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All the Better to Taste You

by Marisca Pichette

 

This morning I swallowed the Wolf.

I started with oatmeal — sweetened bitter by fresh maple syrup, sticky all the way down. On top I poured mead inherited from drunken bees bumbling through the windows I always leave open — wide, gaping, hungry.

I finished with the Wolf. He’s quite small now; time and peace have removed his claws, decades of sweetness have rotted out his teeth. An infestation of fleas conjured by my stepsister forced him to shave completely. His final years were pale, bald, shivering as I carried him from room to room.

At the end, all that remained to feed his once-formidable muscles were nightmares. First mine, then his — rousing him gasping at midnight. I brought him cocoa, warm milk with a dash of honey.

At the end, I slept soundly, snuggled in a bed that learned to fit me. I stopped having nightmares years before I swallowed the Wolf whole.

He stirs in my belly now. Treacle-slow, contemplative, tame. He knew today would come before I ever thought to make his end.

---

“You’ll eat me up,” he said the day we met. I wore my white cotton dress, cornflowers embroidered along the hem. He lay in bed under a blanket stitched of lace and grandmother skin.

Then he was large, gray as ashes, eyes algae-green. I’m sorry to say I was scared of him, thin as I was, still within reach of my teenage years. I couldn’t imagine a day when I would be stronger than the Wolf.

“With treats and dreams and moon-blood,” he told me the day I moved into the guest room. One suitcase, a twin bed dressed in faded linens. My hands — naked, cold. Standing there, one hallway away from him, I wondered if I’d made the right choice. I wondered if I’d had any choice to make.

We’d run out of space in my mother’s house. After college, my stepsister had married and brought the Woodsman home. It had never been a mansion, equipped with only enough rooms for a mother and her daughters. The addition of the Woodsman meant the subtraction of someone else.

My mother asked if I would mind moving out, living with our only other relative: the Wolf.

“Don’t let her bite you,” she told me as I packed pads and protein bars into my suitcase.

“It’s he,” I replied, resentful and a little petulant. I knew a little about wolves. My stepsister had known a few in college, though only tangentially. They came more to some families than others, and never before the age of sixty. He was our first, as far as I knew.

“No, it’s she,” my mother huffed. “She was your grandmother, before.”

“That doesn’t matter. Now he’s a wolf.”

She gave me a hand-me-down cardigan and left the room.

---

When I moved in, he cooked for me. Quiche in the morning, martinis at lunch, Bolognese for supper. His table manners gave me my first nightmares, mixed up with cold toes and shifting shadows. I rose each morning exhausted, longing for home. The cottage was too quiet. The Wolf didn’t speak much. He seemed as uninterested in my presence as he was unbothered by it. He spent more time in the garden, while I perused the living room, pulling old photo albums from the bookshelves.

Countless photos of my grandparents, my mother and her siblings growing up in the woods.

No wolves.

At dinner I tried not to watch him, pushing fragments of pepper around the edge of my plate.

“Why did you change?” I asked him at the end of the first week. “Why become a wolf?”

He gulped cider, dribbles drying into sticky patches of fur. “When you get older, you’ll understand.”

In bed I worried I’d never get the chance. Shadows shuddered, floorboards creaked, and I remembered my situation. Wolves are dangerous, even if they were once family.

---

My stepsister brought her new husband to visit. The Wolf was in the backyard, putting golf balls against the woodpile.

“It’s . . . nice?” my stepsister hazarded, the three of us crammed into the tiny kitchen my grandmother had wallpapered one too many times. Spots of mildew marred the skirting board, oxidation colored the drain honey-orange.

The Woodsman wrinkled his nose. “I smell Wolf.”

“My grandfather,” I said. Part explanation, part correction — though exactly what I was correcting, I wasn’t sure.

“Grandmother,” my stepsister said. “Though she’s not human anymore. Hardly part of the family now. She became a wolf, after all.”

The Woodsman scowled. “I’m glad you’re not related. Bad blood like that is hereditary.”

“No wolves in your family?” I asked, pointed. Forester communities were rife with wolves. It was well known. They’d been the first to exhibit the trait, passed it to others.

He made for the door. “I need some air.” A glance at my stepsister, then a sentence tossed over his shoulder as he left: “This place is rank.”

I was angry, though not sure why, then. Sheepish, my stepsister followed her husband.

---

I started learning how to cook, partly as an act of self-preservation. I made popovers for breakfast. The Wolf covered himself in crumbs. I made mimosas for lunch; he drank all the champagne, hardly touched the orange juice. For supper, I rolled chops in savory spices and painted them with honey. This he enjoyed. I prepared it every night, the local butcher’s new favorite customer.

My stepsister visited to tell me she was pregnant.

“Congratulations!” I said — I meant it — and offered her orange juice (we always had extra).

She hugged me. She smelled of lilac and sawdust. “I’m sorry about before. Pine’s just . . . his mother became a wolf, you know.”

“Where is he now?”

She looked at me, confused. “At home.”

“I mean the Wolf.”

“Oh. I don’t know.”

After an awkward pause, filled by the sipping of orange juice and the tinkle of the windchimes, she said, “Where’s . . . him?”

The Wolf didn’t have a name. He didn’t use grandmother’s, of course, and nothing human seemed to suit. Since it was just the two of us in the house, I had no need to use a name. When one of us spoke, it was clear who should stop and listen.

I smiled. My stepsister was trying. But I knew she would never fully understand why I’d come here. I wasn’t sure I understood myself, yet. A year had passed. I hardly had any nightmares now.

“He’s in bed. He’s been ill with a toothache.”

“I have some cream!” She rummaged in her bag and produced a bottle. “It should help.”

After she’d gone, I offered the Wolf the cream and told him what my stepsister had said. He took it in a clawed hand, inspecting the label.

“This will make my teeth fall out. I won’t use it.”

When I tried to take it back, intent on throwing it away, he slipped it into his pocket. “Not yet.”

I asked him what he meant, but he refused to elaborate. He stayed in bed for three more days before pronouncing his toothache healed and returning to the backyard, golf club in hand.

---

My stepsister had three children. They never visited, but wrote letters over the years. When the eldest graduated from college, I attended the party at my mother’s house. The Wolf stayed home.

He was terribly thin, half the size he’d been when I first moved in. He only ate supper now, foregoing the other meals so I was often eating alone. The morning of the party, I caught him applying my stepsister’s cream to his speckled gums.

“You said that would make your teeth fall out!” I said, unable to keep the accusation from my tone.

He nodded. “It will make things easier, in time.”

“What things? Give it to me!”

He held the bottle high, out of my reach. “Distant things. Never mind, now.”

I stormed out of the cottage, my best dress swishing in the May breeze. Face hot, I didn’t want to admit how much I still didn’t understand.

It was a pleasant day for a walk. My temper cooled in the woods, and I arrived at my mother’s house just as the sun crested the trees. The party was in full swing. By the drinks table, my stepsister introduced me to her children for the first time.

“You’re the old lady who lives with the wolf,” said her youngest.

“She’s not old,” said the middle child. “She’s mom’s age.”

“She looks old,” said the youngest.

“That’s what happens when you live with a wolf,” said the graduate.

I smiled and swallowed my champagne. The bubbles tingled all the way down.

When the second child graduated a year later, I didn’t attend the party. I wasn’t invited to the third.

---

The Wolf became frail. He lost all his teeth, feasting on just the sauce from the meat he had once enjoyed. I had to clean him and carry him outside each day. He no longer golfed, but sat in the sun, eyes closed. I trimmed his claws and combed his patchy, matted fur. Years passed quietly. When a parcel arrived from my stepsister, I didn’t want to open it.

“Please,” croaked the Wolf, arms folded in his diminished lap. “It’ll help.”

I took the ax from the woodpile and cut the tape. The box was full of fleas. They leapt forth and before I could scream, they’d covered him, biting. I could no longer see his arms, his lap, his face.

I wrapped him in a towel and rushed to the veterinarian on the other side of the woods. An hour passed in the waiting room, outdated magazines failing to hold my attention. When at last he came out, carried by the white-gloved vet, all his fur had been shaved, his pale skin riddled with itchy red bumps.

“That’ll be $600.”

I paid by card and gathered the Wolf in my arms.

I cursed my stepsister on the drive home. From the car seat, the Wolf chided me.

“She knew what to do. She has cared for wolves before.”

“No, she hasn’t! All she wants is to make us miserable.”

“No,” murmured the Wolf. “For you…” The medication had made him drowsy, and he didn’t finish the sentence. He was silent for the rest of the drive.

---

After the fleas, he aged faster, curling in on himself until he was hardly larger than the chops I used to feed him.

“Are you dying?” I asked, surprised at the tightness in my throat. I never expected to grow to love the Wolf as family, to feel his pain as mine.

“Wolves don’t die,” he said in a voice so soft I had to bend forward to hear. “We simply become less, until the next wolf is ready to grow.”

“Like a seed?”

“Like that.” He coughed. “Syrup tomorrow. And mead.”

I carried him to bed, laid him in a nest of blankets. I retreated to the guest room, though after half a century, I was anything but a guest in this house.

---

In the morning I made oatmeal with maple syrup. I brought up mead from the cellar and set the table before going to rouse the Wolf.

At first I thought he had gone. He was barely the size of a bumblebee.

“What happened?” I gasped, cupping him in my palms.

“Eat,” he wheezed.

I brought him to the kitchen and offered him oatmeal, syrup, mead. He turned his bald head away at each.

“Not me. You.”

Terrified, I gulped down breakfast, chased grains with honeyed wine. Somewhere between bites, I understood at last.

Trembling, I laid down my spoon. I wiped my mouth clean. “What now?”

“Swallow me,” he said. “And I will grow in you.”

“You’ll come back?”

“Not me. You.”

I balanced him on my hand. Closing my eyes, I tipped him into my mouth.

Sweetness bloomed across my tongue, down my throat, into my chest. He settled behind my ribs, pulsing in time with my heart.

The syrup would cushion him, protect him as he unwound completely and retangled into the start of . . . me.

---

A year passes in silence. I make three meals a day and eat alone. All the while, my Wolf grows. He fills my chest, my arms, my legs. My old muscles tighten into knots of wild energy. My white hairs darken gray. A year and a day since I consumed him, I feel my Wolf awake.

My body breaks into a new shape. I gratefully release my name.

I am a Wolf — like my grandfather before me. My blood is clean.

My howl knows no pain.