Mongrels

by Stephen Graham Jones

Every boy who never had a dad, he comes to worship his uncle.

none of Grandpa’s stories were ever lies. I know that now. They were just true in a different way.

She wanted me to be the one who got to have a normal life, in town.

Texas was doing everything it could to keep us here. Not because it wanted us to find work, to make lives. It was because it wanted to eat us.

Ouch

You can always get one more bite in. Remember that.”

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

bookwolf,

Oh I’m taking this!

He was just standing there, his shoulders rounder than usual. It made me realize that he wasn’t a giant.

That moment when a kid realizes the person they’ve worshipped is just a person.

We never go to college, hardly ever even finish high school. A good game show, though, if you listen right, you can get an education for free. It’s stealing back what you had stole from you in the first place.

I don’t think we’re talking about werewolves anymore.

A book, though. Every time he caught me with one of those, he’d always ask what that book could tell me that he didn’t already know?

Everything’s a trade-off when you’re a werewolf. It’s like the world wants us to be monsters. Like it won’t let us live the way normal citizens do.

The wolf, it always claws its way to the surface.

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

No matter how hard I scratched, though, the wolf wouldn’t surface.

“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.”

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