waiting for the dark and the quiet, as it so often did when she was young. Not just fear—the Fear. So overwhelming it deserves its proper status.

Everything she’s ever feared, waiting for its big reveal. Death itself.

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.

There’s no numbing the already numb.

How do you live with what you’ve seen? With what you’ve done? How do you protect?

“Haven’t you noticed by now? Just because something’s impossible doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

Our fears are too big. Too shapeless. They’re not as simple as a monster in the dark. Insecurity. Anxiety. Trauma. Career. Social pressures. Money. Love. Politics. Identity. Health. Hypochondria. How do you fight those fears? How do you—

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? 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.