Mongrels

by Stephen Graham Jones

“He’s not a bad wolf either,” he went on, shaking his head side to side. “That’s the thing. But a good wolf isn’t always a good man. Remember that.”

“Your grandpa,” he said, holding him right there. “One thing I can say about his old ass. He always liked to run his dinner down instead of getting it at the store, didn’t he?”

It feels like whispers. It sounds like smiling. It smells like teeth.

Scraping the passenger side along a guardrail, for the simple reason that steering wheels aren’t designed for monsters that aren’t supposed to exist.

She steps past the bumper, isn’t even all the way out of the road when she’s jerked into the darkness like it’s a giant mouth.

If we went any faster, we were going to outrun our headlights.

I rolled my window up so the Impala could be more of a bullet.

When you’re a kid, facts don’t matter. It’s how hard you believe. How much you wish.

“Always feed a wolf his fill,” the old woman quotes out loud, “lest you wake with your throat in his jaws.”

Except I guess that makes love the actual infection in our blood.

“If you’re not a beautiful monster, then you’re a villager,” he said matter-of-fact, his real attention on bringing his foot down, flattening a city block in slow, crunchy motion.