Lindsey
- Jun 30, 2021
- 2 min read
by Stephanie Yu
The morning after our sleepover, Lindsey and I woke up as wolves. It had been a lifelong dream of hers and I could tell she was finally happy. As a human, she had spent recess howling and running across the soccer field. And I would go after her, floppy like a puppy in her wake.
The first few hours, we relished the new scents and smells in her backyard. We liked rubbing our noses into soft mosses, into each other’s fur. We liked how we sneezed with our whole bodies. We liked pumping our powerful hind legs into the dirt as we ran from one end to the next.
But when the sun went down, I felt a strange tug.
“I need to head home,” I said.
“There is no ‘home’ anymore,” she responded, not looking up. She was digging up a root that looked like a femur.
My mom would have dinner waiting. Pork dumplings with chives. Lindsey’s mom never had dinner waiting. She was always away at physical therapy after her accident. Their house had a feral scent. Filled with gerbils and chinchillas and a fat hamster that never moved.
Lindsey’s little brother. They ate corn kernels in their canning liquid from styrofoam bowls.
“This is a game,” I said. “I’m done playing now.”
“Suit yourself,” she replied. “I’m staying.”
“Don’t be a nincompoop,” I said. It was a word we had learned from the TV.
Lindsey turned her tail up at me as she trudged off into the tangle of trees beyond her house. It was a very insulting display in wolf language that made me want to lunge at her furry white throat.
At home, I sat upright with my family around the table. My tongue lolled out, panting. All that running had worked up a savage appetite. My mom served dumplings in black vinegar, my favorite. But when I began to eat, something about them tasted dead and rotten inside my mouth.
In the woods, a heart stopped beating in Lindsey’s jaws. The blood was warm on her snout. The ground felt cool and pleasant to her paws. Her lungs worked fiercely as she took off, running deeper into the dark.
Curled up in my bed, I thought of her. Chasing the wind, drinking the air, finding her kin. I gnawed at my own foot just to feel something else.
Stephanie Yu lives and writes in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Longleaf Review, Phoebe Journal, X-R-A-Y, and has been selected for Wigleaf Top 50. You can find her @stfu_stephanie.
