Feed Them Silence

by Lee Mandelo

This wolf can’t consent to being studied by you, which involves a nonconsensual surgical procedure. The presumption you’re making in claiming to report on its real feelings, so you can make a name for yourself, violates its sovereign dignity. It can’t correct you when you put words in its mouth. So, yes, as an ethnographer I fucking disagree with the entire premise.”

The stench of alcohol swab disappeared beneath a rich wash of olfactory input, smell so intense it held texture inside her skull.

The wolves rolled across the loamy forest floor, slobbering on faces and chewing ears and outpouring love. The startling recognition of a specific feeling—plus the cracking stretch of her own heaving rib cage—offered Sean a brief psychic harbor to cast anchor in; she hitched herself onto an immediate drive to name the wolf’s desire, to tie her own desire neatly around it.

Sean smashed against the loss like a concrete wall, her sudden self-isolation triggering a savage, throbbing headache.

What did it mean, to make history? The accomplishment blipped on her radar for a moment before the mountain of work that remained rose overhead.

At the front of the pub, the double doors swung open with a gust of chill air. Riya stood framed in evening lamplight, a jaunty mustard scarf draped across her throat and the right shoulder of her leather jacket. Hands in her pockets, she scanned the room, catching Sean dumbstruck at the figure she cut. And then, she smiled. Cool red lipstick, a handsome flash of teeth, threads of silver shining in the thick waves of her black hair; the golden tinge of the pub lighting made her dark skin glow. Since the grant celebration, neither of them had appeared at one of the other’s work-related gatherings. Sean had to admit, her reception among colleagues had gone stiff without Riya’s steady assistance. A détente appeared to have begun, though Sean couldn’t guess why tonight was the night. She swallowed another mouthful of cider to ease her parched throat while her wife approached the table, unzipping her jacket over a cream shell blouse tucked into high-waisted black jeans. Dahye whistled approvingly and Riya winked in response as she took her seat beside Sean.

“Kate is the real reason we’re here,” Sean said. Riya’s concern for the animal lay self-consciously on her mind. The smelly panting breath of packmates haunted the root of her own tongue, a remnant of the cognitive enormity of sharing in the wolf’s self. “So maybe a toast for her sake, as our window into another world. She’ll be our North Star.”