Tell The Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

My mother said it was like a cassette tape you could never rewind. But it was hard to remember you couldn’t rewind it while you were listening to it. And so you’d forget and fall into the music and listen and then, without you even knowing it, the tape would suddenly end.

Without Finn, Toby was like a kite with nobody holding the string.

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

I could hear Finn’s beautiful laugh in my ears. “Hm-hm-hm,” his laugh went. Like he’d swallowed the sun.

Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart. And maybe that’s what it meant. Tell the Wolves I’m Home. Maybe Finn understood everything, as usual. You may as well tell them where you live, because they’ll find you anyway. They always do.

That 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.