Feed Them Silence

by Lee Mandelo

though on the inside, she classified all of their actions under the possessive umbrella of her labor and direction. Her team; her results; her lab; her wolf.

You’re chasing another creature to give you the intimacy you’re craving, a being that can’t reciprocate your desire the way Riya can and has.

Sean slid out of her language-oriented processing to the meditative role of phantom-inside-alien-flesh. Dispersing herself without losing herself, like a solution of oil and vinegar, fatty and stinging on the tongue. Words were for after the feed cut her loose from the rush of being something else.

Fissures she’d been able to smooth over before spread into chasms—as if once Riya peered into her rotten emptied core, past the veneers of competence and charm and concern, those hollow parts were all she could see.

She had no room to be scared for herself with the youngest to watch after. Territory had been bounded on all sides by mowed-down open spaces that rebounded with raucous noise. The waters tasted of metal, and the woods were desolate even before the cold came. No future, none that she or the pack-mother could imagine; nonetheless, they strove toward it.

An unexpected dislocation, far worse than hearing her own voice speaking back to her on her phone’s answering message, smacked her across the face.

Looking forward to her night spent in a silent house and a cold bed made her chest sting. I’ve never had so many people in my life at once, Sean thought longingly—her own private feeling, separating her another step from their unified self.

A terrible, wounded desire to slip into Riya’s skull and observe her emotions, chase her thoughts while she chewed her asparagus, overtook Sean; instead of being locked away from her insides, coasting across the surface in words and deeds, she wished she could reach secretly into the deepest parts of her. Maybe she’d understand her better from there.

She was missing these familial moments, adrift in her own solitary body.

If she were god,

And she—her wolf, herself in the truth of the fray—snarled the rage from her guts and made a suicidal dive for its hanging belly, between its sweeping claws—

If her wife or her team had responded earlier, she thought vindictively, maybe she wouldn’t be driving to the middle of nowhere with a month’s supply of meat. The pack needed her more than the humans in her life. Kate hadn’t been the one to leave her or betray her trust.

Maybe if Riya had been at home, or her team had been willing to communicate with her, she wouldn’t have flung herself at the one creature she felt she could be intimate with, as false as that feeling might be.

Sean couldn’t bear to be seen in mourning,

Late capitalism dictating the precise worth of a life, to be preserved or destroyed, based on the logic of markets.