History of Wolves

by Emily Fridlund

The cats watched warily from the windowsills.

At the time, I thought about this a lot. I tried rearranging the variables, keeping the constant constant. I wondered what Patra was like at fifteen. I imagined her in high school: shorter than me, even skinnier, better liked. She’d be the kind of girl who had one close friend, someone who moved away when she was twelve and left her disconsolate at first, then sweetly, tragically distant. She’d have really excellent pens and extremely legible handwriting. I imagined myself at the husband’s age, thirty-seven (I’m thirty-seven now: I have a car payment, a PO box), and I made the husband into a child. A belligerent four-year-old with Velcro shoes, a milk moustache, and a temper. I sent Paul into his twenties by himself. I gave him a college degree, maybe a master’s, and I set him loose in the world with his golden hair, with a degree in architecture and maybe an admirable ear for music or foreign languages. I gave Paul time to be a lady-killer for real, to regret his Chinese tattoo, to begin to regret lots of things. You know. To be twenty-six.

Complete strangers said this to me, people I’d met maybe twice or three times—years ago, when I was a little kid—back when my dad had occasionally picked up summer work as a guide. As if they weren’t interchangeable to me, like geese, like birds with their reliably duplicate markings. I marveled that I could seem so particular and durable to them. So distinct.

But Tameka was quieter, lovelier. Mine. She bit her nails off into a pile, saved them in a clear plastic Baggie she squashed into a ball and put in her armpit. Her stash, she called it. Don’t tell, she whispered. Of course I wouldn’t. Of course not.

You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there’s always something wrong. Everywhere you look, there are insects thickening the air, and birds rifling trees, and enormous, heavy leaves dragging down branches. You want to trammel it, wreck it, smash things down. The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters.

It was hard to explain how ingrained a habit it was to pretend I understood what was happening in other people’s lives before explanations were offered.

I heard my mom go inside—a single flap of the tarp—and guilt swooped over me and away, like one of those birds of prey blacking the sun for an instant. Then I was just angry at the dogs, which felt better.

He was wearing his black slippers, I saw, so he was the kind of man who packed slippers for a night in a hotel.

hurtling into harbor at full sail was the greatest of all forms of stillness.

She unclasped her breath the way people do when they’re about to speak, then closed her mouth again,

He was kind to objects. With people he was a little afraid.

So many people, even now, admire privation. They think it sharpens you, the way beauty does, into something that might hurt them. They calculate their own strengths against it, unconsciously, preparing to pity you or fight.

She wanted very badly for me to cavort and pretend, to prove I was unharmed, happy.

Her body was like a pulled wet branch,

There’s nothing to say about happiness, you know?

Later, it would be impossible for me to tell anyone of the happiness of those hours, the exquisite sweetness of sitting there with her asleep beside me on the couch,

After only a few turns, I felt the deep drudgery of having played this game too many times before.

her mouth open wider than it needed to be for breathing.