Such Sharp Teeth

by Rachel Harrison

It might be the only defining quality of my hometown. Persistent mist.

I guess time erases the things you least expect.

Mist curls in all directions; it peels from the night like the skin from ripe fruit.

For some reason I can never fully trust my own experience. I’m always treating myself like an unreliable witness. I offer no empathy, only an endless cycle of interrogation.

On the drive home, Scarlett and I stop for chai lattes at the shiny new Starbucks. We drink them at one of the tables outside, despite the drizzle.

Bad things have a way of severing your life into “before” and “after.” It’s really annoying.

Having a nightmare during a nap seems particularly cruel. Regular sleep, fine. But to be betrayed by a nap? Uncool.

Denial is hard to sustain. It requires constant effort.

We pull up to Ashley’s. Her lawn is a cemetery. There are plastic skeletons everywhere, foam headstones, fake spiderwebs. There’s a giant jack-o’-lantern inflatable, and beside it a friendly ghost.

It’s a sweet autumnal evening with a light cinnamony breeze and a violet sunset.

What else should I do? Go to the library? The only books they’ll have on werewolves are teen romances and horror novels.

I don’t think it’s lost on either of us that he’s waited fifteen years for this. Now that it’s happening, now that I’m here inside this kiss with him, it’s no wonder why it took me so long. This is a game-over kiss.

None of those fantasy nerds covered this on the forums.

Our dynamic, too. It’s not what it was. I don’t have all the power anymore. I’m not in full control. Because I care.

select a dark purple ball. I don’t really love the idea of sticking my fingers in these holes. Who knows the last time these balls were sanitized?

And that’s it, nothing else, nothing cute or clever, because my brain seems to have been swapped with a blobfish.

“Bullshit you don’t have expectations,” I say. “You’re trying to Lady and the Tramp some spaghetti with me.”

And the thing is, women aren’t allowed to be angry. Nobody likes a mad woman. They’re crazy, irrational, obnoxious, shrill.

another thing that women aren’t allowed to be is heartless.

Local news and sitting in the shower. I feel like I’m playing depression bingo.

I want to come across like someone who isn’t in the midst of an existential werewolf crisis. That’s what I’m striving for.

The werewolf thing only enhances all the parts of me that were already broken and wrong. It’s trapped me with the worst of myself. It’s my reckoning.

He rubs my feet. “Right,” he says. “Are you comparing your mother to Charles Manson?” “No, I would never,” I say. “Her vibe is way more Heaven’s Gate.”

He’s sitting right next to me and I miss him.

“Listen, Rory, I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what’s going on with you. But you need to talk to someone. I wish I could be that person, but I’ve kind of got my uterus full.”

“What do you want from me? How would you react if I came to you and said I was a unicorn?”

When you’re anxious, if you name three things you see, three sounds you hear, and then move three parts of your body, it’s supposed to help calm you down. The 3-3-3 rule.

Icicles glisten in the afternoon sun. They weep from the trees, slowly returning to their former state of matter.

I run in circles under her brutal eye, feeling the lunar cycle in my muscles, in my marrow. A tension waxing and waning.

I find the edges of these memories have frayed, gone sepia toned. My life in the city, who I was there, it’s in the past, and I feel surprisingly at peace with this.

Once I stopped thinking about what my life wasn’t going to be, I started to see what it could be.

My strength doesn’t come from the bad things that have happened to me. It defies those things.

I’m so used to being reminded how ugly a place the world can be, I forgot it could be beautiful, too.