Mongrels

by Stephen Graham Jones

and then he’d play both parts, growling like a wolf, his shoulders pulled up high, and turning around to bleat in wide-eyed fear, like a sheep.

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’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.”

itching to roam, to fight, to run down his dinner night after night because his knees were going to last forever. Because his teeth would always be strong. Because his skin would never be wax paper. Because fifty-five years old was a lifetime away. Because werewolves, they live forever.

The story was about dewclaws. And none of Grandpa’s stories were ever lies. I know that now. They were just true in a different way. He had been telling me secrets

And now I understood, about Grandpa’s tick. That smooth divot of scar tissue he’d shown me on the back of his arm. It was so I would look at my own arms, someday.

Werewolves that are born, they’re in control of what they are, or they can come to be, at least. They have a chance. If you’re bit, though, then it runs wild through you.

We’re werewolves. This is what we do, this is how we live. If you want to call it that.

But calories aren’t the dangerous part of the french fry. The dangerous part of the french fry is that once you have a taste for them, then, running around in a pasture one night, chasing wild boar or digging up rabbits or whatever—all honest work—you’ll catch that salty scent on the air. If you still had your human mind, you’d know not to chase that scent down. You’d know better. You’re not thinking like that, though.

Because I’m a werewolf. Because I’m part of this family.

and if there are any real answers about werewolves, then it’s a picture of them right there doing that, a picture of them right there trying to find each other.

Billy the Kid was the first werewolf. He was probably even the one who figured out you could bite your own thumb off if you absolutely had to and then go wolf around that next corner, pray that the transformation won’t be counting fingers this time.

Getting a degree would be like I was deciding to trade in my heritage, my blood.

Leave the water to the fish, the trees to the cats. Everything between, it’s ours.

I would have cried, except I’m a werewolf.

“I ate it.” Of all the lies I’ve told, this is the one I always come back to, to listen to again. To watch. It’s the only one that’s ever really been perfect, the only one I didn’t have to hesitate before saying.

I’ve never seen one, but these man-wolves, these moondogs, they’re what the movies are based on. They can’t go the full distance, can’t transform like you can if you were born into it, but they can get half the way there, anyway. The claws, too much hair, the ears and the snout. The teeth. Their body, it’s trying to fight the blood, to keep it down. But the moon, it sings that blood up to the surface like a tide.

With a werewolf, loving and killing, they’re the same act.

half man, half wolf—and they throw pups with some human, then that kid should just be a quarter wolf, right? Wrong. Because the wolf blood, it’s hungry. Even a quarter is enough to really be half.

Getting called a bookwolf,

The biologist’s uncle says this “panhandle” they’re in is really the bottom of Alabama, somebody just drew the lines wrong, but it would cost too much to reprint all the maps and books, and change all the road signs.

He’s the one who finally figured out the real way to recognize a werewolf. They’re the ones who never grow up.

she knew I was a werewolf because of algebra. “Maybe I’m just bad at math,” I told her.

You realize you’re onstage, you dress things up.

If Arkansas is heaven for werewolves, then North Carolina, that’s our hell.

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

She’d been planning on watching my mom grow up normal. She’d been counting on it. And, if not her, me. And all I wanted was to betray her.

they get all their blood drained after they’re dead, then get filled back up with the medical version of antifreeze, their lips and eyes glued shut, their fingernails painted, makeup brushed onto their faces, their new perm hairsprayed so hard it’s like a helmet against the worms. Not that the worms can even get that close anymore. After the airtight casket’s bolted shut, it’s lowered into a concrete box. Dig one of these corpses up ten or twenty years later, and it’ll look just the same. Unless you touch it, need to see the jelly your mom or your brother’s become. It wasn’t always like this, though.

It’s like the world wants us to be monsters. Like it won’t let us live the way normal citizens do.

This bear was twice again as big, and more golden brown. A graham-cracker bear from a nature show.

how you acknowledged the person inside the animal. How you tell them that you see them in there, yes. And you’re sorry it has to be like this.

Army’s the only place that could take our particular kind of stir-crazy. We’re ground troops. We’re meat to feed into the big grinder.

“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.

This one Libby found at a car wash in Augusta. We were living on the Georgia side of the state line, but this car wash was in South Carolina. The plan after the Night of the Bear had been to book it west,

“We’re all bastards,” he said. “Mutts, mongrels. Here’s how it started—how we all started.

Sheep was the wrong word, I was pretty sure. More like Sleeping. Sleeping Wolf.

“If you’re not a beautiful monster, then you’re a villager,”

When you don’t have a future, it’s always right now that means everything.

“Being a werewolf isn’t just teeth and claws,” she said, her lips brushing my ear she was so close, so quiet, “it’s inside. It’s how you look at the world. It’s how the world looks back at you.”

“We don’t all know each other,” Libby 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. Rayford lurched out, his compound

This is how it is with werewolves. Even when they lie, it’s the truth.

And now I knew the truth about myself. I was a murder weapon. I was revenge. I was a burden my aunt and uncle had been carrying around for ten years already, out of obligation to my mom.