Grace Elizabeth Butler

 

 

Mom did everything she could to keep my blood from coming, but it came. It came on a Wednesday in June. The moon was in a waning gibbous phase, or waning “give dust,” as little Corey called it, and faded into the blue summer sky like a marble sinking into a pool. I was thirteen.

Mom had pulled out all the family cantrips and more she found off internet forums with names like “Healing Circle Secrets.” She made me drink “witch milk” every Friday night, a muddy brew of shaved fir bark and black trumpet mushrooms. She made me run outside under a new moon whenever one came. She never let me use commercial shampoos or makeup “pumped with hormones” and had me wash my hair with apple vinegar. When I got the first little bumps on my chest that might be boobs, she bought me too-tight sports bras that kept me flat and pinched my skin whenever I bent over. All that, and I still went to the bathroom that Wednesday and found those little red blotches on my watermelon-print panties.

We tried to keep it a secret from Aunt Margaret, but she could smell fresh blood a mile off, spilled from a kill or otherwise. She sniffed my panties right out of the trashcan and ran through the house, waving them over her head like a flag.

“Faith is bled! Faith is bled!” she said in a singsong.

Her voice carried to the backyard and brought the boys to the patio. They jostled each other and kicked at the sliding glass door, cupping their mouths and howling in turn. Smears of dirt and bruises dotted their faces from their rough play. Little Corey patted the glass from the inside, wanting to join in with the big boys. They always scared me when they got worked up, so I shirked into the kitchen.

“Faith, come get your blessing,” Aunt Margaret hollered from her Gaia shrine room.

“She doesn’t want your blessing,” Mom answered in a snarling voice. She stood in the kitchen with me, pretending to ignore all the fuss as she stuck a thermometer into the butt of a big chicken roast.

“Yes, she does,” said Aunt Margaret. She poked her head into the kitchen, and I saw she had smeared some of my blood on her forehead, right above her penciled eyebrows. It looked like old ketchup that someone had left out on paper plate. “A first blood is especially powerful. It’s her blood. She should get in on the blessing.”

Mom threw the thermometer into the sink and pulled off her gloves. We followed Aunt Margaret to her Gaia shrine room. The hovering smoke from the sage incense made my head feel heavy. Aunt Margaret bent before her Gaia, a naked, wooden women with long hair and big breasts that sagged over her belly, and motioned me over. When I knelt, she picked up my watermelon panties and smeared some blood on my forehead. I didn’t get much, since it had crusted too much.

“You have the power of Gaia now,” said Aunt Margaret. She turned to Mom. “She’s going to get her Change soon. She needs to go see the White Wolf.”

Mom tucked her thumbs into her apron and bared her teeth. “If he touches her, I’m going to bite his dick off.”

“He’s the alpha,” said Aunt Margaret. “We have to do it.”

Mom untied her apron and threw it over the statue. “Fuck Gaia,” she said.

 

 

Aunt Margaret made me pick out my best dress, the blue strapless one I had worn to my school’s Valentine’s dance, and sat me on a stepstool in front of the bathroom sink. She circled around me as she dabbed and dotted full makeup on my face from her personal kit. The little brushes felt like feathers as they dusted over my skin and smelled like plastic and baby powder. Aunt Margaret squatted over me and turned my head this way and that, her face scrunched. Once satisfied, she took us out in her Corolla to go see Uncle Daniel. On the drive, I kept opening the visor mirror to make faces, puffing up my apple-red lips and batting my inky eyelashes. The boys followed behind us in Grandpa Gerald’s old pickup, even though we didn’t ask them.

When we pulled up to the Uncle Daniel’s cabin, the boys jumped from the truck bed and ran laps around the trees, shirtless and shoeless and howling up a storm. Aunt Margaret just clutched her car keys and giggled at them. Jesse and Tyler skittered up to the penis statue buried next to the garden gnome. They snickered and pointed like it wasn’t always there. A “phallus,” Uncle Daniel liked to call it, “for virility.” Jesse grabbed Tyler by the head and tried shoving him onto the penis. Tyler elbowed Jesse in the ribs, and they both went down. The rest of the boys rushed into the scuffle, growling and yipping. The screen door on the cabin clattered open, and Uncle Daniel marched down on them, baring his teeth, but making no noise. The boys broke free and scampered off in different directions.

Uncle Daniel turned to me next, the bare teeth now a big grin. White teeth. White hair. White beard. White Wolf.

“Marge,” he said, “Faith. Good to see you girls.” He tussled my hair with a heavy hand. “You’re late, Faith.”

“I am?” I asked.

“You missed the full moon.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said.

“Would have been nice to have another full moon wolf.” He seemed to be talking to Aunt Margaret this time. She shrugged.

“Faith’s a good girl. It’s not something she could help.”

“Suppose not.” He smiled the whole time, but his eyes bulged like they wanted to pop out as us. “Let’s get inside. I’ll consult the runes.”

Uncle Daniel’s cabin always had lots of dead animals in it, hanging off the walls or propped up in corners, their eyes open and their mouths hanging open a little. They always looked surprised to be dead. The cabin had a musty, peppery smell that made my nose itch. I worried I might be getting the Scent. Uncle Daniel led us to his study, where he had a deer head hanging over his rolling chair. The head had a big pair of antlers that reached down towards us like a deformed pair of hands with stubby, grey fingers. Uncle Daniel scooped a handful of runes out of a drawer and tossed them into a wooden bowl on his desk. The runes clacked and skittered around before settling. I later learned they were carved from bison bones. More dead things.

“What do they say?” asked Aunt Margaret. She had never learned Norse.

“The usual stuff,” said Uncle Daniel as he prodded them around. “Looks like she’s good and fertile. The wolf rune is there, so she’s got the gift. She should turn soon.”

“That’s good.” She bobbed her head and clicked her manicured fingers together.

“I’d like to talk to her alone.”

Aunt Margaret hesitated for less than a second before saying, “Of course,” and left me alone with the White Wolf.

“How you feeling, Faith?” he asked.

“Alright,” I said. In truth, my stomach hurt, and I hated the slick feel of the pad Aunt Margaret had given me. He wet his lips, looked me up and down.

“Put your arms up.”

I reached for the ceiling, my arms responding to the alpha’s commands before I could think.

“Turn around.”

I did, and the skirt of my dressed flared, showing my bruised shins.

“Are you wearing a bra?”

I shook my head. My sports bra would show over my strapless dress, so I ditched it.

“You’re becoming pretty. You’ve got some development, too. Are any of our boys sniffing after you?”

“Them? No.” I thought of a pretty boy I saw at my school between periods, who wore a beanie with a skull on it and had long eyelashes like a girl. He smiled at me sometimes. He wasn’t in my pack. He probably didn’t even know about packs. “Boys are stupid,” I said.

“Good.” Uncle Daniel chuckled. “Would have to give them a licking, otherwise. You’ll get your Change soon, Faith. Soon after, you’ll be getting a mate.”

“You?”

He wet his lip again, a little pink worm poking out over his white beard. “Maybe. It is my right. First pick and all that.”

I nodded. Another thing I couldn’t stop. Like getting my blood, these stupid boobs, the Change with a big “C.”

“You hungry?” he asked. “I got some venison going in my slow cooker. Heck, let’s open a bottle of wine and celebrate. You wanna’ try wine, Faith?”

“Sure.” I had sneaked sips of wine before. It didn’t taste bad, but I disliked how it burned my throat.

Uncle Daniel strolled out of the study, stopping to tug my hair when he passed. I heard him say some words to Aunt Margaret in the hall, followed by Aunt Margaret’s high-pitched hyena laugh. Something tapped on the study window. I turned to see Jesse making gaping kissy faces on the glass. He then pressed his naked torso on it and made fart noises by trapping air on his belly. He snorted and laughed. I walked out of the study and past the kitchen, where the adults debated two red wines that would have identical aftertastes of vinegar. Jesse and the other boys followed my steps in the windows, their howls seeping through the log cabin walls.

I went out to the back patio but stopped to pick up a little wolf statue made from painted plaster that was sitting on a table by itself. When I got outside, I sat in a rocking chair on the patio and thumbed the statue. It had its teeth bared, its neck hunched. I flipped it see if it had a penis, but only found more smooth plaster. As I rocked in the chair and felt the hard creases the wolf’s fur, I thought about some of my other cousins, Mabel and Sarah and Tianna. They had left to make babies, and I never saw them anymore. Maybe when I Changed, I would get to see them on the night runs, our new feet pounding the earth in synch.

The boys circled me and pushed my rocking so hard my head banged on the wooden back. I shouted and shoved, then started scratching. They didn’t leave until Uncle Daniel came back to chase them off.

 

 

Aunt Margaret drove me home around ten. I looked for the waning gibbous moon over the road, but it had already left. When we got back, Mom hissed at me to go to bed. I did, but my fan kept me up with its clanging on its hinge. I would wake up, turn it off, start burning, then turn it on again. I felt the wetness of the pad between my legs and worried it would leak into my sheets.

While I struggled around my bed, I thought about the first time I saw the adults Change. I was nine. We had stayed the night at Uncle Daniel’s cabin for a Samhain party. I heard the adults yowling around downstairs and the startling crashes of their beer bottles hitting the floor, so I sneaked out of my room. They had run out to the patio and started stripping. The full moon swam through the sky with two thin clouds trailing it like it was towing them along. The adults lobbed their clothes everywhere, some shirts settling over the hedges. Aunt Margaret’s lacy Victoria’s Secret bra smacked me in the face with its clip. The moonlight washed their naked forms, but they had already turned so hairy, I didn’t see much down there around their legs. No one seemed to notice me but Mom. She turned to me as the pale grey hairs slithered over her face. Her eyes looked weepy as she stared, her irises collecting the moonlight and shining it back at me. She might have yelled at me to go back inside, but her mouth had filled with long wolf canines. She jerked her head and whimpered. Uncle Daniel circled around in his new white coat and howled. The rest joined in, a discordant chorus, then they scampered into the brush. Mom slipped through the branches last, turning back to watch me one last time, her ears flat on her skull, as if warning me not to follow. I didn’t. I knew they had gone out to kill things and have sex.

Done with sweating in my sheets, I slipped out of bed and tip-toed outside. The mosquitoes’ collective buzzing sounded like a stretched-out growl. I walked down the asphalt road, wincing as my bare feet found the pebbles and chipped holes. A car drove up behind me, its headlights blowing up my Wonder Women pajamas, but it rolled by without slowing. I walked until I found a patch of woods, then walked on inside.

As I pushed through the stabbing branches and leaves that trailed over my legs like snakes, I heard a small animal rustle in the brush by me. I stopped, and it stopped. A spot of blue-green light glimmered out of its eye like a jewel from one of Mom’s necklaces. I could smell it, smell the gamey fear that seeped through its sweat. It must have thought I came to hunt, like my family would. A nose twitched in the shadows, scanning me back. I reached, wondering if I would feel a soft snout or a needle prick of teeth, but it hustled off, crashing through the woods with desperate abandon. I pressed on.

I found a spot where the trees had thinned around a log split down its spine. I slipped out of my pajamas and threw them over the log carcass, then shimmied off my panties. They had new blood stains, broken out around the edges of the pad. I stamped them into the wet grass. Gaia could have her blood back. The stars poked around the wavering tree branches like peeping eyes. I stood there, naked, smelling the pregnant dampness of the woods, the mosquitoes on my face, the moss on the fallen tree. No moon outside. I didn’t care. I threw up my arms and prayed to Gaia, let me Change. Don’t make me a wolf that is always running after another. Make me into something without a pack, that can slip through the forest and disappear, like a fish slipped into a pond. Make me into something with no hunger, no burning in the groin, no need for another’s fur to press against mine. Mom always told me you need to give something to get something. As I stood with my arms raised and my eyelids trembling shut, I wondered what else Gaia would want.

 

 

 

 

GRACE ELIZABETH BUTLER earned her BA in Writing at the University of Tampa, while working part-time as a paramedic in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. She has previously had her short fiction published in the literary journals, Veritas and Neon. Her works are primarily concerned with fabulism and magical realism.