BY
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
YOU DON’T KNOW ME, BUT you do.
Walking the path from your father’s house back to town, there came that certain span of steps where your back straightened, didn’t there? Your skin came alive, trying to feel every breath of air. Some of those breaths were, as you now know, mine.
Most nights I’ve let you pass. Not this night.
Zeus thought that by forcing me into this form he was punishing me.
He was liberating me.
He said I would be hunted.
Instead, I’m the hunter.
Before, my lands were bound by walls, and my men had to patrol those walls on a daily circuit. Now my land is the night.
By changing me into this form you perhaps recognize from legend, from your own nightmares, Zeus granted me access to realms I’d never considered. You no longer need to call me Lycaon. My name now is your sharp intake of breath when you realize you’re not alone on your long walk home. If you hear my footfalls or my breathing, it’s because I mean for you to.
This is Zeus’s grand and just judgment against one who would feed him human flesh in his stew, mixed in with the lamb and vegetables. It wasn’t the smell he’d recoiled against—in the kitchen, I’d sampled a spoonful myself, and it was fine—but, evidently, the idea. Could he not in all his wisdom discern my true motivations? That I was honoring him by having my own son sacrificed and butchered? What more meaningful offering could I have made, I ask? What else could have been in keeping with his might? Would mere lamb and vegetables not have been an insult to one such as he?
So I thought at the time.
Sitting across from him that day, king to king, his wooden spoon dipping down into the bowl, I was as content as ever I’d been.
I still am. Or, rather, I am again.
Yes, as he wanted, as you can see before you now, my true nature is expressed in this lupine form, which was his judgment: that I no longer be able to hide who I truly am. All who see me, fear me.
As far as mighty Zeus is concerned, the story of Lycaon was over the day he, in his laughably obvious peasant form, flipped my table over, stood from it to his true height, and glared down at me, my limbs already creaking and breaking into the shape he thought more fitting, his voice booming down to me about what I’d almost done this day, how I didn’t know what it was that I’d attempted.
Our story was not over that day, however. Yes, with a flick of his finger he stripped away my human form, bent me forward such that I rested on four paws, not two feet, but that wolfen form he initially damned me with turned out to be the exact means for me to finish what I started that day he knocked on my door in beggar rags.
You see, mighty Zeus, playful Zeus, crafty Zeus, he can’t help but dress up like this and like that, adopting whatever raiment allows him to gain his impulsive ends or satisfy his fleeting curiosity or quench his childish need for entertainment.
With my new senses, though, I can now smell through such trickery.
I’ve watched him couple as a swan, I’ve tracked him from shore when he swam as a bull. I even listened to him sneak into the locked room of a high tower as a ray of sunlight, and I recognized him not because a ray of light makes sound, battering into motes of dust, but because mighty Zeus was chuckling to himself low enough that only wolf ears could register it.
But maybe, if his judgment against me is just, maybe I’d had these ears all along, yes?
Maybe like can hear like, monster can hear monster.
Either way, Zeus had forgotten poor Lycaon, meting out the rest of his days on four feet, chasing down beasts of the field for his dinner.
It would be his undoing.
* * *
As a man and a king of Arcadia, I had near fifty sons—minus one for the pot, yes?
After Zeus reshaped my limbs, pulled this canine muzzle forth from my face in a tearing of skin and grinding of bone that near erased my mind, he, in his wisdom, felled all those sons of mine with a sweep of his right hand, so as to once and forever terminate my family line.
In the field and the woods my boys fell as one.
Next, Zeus ravaged my lands, collapsed my home and outbuildings, and scattered my wife and her family to distant shores.
When I could stand again that evening, the world came at me in a rush—the smells, the sounds. I could hear the massive footfalls of spiders, their webs ringing like harp strings, and I could taste the smoke of fires two years old—poachers in my woods, who had . . . yes, who had spirited away a stag I’d had my eye on.
My lips peeled away from my teeth, and saliva descended onto my forepaw.
The first step I took on my new legs was stronger than I meant, and threw me into the rubble that had been my kitchen, further collapsing it.
No one was around to document this.
That painting you’ve seen, of a moment from my fall, an instant of my transformation?
The painter wasn’t there. He couldn’t have seen. Had he been there, I would have ripped his right arm from his body, lapped his blood from the dirt, my eyes locked on his as he died, to drink his last moments as well.
This is what wolves do.
Standing among the wreckage of my home, I may not have known my limbs nor my senses yet, but I knew my role in this new world I’d been delivered to.
Still, the rabbits of the field and the deer that had formerly been mine, they knew me for what I was, knew me before I knew myself, such that when I padded out into the night after them, they were already gone, were already burrowed into their safe places, were already fleeing onto other lands.
For three nights I tried to ambush one, just for a single mouthful of raw meat, but they had been running this race for untold generations, and evaded me time and again. My new senses only served to torture me, as I could hear their fluttery hearts beating, could taste them on the air. But catch them I couldn’t. Not yet.
On the fourth day, perhaps just as wise Zeus had designed, I had to take what food I could catch: the decomposing bodies of my sons, lying where they’d fallen in the fields, under tumbled-over walls, in the backs of wagons that would never move again.
Is it punishment to have to eat exactly the meat I had formerly tried to feed the peasant who knocked on my door, his sides starved down enough that his ribs were near-visible?
If it was, then it was sweet punishment.
The muscle and organs of children I’d fathered myself, it nourished me in a different way.
Over the course of the week, and in spite of the putrefaction that only made the muscle sweeter and less resistant, I tore my sustenance from the bones of my sons, and licked the insides of their skulls for more.
If this was punishment, then punish me more, please.
On the eighth day of my repast, a townsperson showed up with a weekly delivery. He stood from his cart and eyed the ruins. From the shadow of one of the few walls left partially standing, I watched him.
My belly was full, but my mouth still watered.
He came back the next midday leading a detachment of soldiers, and I watched them from the trees, growling my displeasure. I still considered this my land, see. My home.
That night, after they’d set up tents in order to further investigate in the light of morning, I crept in, the darkness as the day to my new senses. The horses screamed with my approach and pulled their pickets free, crashed off into the night, back to the safety of town.
The soldiers circled around behind their spears and shields and stoked the fire higher and higher, and the whole night I only circled them.
Just before dawn broke, then, the part of my mind that thought like a wolf presented an obvious fact to me: if the soldiers were here, then they weren’t protecting the town, right? And, without mounts, they wouldn’t be tonight either.
I left them to their slow investigation of the ruins—really, they were plundering what they could from the rubble—and that night began my days-long siege of the town. I picked off those who wandered out to the edges, the children playing games, the women walking out to the hill to see if their soldier husbands were approaching, and then, never mind that my hunger was long sated, I picked off those who came looking for the children, the wives.
They didn’t nourish me the same as my own sons had, but I learned to draw pleasure from their fear. It was enough.
When I’d gorged myself on the town such that I was only pulling the tongues and certain organs from the bodies I’d plundered, I padded back to my lands one last time and—just because I could, because I knew now that I was larger than any of the wolves I’d used to hunt from horseback—I crashed into the sleeping soldiers’ camp and tore whatever flesh flashed in front of me, not even eating it, just destroying and destroying.
As a child, from a high place, I’d once watched a pair of wolves move through a herd of goats, killing for no other reason than the sheer joy of it.
Now I was that wolf.
I don’t bite holes in the world because I dislike the world, I bite holes in it because I have these teeth.
That night with the soldiers is probably where the connection was made between the former king and the current monster, too. Since a head injury in my middle years, I’d always had a narrow blaze of white at a distinctive angle through my black hair. In my new form, as you can see, that blaze persisted and revealed my true identity to those soldiers.
Such are legends born. Such do necessary truths begin to get told.
* * *
As a king of men, my sons had numbered enough to form their own phalanx, nearly.
As a wolf, my progeny were even more numerous.
Zeus neglected to geld me, see.
His punishment against me was that I would have to run my dinner down every night, that I would have to be as savage in my daily life as I was when I cubed the smallest bit of my least son into his stew.
But in punishing me thusly, he also gifted me with everything a wolf might have.
Chief among those has been wives.
As king, I had privilege and access to any woman who caught my eye. As king of the wolves, my dalliances ranged even further. Not only could I mate with wolves of the forest, I found that, much like my maker Zeus, I could share such congress with other animals as well. Specifically, the curs and mongrels that lived off the waste of towns.
My children were numbered in litters in those days, and of course, as when I was a man, I selected favorites to let walk alongside me, capable wolves I trained to hamstring your kind and leave them flopping and moaning in the dust of the road. You die soon enough on your own and, dying alone, can’t lash out with knives or pikes. However, there were also lessons my children could learn about the back of the neck, and the throat. Open the throat, and everything good spills out, doesn’t it?
The soft belly is good too, if there’s time.
You’ll learn this all as well, don’t worry.
Really, there’s no part of a man that a wolf can’t take advantage of.
And of course I instructed my children of those early years to hunt mainly at night, and to keep their distance from the soldiers, and to always stay upwind, unless the panic of the livestock is beneficial in some way.
Myself, while I still took one of you from time to time as reminder, it was less about sustenance, more about a display of who was still king, and who was not.
What I found I derived more nutrition from was the puny whelps the town curs threw, with their floppy ears and mottled coats—my pups, I mean. Did living my first week as a wolf on the meat of my own sons dictate my taste, I wonder? Was I still living Zeus’s judgment, then?
If so, it was a sweet judgment.
What I would do is pass through the edge of a town, mount whatever straggly dogs were bold enough to pad out for the fresh deer I’d dragged up, and then I would come back a couple of moons later. With pups, I liked to wait until they were suckling on their mother. When they were lined up on the teat like that, I could lower my great mouth down to their wiggling bodies and pull them up one at a time, their mouths holding onto their mother, stretching her out until there’s that pleasant pop of suction collapsing.
While chewing the meat and soft bones together in a single mouthful, the rest of the pups wouldn’t even scramble away, would just keep feeding, loading their bellies with that pale blue milk that is the perfect garnish for their soft muscle, like a center that comes in a warm rush, surprising every time.
The mothers just glared up at me, unable to move.
Sometimes I would leave them one or two pups yet wriggling, for the next generation. I found that throwing pups off of pups I’d fathered was even sweeter, is what I imagine I might taste were I to bite into my own naked belly.
Such is the way mighty Zeus designed me.
Even better, eating the milk-saturated, wriggling-blind pups born from pups I’d myself fathered had an unexpected effect, one not dissimilar to the one you see before you now.
If I gorged myself on the whole litter back then, I could, for perhaps an hour, stand up on my hind feet as I used to when I was man.
With practice I found I could even walk a bit, unsteadily.
It’s a release like none other, to work around the curse laid down by a god and prove it not a curse. To walk slowly through the market of a sleeping town, my every sense alive, my children arrayed out behind and beside and ahead of me, lest some soldier wake to relieve himself, try to raise the alarm.
The night was populated with monsters in those days, yes.
In these days as well.
* * *
It was during one such midnight stroll that my revenge against mighty Zeus took shape.
Having eaten, this time, the mother of the litter as well as the litter—she was weak, it was a mercy—I found that my balance was even better, and I walked confidently all the way through town this time, to the meadow on the other side where it smelled like horses usually grazed. There were no horses then, though.
One of my sons growled deep in his chest, alerting the rest of us to what was happening out in the grass. In a burrow out in the field was the pounding heart of one of my many curs, giving birth. She’d come out here for safety. She’d come out here to try to escape me.
Having never eaten a litter this fresh, still sheathed in afterbirth, and curious what the result might be, I had my children uncover her, never mind that the pups wouldn’t be filled with that milky-rich center this time.
The mother was a pitiful thing, starved down and weak, whimpering, crying from the effort, shivering with fear, only half done with her delivery. The first four pups were rolling in the dirt, eyes closed.
My mouth watered, as would any wolf’s, as would any king’s.
Moving slow on my two legs, I started to bend over, come down to all fours for this rare feast, but startled back from a sudden, powerful fluttering to my right. My first thought was that this was a trap, that the soldiers were ranged all around, covering their scent and sound somehow—that a crossbow bolt or net was nearly on me, to shorten my reign at last. But then I realized: we weren’t the only hunters, this night.
It was an owl, one of the tall ones that stands up to a man’s waist or a wolf’s shoulders.
It too had been tracking this birth, and likely mourning that it had no access to the burrow.
To it, these wriggling pups were just helpless, especially plump mice that didn’t yet know to run away.
Its talons pierced the back of the pup farthest from the teat, and then the great gray wings pushed down together, lifting the bird back into the darkness on an expanding pad of air. We all listened to it lift away, coast down deep in the trees, and strain this giant mouse down its gullet.
When one of my sons nosed forward, for one of the remaining pups, I lifted my lips, warned him back. He mewled, dropped his tail, slunk off, and I never even had to look over.
I was still listening to this owl, deep in the woods.
* * *
Yes, as a king I had perhaps underestimated Zeus. I admit that freely. Being a wolf, however, had taught me certain things I could never have learned otherwise.
As a man, I could of course walk by any number of rabbits or moles and never feel compelled to snap them up, swallow them down. As a wolf, I snatched those rabbits and moles up even when I wasn’t hungry for their meat. I still thought like a man, but my body reacted to its natural prey like the wolf it was.
I had to imagine it would be the same with Zeus. For all his might and cleverness, he would still be prey himself to whatever form he was using to move among the mortals. And, with these new ears, I knew what form he had been recently taking, and would, I had to presume, continue to take until his current dalliance had run its course.
For years he had sat atop his Mount, playing treacherous petty games with others of his kind, but then a vision of milky skin must have passed before his eyes, as it always did. He had leaned over from his high seat, studied us down here in our filth, finally settled his divine gaze on the one of us who had caught his fancy, one whose beauty was already dooming him or her to unasked-for nightly visits.
His whole existence, see, it’s about satisfying his own fickle desires, be they carnal, as was the case here, or, as when he knocked on my door, playful. Either way, he’s so satisfied with himself that he can’t quite contain his mirth. He’s getting away with it again, and that persistent divine chuckle deep in his chest, at the core of his being, that’s what my wolf ears can’t help but register.
I say this with confidence because I felt that same mirth myself moments ago, padding up behind you: I’m getting away with it again, yes. And who is there now to punish me? But I get ahead of myself.
Though I hadn’t bothered to interest myself with where Zeus was going—which bedroom, what tower—my ears had picked up how he was getting there. I knew what animal raiment he was clothing himself with, and so wagered that I could use that against him.
I padded away from my children that night, and stationed myself along the shore, in what I knew to be his path.
Then it was just the waiting.
Time passes differently on the Mount than it does in the mortal realm. I say this because, if Zeus’s carnal impulses want to be satisfied on any kind of cycle, then that cycle is markedly different than in men, or wolves.
I sat on that rocky shore for five weeks, listening for his return. My sides drew in, my mouth watered for the animals I could hear crawling around me, but I remained motionless, could not give up this effort just because death might be looming. I wasn’t even sure I could starve down to nothing, but by the end of the first week, I knew that this hunger, already all-consuming, was not likely to abate.
Yet I persisted in my vigil.
I once had offered a god a simple meal, and he had turned the table over on me. In my new form, though, I could set that table back up, couldn’t I?
My dry lips cracked with movement when I heard the heavens open to admit a traveler down into our realm.
Zeus was in the world again.
* * *
Though it was daylight, I raced alongshore to the nearest town, took a scent-reading, found the cur I’d mounted two months ago feeding her newborn pups. She bared her teeth at me in the fiercest way she had, and had I still the mouth for it, I would have smiled at her pitiful effort.
She had hidden herself under the porch of a stone house.
I pushed under to dig her out, sucking down the first two of the pups as a reward to myself, but then the stone house’s owner stepped out with a farming tool.
For a moment we locked eyes, his face slack, my muzzle bloody, and then I was on him, had his throat in my teeth. To insure no more interruptions, I went into his stone house then, walking on two feet thanks to the meal he’d interrupted, and easily dispatched the rest of the family—daughter, daughter, wife, moving on to the next while the previous was still falling. On the way out, I took note that the pot bubbling over the fire was stew.
Again, my kind can’t smile, but perhaps my eyes did.
Quickly, with no thought to who might be watching—there was no time—I dropped to all fours, dug the cur and her pups out, and left them curled up there, save the piebald one I had nipped by the back of the neck.
He struggled and kicked in my teeth, but he weighed nothing and was still new enough as to be blind, couldn’t see the legendary run I was making, from far inland all the way to the coast in a matter of hours.
When his skin pricked and his blood washed into my mouth, I didn’t even bite down more, just ran faster, and faster again.
The chuckling satisfaction in the sky was moving along the water’s edge now, was coming back from whatever conquest Zeus felt he’d just made, whatever he’d just gotten away with again.
Instead of meeting him, I surged ahead even faster, into his path, into where he was going.
This time he wasn’t a swan, wasn’t a bull, but a great eagle.
And just as I was carrying a young son in my mouth, he had in his talons the unconscious form of a young boy who had evidently been fetching enough for Zeus to transform, glide all the way down here, and now deliver him back up for a week of pleasure on the Mount, whether the boy agreed or not.
Such is the way of things with a god.
Pushing harder and harder, I ran ahead, dropped the pup from my mouth into the grass, in order to finish what I’d started years before.
Had I left the struggling pup on shore, that would be too obvious, even for one so brazen as Zeus. In the grass, though, his sharp predator eyes would automatically register the blades trembling with life, and his wings would dip him down ever so slightly, to consider this new possibility, his clawed feet already flexing in anticipation.
I was just ahead, hunkered down in a copse of trees, my hackles vibrating with anticipation.
No bird of prey could resist. Not even mighty Zeus.
Without considering the danger, he flipped the unconscious boy up into the sky to retrieve later and angled his head down, tucked his wings back, and fell into a sharp dive, following his eagle instincts.
Slashing down like that, he was a bolt of lightning, yes.
His great talons pierced the pup in four places when he hit, each puncture instantly mortal, and then he was gone again, banking hard to the other side of the meadow, which is perhaps an instinct in birds of prey.
Where he drifted down was a mere span before my copse of trees.
Holding the shattered, leaking pup down with one claw, he drove his beak down for a morsel, came up with it fast, leaning his head back so as to straighten his neck, work this meat down.
And again, and again, three bites in all. It was all the pup had to it. The bony tail yet flopped on the ground, and Zeus’s eagle eyes, attuned to just that type of movement, watched it, perhaps curious, perhaps amused.
At which point I stepped out.
He turned to face me, taking on his divine aspect in a matter of two steps.
“Lycaon,” he said, his voice thunderous, the whole realm trembling from it.
“Mighty Zeus,” I said back to him, and dipped my head in a show of respect, if not respect itself.
“What brings you to my field this day?” he asked, moving to the side to see me better, I think, his head actions still that of a bird even though he stood on man legs.
“Did you like your meal?” I said to him, and in a divine instant he saw the smile in my eyes, and he registered that he had just eaten one of my sons after all these years. He turned away, looked up into the sky, where presumably his boy-child was still falling, and would continue falling until fetched.
“You know not what you’ve done with this, Lycaon,” he said at last, licking a speck of the pup’s blood from the corner of his mouth and spitting it harshly down into the grass.
“It was to honor your greatness,” I told him. “You never allowed that possibility, did you?”
“To honor me?” he said.
“He was my own son,” I said, a growl rumbling in my chest. “The most precious thing I had to offer.”
He shook his head, looked to the sea in sorrow.
“Your least son,” he said. “Your weakest son. Did you even dispatch him yourself, or have it done, Lycaon?”
I only stared at him about this.
“And so you insist on honoring me in this fashion,” he said, turning back to me, his eyes sparking, flashing, the air around us crackling. “Despite the fact that I resist it, you continue the motion you started those many years ago. Did you ever stop to think there might be a reason for my reaction that day, Lycaon?”
“You would not be hoodwinked,” I said, my words barely crossing my lips.
“Such is the shortened sight and apprehension of mortals,” Zeus said. “When—when a god such as myself tastes of human flesh like this, Lycaon, even disguised human flesh, so begins the corruption.”
“You were already corrupt,” I said.
“Not like this,” Zeus said. “Never like this. This is the end of us, Lycaon—of the gods. This is the end of this age altogether.”
“And the beginning of mine,” I said, just loud enough.
“If you had kept from eating human flesh yourself,” Zeus said, “you would have become again who you used to be, did you know that, Lycaon?”
“I am who I am.”
“You are at that,” he said, still circling, still considering this new situation, these new terms. “This, I think, will be your age, your kind’s age. Hark, can you hear, can you smell it already, can you see it in your mind’s eye?”
With the benefit of his augmentation, or just because he willed it, I could: far away, in the stone house where I’d slaughtered the family, one of them was now rising. The daughter I’d taken in my mouth, shaken, and tossed aside.
I hadn’t bitten her deeply enough.
She was . . .
“No,” I said, taking a step back.
“Yes,” Zeus said, with force, and as we watched together, her frail form began to tremble and seize.
My bite, my teeth, my saliva—they were changing her.
Just as had happened with me, claws punched through the ends of her fingers, her legs broke backwards, and her mouth elongated into a muzzle.
She stood then, not on four feet like me, but on two, as I had been when I’d attacked her.
“I should have gelded you that day,” Zeus said, “and I cannot undo what you’ve started, but I can correct my mistake, anyway.”
He turned his hand over, palm up, and bade me rise, rise, and I had no choice: just like the newly born wolf-girl miles away, I stood up on two feet like this, and felt the world solid beneath me. Whereas before my balancing up on two legs had been a rare treat, due to my preferred sustenance—a rare treat I had to concentrate to maintain—now, due to my reshaped limbs, standing up on my hind legs was natural.
“No longer can you run down the fast little rabbits of the field,” Zeus proclaimed. “They twitch this way and that way with no notice. You’re too slow for that kind of hunting, now. Now the only prey you can easily catch, it will have spears to lob against you, walls to build to keep your hunger out.”
I forced myself back forward, onto what I now have no recourse but to call my arms again, though they were furred, though there were yet claws at the end.
Zeus chuckled at my awkwardness. I was born again, a third time, but now I was no longer wolf, no longer man, but a form locked between the two.
“And from this day on,” Zeus said, squatting to see me eye to eye, “you will no longer couple as you’ve been doing, Lycaon. Now the only way you can procreate will be the way you just did, with your mouth, with your bite. Thus says Zeus, even if it will be my last proclamation.”
I turned my head again to the idea of the wolf-girl, staggering through her stone house.
“You would have me mate using only my teeth?” I said to Zeus.
“And what fine teeth they are,” he said, standing again, cocking his head to the clouded sky as if gauging the descent of his boy up there.
“But I’m a king!” I screamed. “And I was—I was only honoring you, the mightiest of the gods!”
“Mighty no more,” Zeus said, and we watched together as the boy thumped down from the sky, coming down on the rocky shore face-first, his back folding over the wrong way, shards of white splashing up, a lone gull banking over to investigate. “With what you’ve introduced to my stomach,” Zeus went on, “I now must live out the rest of my days as a mortal. As must we all in Olympus.”
“I can take it back,” I pled. “Let me—I can bite it from you, if you’ll but—”
“Run off now, Lycaon,” Zeus said, waving me away. “I still have enough of myself left to lodge another punishment, should you so desire.”
For a long moment I glared at him, then I stared across at his broken boy on the rocks, and then I looked out to the trees, arrayed against me like everything else.
“We will tear the throat from your precious mankind,” I said to Zeus at last, my chest growling the promise true. “There will be no more pretty children for you to steal.”
“Perhaps,” Zeus said. “And perhaps they will come for your kind, Lycaon. For your children. Perhaps you will be hounded for ages, until you become but a legend.”
He stared at me then as if daring me to rush at him, finish this now. When I didn’t—I didn’t know whether to try on two feet or four—he gave me his back, walked to the beach, perhaps to mourn his broken boy, perhaps to feast on his liver.
Note that he walked. He didn’t sprout wings and glide over.
Truly, that meat I’d introduced to his system was festering, was corrupting.
True natures indeed, mighty Zeus.
As for me, my children are no longer my children—we pass in the night, our teeth flashing—and my first daughter of this new form has children of her own, minor whelps I hear crying from the town walls, where the men pierce them and hang them. It weighs on my heart, their cries.
I still keep to the shadows, yes. To that lonely turn in the road.
Look back if you want. You might even chance to see me.
I’m those footfalls drawing ever and ever closer, then retreating to the shadows just for the thrill of it, just to hear you scream, then finally rushing close on two feet, to hold you close.
Zeus in all his wisdom would have me hounded through the centuries.
Not likely. Not while the roads are dark, not while my teeth are still the sharpest things in that darkness.
Hold steady now, I don’t want to bite too deep.
You will be the second of my new children. Together, the night will be ours to do with as we will.
Punishment? Hardly. More like a gift.
Mighty Zeus, that dead Olympian, his last divine act was to give us the future, child.
Let’s take it by the neck, now, shake it until our fur is matted red.
I said before that this mouth was incapable of smiling?
I was wrong, child.
All I do now is smile.