Tell The Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

doctrine of signatures, which meant that God had signed every medicinal plant so you could tell what it would cure. Red ones for blood disorders. Yellow for jaundice. Other plants I didn’t even remember the names of, with roots shaped like hemorrhoids or kidneys or the heart. Finn said it was all nonsense but that it was a nice idea. Nice to imagine someone signing their name to the world.

Things you’d never even seen with Finn could remind you of him, because he was the one person you’d want to show. “Look at that,” you’d want to say, because you knew he would find a way to think it was wonderful. To make you feel like the most observant person in the world for spotting it.

I thought it was good to test yourself sometimes. It was good to see how much you could take.

And once I started, there was no way of stopping. Everything that had been squashed down and pressed into a hard tight ball in the center of my heart came undone. I stood there, shaking and heaving on Madison Avenue in front of Toby, waiting for him to run away or shove me into a taxi, but he didn’t. He stepped in, put his long arms around me, and leaned his head on my shoulder. We stood there under that awning until I could feel that he was crying too. The click of Toby’s mint against his teeth, and the high squeal of car brakes, and the rain plinking on the canvas over our heads all joined with our low deep sobs to make a kind of music that afternoon. It turned the whole city into a chorus of our sadness, and after a while it almost stopped feeling bad and turned into something else. It started to feel like relief.

“Don’t you know? That’s the secret. If you always make sure you’re exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won’t care if you die tomorrow.” “That doesn’t make any sense. If you were so happy, then you’d want to stay alive, wouldn’t you? You’d want to be alive forever, so you could keep being happy.” I reached over and tapped my ash into a pretty pottery dish that Toby was using for an ashtray. “No, no. It’s the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven’t done everything they want to do. They think they haven’t had enough time. They feel like they’ve been shortchanged.”

The sun kept on with its slipping away, and I thought how many small good things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something terrible.

I didn’t think I was a violent person, but right then something dangerous seemed to be waking up. Some hard dark sleeping thing from deep in my belly had opened one eye.

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn’t like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn’t be a mother and it was likely you wouldn’t become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You’d become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you’d have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.

I knew the way lost hopes could be dangerous, how they could turn a person into someone they never thought they’d be.

That was how one person’s story ended.

I used to think maybe I wanted to become a falconer, and now I’m sure of it, because I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

Her tears tell the story of what she knows. That the past, present, and future are just one thing. That there’s nowhere to go from here. Home is home is home.

Everyone needs to think they have secrets.