Tell The Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

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.

My Dearest Love, I’ve said everything I need to say except this. This one last thing. Please look after June for me. Please promise to take the very best care of my only girl. With so much love my heart might split in two … Finn

I absolutely expected this and it still made me teary

Maybe Finn just wanted to think that his two favorite people might sing and smile and stumble around the city like they were having the time of their lives.

You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches. Did you know that? Can you imagine?”

“You think I don’t know about wrong love, June? You think I don’t understand embarrassing love?”

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

Listen, next weekend, after the play’s all over with, you can come over to my house and we’ll roll you a character. No obligations. We’ll just roll, see what happens. What do you say? I’m pegging you as maybe assassin material.”

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.

“Will you come with me?” I whispered up to her. She closed the window and breathed out onto the glass. With her finger, she wrote, yes into the fog. Without even thinking about it, she’d written it backward, mirror image, so it looked perfect to me.

“Just something I picked up,” I said, grinning, and I realized that Toby was shining through me so strongly then that for a moment I was almost completely invisible.

“Don’t you see? It’s like we’ve known each other all these years. Without even seeing each other. It’s like there’s been this … this ghost relationship between us. You laying out my plectrums on the floor, me buying black-and-white cookies every time I knew you would be coming over. You didn’t know that was me, but it was.”

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.

There are dark black buttons tattooed on my heart. I’ll carry them for the rest of my days.

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.