Tell The Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

From the way the room was decorated, someone who didn’t know anything about Greta would think a nice little girl lived there.

Greta knows that for me there are no good parties. I’m okay with one or two people, but more than that and I turn into a naked mole rat. That’s what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth.

my father’s Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits cassette. All my parents’ music came from greatest hits albums. It was like the thought of getting even one bum track was too much for them to handle.

AZT, which was apparently a drug that helped people survive with AIDS. I sat back down, waiting to hear what he had to say, and when I did I couldn’t get up again. The FDA had just approved it, he said. The drug would be available to the public within six months.

March, 1987

I understood how just about anything in the world could remind you of Finn. Trains, or New York City, or plants, or books, or soft sweet black-and-white cookies, or some guy in Central Park playing a polka on the harmonica and the violin at the same time. Things you’d never even seen with Finn could remind you of him, because he was the one person you’d want to show.

I didn’t know if you could catch AIDS from tears, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t afraid of things like that anymore.

all the jealousy and envy and shame we carried was our own kind of sickness. As much a disease as Toby and Finn’s AIDS.