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.

Maggie Damken

What he did to her in the meadow, only the foxes know.

All through the rest of the afternoon the foxes wait in the tall grass. The sunlight limns each blade with liquid gold and crimson blush. Purple night mushrooms across the sky, swallowing the coneflower and milkweed. Moonlight makes ghosts of the swaying leaves. With the impenetrable dignity of statues, the foxes wait. The black wind rustles the tufts of fur on the tips of their ears. The call of an owl moves through their bodies like a prayer.

The girl lays in the meadow where he left her.

The police do not find her.

Foxes are patient until they are not.

The foxes are not merely foxes. Yes, they have rustic backs and white bellies, long black legs and white puffs at the end of their tails, and eyes as old as Jurassic amber — but that does not mean they are foxes. They have the shape of foxes and the look of foxes but on their faces they wear masks.

Any creature that wears a mask is not limited to what it is perceived to be.

The first masked fox stands and peers down the meadow where the body of the girl still lay. Sometime later — although time matters little to the foxes until they have decided it has run out — a second fox stands, and the pair go walking through the tall brown grass.

The beetles and the flies wanted her, and so they claimed her. Such is the way of nature: in death all things are equal regardless of whether the death is just. Livid bruises clot her throat in thumb-sized prints. Blood speckles the corners of her mouth. Windblown hair scatters across her face. Her left arm, broken, bends back at the elbow. Her right palm opens toward the sky. The foxes know what happened because they watched it happen, but now they see what it means.

The foxes look at each other. In both of their bellies, the weight of their sacred duty unfurls. In both their eyes the light of primal rage simmers with a cold and unforgiving glare.

Somewhere there is a man who does not know that the foxes are coming for him, but they are coming nonetheless.

The foxes are not gods. They do not require homage. They do not receive prayer. They do not grant miracles. They do not fight amongst themselves or select favored humans or cast curses. They are not cruel or petty or jealous. They do not love or despair. They do not laugh. They do not exist to be believed in.

But they are not dissimilar to gods. They can change their shape. They can interact with humankind when they choose. They cannot create beginnings but they can create endings. They are not all-seeing but what they see is always true. They are not all-powerful but they do have power. They are not benevolent but they are not the opposite: the foxes are beyond debates of good and evil. They concern themselves only with what is fair.

Like all that which is holy, the justice of foxes exceeds mortal understanding. It does not seek mortal approval.

The foxes find him. He lives in a white house at the edge of a wood full of thin birches and sweet maples. Coils of smoke rise from the chimney into a sky as blue as the inside of a flame.

From behind the line of ancient trees, the foxes wait and watch. Inside, two young girls set the table for dinner and a woman opens the oven door. When the foxes make their decision, they remove their masks. Swaths of shadows roil across their faces like black mist on a lake, with rows and rows of tiny teeth that glimmer like stars. They roar back their heads and open the vicious spiral of their true mouths.

And then the foxes do what foxes do.

MAGGIE DAMKEN is a librarian-in-training and an emerging writer whose work has been previously published by Strange Horizons, Cease Cows, Breadcrumbs Magazine, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, and others.

Hilary Gan

I have just passed Picacho Peak along Interstate 10 on the way home to meet Shane for dinner, Tucson spread out before me in the dusk, when the sun grows so bright that the clouds turn black like an old film negative.

When I come to, I am picking glass out of my neck. My car has stopped halfway into the trunk of another car and all around me I hear the keening of half-naked humans like the screams of snared rabbits, bleeding from their burns, kneeling in the desert, pebbles sticking in their naked knees as black rain falls, hot and steaming onto our ironed bodies. I am keening, too, and I don’t even notice until I take a breath that tastes like metal on fire and the sound stops.

I smell my own skin burnt in the pattern of the small white flowers on my button-down shirt, flowers like scarlet tattoos over my breasts and down the line of my torso. I am saved where the shirt was blue, though the shirt itself is falling away in sticky threads like spiderwebs. I prefer the smell of my own charred being to the acknowledgement of the dead and dying spread before me.

This is my city and I know where the center is, where the lance was loosed, but I do not let myself think of it. I walk, for what else is there to do but keep moving forward? I hold the morningstars of my arms away from the forget-me-nots along my sides so that they will not chafe and lose their petals. I climb over the hot metal side of the train and walk, towards the center of the city, towards the source of the embers and blackness, opposite the way the living travel.

What does that make me?

A mile down the road under the darkened sky I see a woman trying to stuff her own intestines back into the hole in her guts with the hand that isn’t holding her shiny, red, dead child. I say, “There are helicopters coming to the city — they will take you to the hospital — you can make it to the helicopters.” I do not know if this is true but I think it should be true and so I say it.

She says, “No, I need to reorganize my closet,” and as she says it, congealed black blood oozes from her teeth and her body twitches and then she passes out. I leave a mother on the pavement holding her own intestines in with her child’s corpse because I cannot lift her without sobbing in agony at the pressure on my skin.

At the edge of the city, I see a man, upright on a bicycle that has fallen against a lamppost in the absence of forward motion, a man blackened except for the eyes, which have melted in their sockets. I steal his crispy shoes to keep my feet from bleeding as they drag along the asphalt and I rather suspect that he won’t mind, as he doesn’t need them. When I try to take them off his ankles crumble, though his feet are whole and I have to ease them out like the cardboard shapers at shoe stores. But all that happens when I wear them is that the blood from my legs and feet pools and makes it hard to walk and leaves spongy shoe-shaped blood footprints on the cement.

A living man approaches me when I get close enough to downtown to see that it does not exist, see the gradual slope of what was a tree-lined street running a bare trail down into the blast site. I don’t scream when he grabs my morningstar arm until I see his eyes are grey and then I feel the pain and make that keening sound, that same word.

“Lila!” he says like it is 1849 in California and my name is a precious metal.

I stop keening.

“No, I’m Lee,” he says.

“Lee,” I say, and he twists his hand around my arm and some of my skin sloughs off like she-loves-me-loves-me-not daisies. I don’t yell, but he lets go and stares at the piece of my skin in his hand, like a wallpaper sample, and then I know him. We were in love once, until — dear God, the world is ending, and I still run into my ex-boyfriend on the street at exactly the wrong time.

“Lee,” I say, and then I see he is covered in glass, shards of it sticking out of his right side. “Lee, I have to go home.”

“Lila,” he says. “That’s on Fourth Street.” He looks at me, more concerned than when my skin peeled off like an orange rind.

“Will you walk me home?” I ask.

“Lila, that’s on Fourth Street.” Then the pain of my body slips beneath the surface and I know what he means; he has turned his head to face the empty shells of buildings, towards downtown, hard to see in the ash and the dark. He is looking the way I was going. The wrong way.

“You can’t go home.”

There is no water in my body but I can feel my throat begin to close. “I know,” I say, and sit down, and I feel the skin of my buttocks stretch and tear as I hit the pavement. Truly, we are animals, and we will not know it until our bodies make us remember.

“Lila,” Lee says gently, and I hear myself say, “Shane — ”

And I wrap my morningstar arms around my ruined body, for I hadn’t just been keening like a dumb beast: I’d been calling his name.

HILARY GAN lives in St. Louis, MO, with her D&D-playing husband and terrifyingly curious toddler. Her major inspirations include Bob Dylan, Epictetus, Neko Case, trees, Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, an insistent orange cat named Harry, and an odd-but-loveably-goofy second set of claws named Bruce. Find more of her fiction and essays at www.hilarygan.com.