Mongrels

by Stephen Graham Jones

This is the way werewolf stories go. Never any proof. Just a story that keeps changing, like it’s twisting back on itself, biting its own stomach to chew the poison out.

He said I would think I was getting better at it, being a boyfriend, but that I was going to have to learn not to listen to that kind of bullshit from myself. Just when I thought I’d figured out what made a girlfriend happy, what would make one stay, I would do something wrong again and that would be that. “Something wrong, like, I don’t know, like eating their pet goat?” Libby’d said, without looking over from the game show glowing all our faces light blue.

Just because you’re in nature doesn’t mean you know the encyclopedia of it.

One thing werewolves can’t say is that they’re not supposed to take rides with strangers. Werewolves are the strangers.

“Do werewolves do that, just leave?” I added, when Libby wasn’t answering. Her eyes when she looked up to me, they were ancient and tired and sad and mad all at once. “Men do that,” she said.

People say werewolves are animals, but they’re wrong. We’re so much worse. We’re people, but with claws, with teeth, with lungs that can go for two days, legs that can eat up counties.