WOLFSBANE

MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY

It’s winter when the wolf comes into our wood.

Out there somewhere, a howl. Out there somewhere, a cry. In the dark woods beyond our house, something red is happening.

I’m at the back of the stove, where it’s warm, wrapped in a cloth, swaddled. I nap in the dark, as the kitchen goes about its business, my sister singing over porridge, my mother singing over the coffee grinder. There’s a news channel on the screen, airing protests. My mother’s a baker. She has no time for laziness. She wakes at four every morning and begins the work of getting on with it. What kind of world is it out there? A complicated world. Even complicated worlds need bread.

Somewhere a howl, somewhere a cry.

“There’s a wolf out there,” says my mother, watching the screen, mixing a compote of summer-jarred peaches and antipathy, set to send to the ruler of the town three towns over, a man who’s banned feeding anyone but one’s own family. Outside his house, there’s hunger, and inside his house, there are, by report, seven women in chains.

“Men are allowed their women in terrible times like these,” says the newscaster, a woman herself, after the protesters are arrested. “Men need their comforts. Let it all shake out after the fact.”

My mother spits out the window, into a bed of glass, nails, and damages she keeps there.

“There’ve always been wolves, in every town, in every wood, everywhere,” she says. “I’m out of patience with wolves.”

My mother’s working at spears of rosemary, whittling them to points, and chopping mushrooms she’s grown on her own, under a log she put in the garden herself. Out there, she’s got snails, some poisonous, some delicious, some familiars. She’s got morels and oyster mushrooms, and she has real oysters, too, in a stream she’s diverted from a distance, a stream that so happens to be salt. She has ideas about her duty to the complicated world. Sometimes she makes complicated recipes look like simple ones. Sometimes a jellyroll is full of things other than sugar.

My mother consorts with bats—she’s built them a manse—and with bees and their sweet curses, with bears and their oldest spells for berries, goose, gorse, and blue, black and rasped, straw and sour. My mother consults with foxes and rabbits, and they let her pluck their winter coats, and so, in this house, she spins the fox and rabbit yarn and we wear creamy knitted sweaters in the winter, unless my mother sends us out in red. She dyes that herself. Our capes and hoods are scarleted with madder from the garden, made into Turkey red by my mother with oak galls, sumac, and the blood of her enemies.

My mother has plenty of enemies in the human realm, but in the animal kingdom, very few. Some, though, are crossovers. The wolves—both the ones with fur and the ones without—are the only ones who refuse to make peace with my mother. It’s been a long battle. She’s been at it since she was a girl. Sometimes they’ve surrounded her, on lake ice—she wears skates, and the blades are sharp enough to do anything they wish to do—or in the wood. Once, they got her in the city, caught her in an alley, five at once, and had their way with her, until they didn’t.

“It was no real matter in the overall metrics of my existence, and that’s that,” said my mother. She needed their blood, anyway. Turkey red dye requires blood.

My mother removes my swaddle and looks into my cradle. I’m there, breathing, and she breathes with me, then swings a fist and punches me hard. I collapse, gasp, grow again. This is how it’s done when a child is sourdough. I’ve been here before, poured from my vessel and stirred with flour, fed, fattened. My vessel, crackle-glazed clay, dates back a thousand years, but I’m much older than that. I don’t mind the process. Later, I’m out again, held in her hands, shaped, my body smooth and rising. She sings to me as she puts my eyes into their lids. I open them.

“Summer blueberries,” she says. “From the garden of a bear named Flihk.”

I look up at her. Tangled black hair and black eyes, a smile like a wooden spoon’s curve. A butcher’s apron made of woven metal. My mother carries a knife, sharpened to wolf-tooth gleam.

Somewhere a howl, somewhere a cry. My mother tilts her head and listens, snorts, and pours herself a shot glass of homemade whisky. My mother makes her own bitters, of purple gentian and the tears of men. My mother distills spirits. The hall closet is full of goose down pillows and jars of ghosts, gentled into extracts for curing sore throats. My mother brews sweet and sour potions alike. She blows the glass to bottle them. She bargains out the beeswax to seal them. Sometimes she’s been a butcher, sometimes a baker. My mother, like all mothers, chops the wood and carries the water. A long time ago, my mother was a soldier, and she carried a gun. Now, she just carries the world.

My mother has no tolerance, none at all, for wolves.

The day continues. Snow outside. Winter birds in the trees, cackling. Somewhere a howl. Somewhere a cry. My mother fills me with honey, cinnamon, walnuts, and the dust of something strong, shapes me, presses me onto a pan. Cold metal slicked with salted butter, salt my mother harvested from her sea-stream. I shut my eyes and relax into this bed. The oven, woodfire, the searing heat, the blaze, the brightness as I’m forged, hard crust, soft center, like anything powerful, like anything wonderful. She brings me out. She wraps me in a red cloth and puts me in a basket.

“To Grandmother’s house you go,” says our mother, as she buttons my sister into her black dress, as she ties a bow beneath the chin of her crimson hood, and out into the frozen world we go, my sister and I, on a mission.

Through the dark woods we travel, past white starflowers and golden buttercups, past purple cones of wolfsbane, all spitting violently into bloom from out of the snow as we walk. Our mother’s magic walks with us.

Somewhere, a howl. Somewhere a cry. The path to Grandmother’s house is marked with claw prints in the snow. I steam in my red blanket, the butter melting beside me, a jar of boysenberry jam, fruit bargained from a bear named Gilletrin for a bottle of tooth-soothing ghosts, and sixteen lullabies for her tiny, cream-pointed cub.

My knife is tucked against my side, and I’m giving, just a little, but I don’t bleed. Bread doesn’t. Bread breathes. My sister swings me, and sings. We were made the same way, my sister and I, of flour and water, of wild yeast, of salt. We have a long memory, of battlefields and voyages. We’ve always been the women who trouble the wolves.

Currants and cinnamon, molasses. Buttermilk and cream from the red hill cow our mother bargains with, bitter herbs, caraway and cloves, rosemary and fraises de bois, coriander and maple, each of us conceived in this kitchen. We travel out from our mother’s house, into other houses. We’re all over this forest, some of us still in this form, some of us shifted into others. We’re shipped out in packages, sent to senators, brought to those making bad decisions. Look at us, in our traditional red wrappings, all nurtured and baked in a little point-roofed house in the center of a dark wood. Daughter after daughter, sister after sister. We start out small, and then we grow.

A howl. A cry. We call out from the yard of our grandmother’s cottage, where the roses fight furiously in the summer, but no one answers.

My sister pushes at the door, and there she is, our grandmother, tall and in her white nightdress, a scarf, a shawl, a howl, a cry, muffled.

“Welcome,” says our grandmother, but she isn’t a woman who welcomes. She’s a woman who speaks, when she speaks, in tongues. Our grandmother lights the oven and leaves it lit. She stands over the fire with her cauldron and her roses, and she counts the stars when they aren’t looking, names them, drops them in the soup. She has a team of planets tamed for harnessing to her sled, and when she travels, she puts them in their tracks, Jupiter and Venus, Pluto, Mercury in the lead. She stands on the back of the sled and shouts “Mush!” and off they go, our grandmother’s white hair streaming behind her like moonlight.

“Welcome” is not her word.

“What a deep voice you have,” says my sister. Our grandmother’s voice is normally a voice you’d find in song, the voice of wind whipping over wine, the voice of birds calling from far away. There is no growl in our grandmother, though she tears with her teeth when she sees fit. Our grandmother is a carnivore.

“The better to greet you with,” says our grandmother, still in a voice that contains gravel and bones.

Into Grandmother’s house we go. Here, the rug is rucked up and the chairs are toppled, and Grandmother’s guns are off the mantle and scattered. There are bullets gleaming on the floorboards, and there’s a machete with a bright blade on the cutting board. Here is Grandmother’s bulletproof vest and here are her boots, and here is her television, turned to a station full of wolves, a station we know our grandmother never looks at. She prefers to watch a gardening show.

Here is the mattress, torn so its feathers are flying up into the air, and here is the quilt, a log cabin quilt made by our mother. The quilt—perhaps Grandmother does not see it—stands up from where it’s been flung and looks at Grandmother from underneath a fold. Then the quilt looks at us, and points at something on the floor.

Here are Grandmother’s night-vision glasses, which we’re never allowed to wear when we sleep over. Sourdough can see in the dark, of course, and everyone out here knows it. The glasses are on the floor, where they’re not allowed to be, in the path of any step or stomp.

“Grandmother,” says my sister. “Let me get your glasses for you!”

But our grandmother bends to pick up her night-vision glasses herself, and she puts them onto her face. They don’t fit, not at all. Her eyes are tremendous and yellow-green, and in each eye is a silhouette of a tall pine tree stripped clean in a wildfire.

“What big eyes you have, Grandmother,” says my sister.

“The better to see you with,” says our grandmother, and pulls her shawl down a little lower over her brow. Her hands are gloved, and our grandmother never wears gloves. Our grandmother works barehanded, nails clipped close, hands callused and covered in burn scars. Our grandmother uses a chainsaw, a hammer, and a drill. She carves the corners from anything that looks sharp without her say-so. White gloves made of stretch satin would make her laugh, and once she began she would not stop, not until the entire forest was sawdust and every wolf in it a parched skeleton, all the fur and muscle gone, sent off in a cloud of scraps to the next village, or, if my grandmother was very amused indeed, over the ocean and all the way to France, where once she was a girl in a wood like this wood, and in that wood, she encountered a pack of wolves. We know this story well. It’s the story our mother told us as she braided our dough into long plaits, as she placed sugar teeth into our jaws and colored our lips Turkey red. We smacked our lips and tasted iron. We’re made of wolf blood, just as we’re made of flour and sour.

“Once upon a time, in the woods,” my mother said, “your grandmother met some wolves. Out they marched, certain they’d have no trouble from her. She looked at them, all young and strong, all tall, their muscles made by boxing at night, the arches of their feet flattening as they walked toward her. Wolves, your grandmother knew, could look like any kind of thing. They had that in common with girls. Your grandmother had been drawing water at the well, and she had a bucket in her hand.”

“What then?” we asked our mother, who was peeling bright red apples, a strip twisting from her knife and spinning down to touch the floor. The apples were for a pie. The pie was for a president. Our mother was sending him a gift.

“‘Would you like a sip of water?’ your grandmother asked the wolves, and she held out her ladle, looking for all the world like a sweet little daughter of some neglectful father. The wolves were thirsty, yes, and they took a step closer to her, their tongues hanging out. Your grandmother tilted the ladle, and the first wolf began to drink.”

Our mother finished peeling an apple. In her hand, the plump flesh was swelling, pale pink and striated with red, and we watched as the apple changed into something that was not an apple, but a girl instead, with black apple seeds in her eyes, and sweet juice dripping from her lips. She smiled at us. Then she folded herself into the piecrust, all knees and elbows, her dagger tucked between her thighs, and our mother rolled out the top crust and tucked her in beneath it.

“Out of the ladle,” I said, “came a river, making its way from the North, where a spring had sprung suddenly up out of the tundra.”

“Yes,” said my sister. “A river, rushing, whitewater, right into the mouth of the wolf. That wolf drowned as he stood there. But there were three more wolves behind the first. Their companion was a drenched fur on the ground, flat as a rug, but the three remaining wolves were still standing, and they drew their guns on Grandmother, and Grandmother was forced to run.”

Our mother put the pie in the oven, and stood there for a moment, and then rapped her knuckles smartly on the oven door. “Fit to feed a wolf,” she said, poured herself a shot of applejack, and drank it. “You don’t starve wolves. You feed them. Properly. Just as I feed you girls, though on different ingredients.”

“And then what happened?” I asked my mother. There were three wolves left.

“You’ll have to ask Grandmother to tell you,” she said, and smiled. “Go there now and visit her. See if she needs anything at all.”

Now, we stand in our grandmother’s house, and the log cabin quilt stands in the corner where the telephone is. The quilt sways and turns its face toward us.

Our grandmother stretches her long white fingers, and the tips of her nails point through the satin. Wedding gloves, I think. Our grandmother never married, and neither did our mother. Who has need of marriage when there’s bread to bake, wild yeast floating in the air, ready for capture?

“What big hands you have,” says my sister.

“The better to embrace you with,” says Grandmother, and stretches her arms wide. There’s a crackling in her spine, and a twitching in her shoulders. On the television, wolves are standing in a room shouting about money and protections for their companies. I think about the man with seven women in his house, all of them chained in the rooms they tend. Men need their women, in times like these, I think, and wolves need feeding.

My sister has the same idea. She unwraps my Turkey red napkin. Grandmother opens her mouth and smiles, and her teeth are long and pointed.

“And what a big mouth you have,” says my sister.

“The better to eat you with,” says the wolf in Grandmother’s clothing, and with that, he’s across the room in his nightie, his hands ungloved, his shawl drifting from his pointed ears, his jaw wide, his tongue slavering.

He has me in his teeth, biting hard, and then he’s swallowing me. My sister follows a moment later, shaking her head as she descends, her knife in hand.

“On with it,” she says. It’s dark in here. Somewhere below me is a white tendril, a braid, and I touch it with my fingertips.

The wolf’s stomach tilts, and we feel the wolf reclining in our grandmother’s bed, pulling the log cabin quilt over himself. The wolf’s belly moves like the ocean, and we are oysters, swaying with the waves. I touch a dress, yes, a white dress, and fingers, callused, long and strong, the nails clipped, but the fingers don’t move in mine, even though I grasp them.

All around us, the sound of a wolf snoring. We’re in the belly of the beast. Our mother taught us that we’re always passengers, that there’s always some larger horror we are, however inadvertently, inside. It’s our job to see just what wrongfulness we’re riding in, she says, and once we identify it, to smash it.

I can hear the television from inside this wolf, a hearing, wolves discussing the dark state of the world, all of them granting each other cake as a reward for courage, even as they vote to deny food and medicine to the rest of the complicated world. Even as they vote again, for chains for some and liberty for others. I hear the sounds of a woman arriving to deliver dessert to the men in session, and I recognize her voice.

I picture our sister, in her Turkey red fox-down cape, her arms loaded with pastry boxes, each one bearing a seal that says it’s come from someplace in the woods, an embossed sticker with a safe house on it, a gleaming golden roof, a ceramic jar filled with soldiers. It all looks folksy, in the way that makes people think the contents of these boxes must be healthy and delicious. None of them will offer her a tip, unless it’s for her blackberry eyes and red lips, her curves made of yeasted dough. They’ll see her shape and think her beautiful, and maybe some of them will speak to her about that, but none of them will thank her for her service as a soldier.

“I’ve come to feed you,” I hear my sister say, and then I hear the wolves open their packages to eat, hunched over their microphones.

What do wolves eat? Anything they can get. They’ll eat the wild world, the streams and mountains, the caves where the bears live. They’ll eat the rooms where women live, and the places where babies are born, and the places where babies aren’t born. They’ll eat whole countries.

What do we eat? Anything we can get. We’ll eat the world too, the yeast drifting on the breeze, the dust from off the wings of butterflies, the San Francisco Bay, the rust from the bridge, the spilt beer, the broken heart, the spit on someone’s finger as she dips it in to stir. We’re made of the pollen of trees long extinct, the soil kicked up by horses and soldiers, the fruit that fell, the milk of goats that lived in the time of the gods, the blood of my mother’s enemies. The particles of clay from our crock, the breath of our bakers. We are made as much of the bodies of the witches of forty generations, as we are made of wheat.

I am a girl in the shape of a loaf, a certainty made of wild yeast tended and traveling for nearly five thousand years, a sourdough warrior full of the ancient world and the present. I’m a story in girl form, a fable made into a loaf of bread. Be wary of what you unwrap, of red cloth, of the trills of songbirds, of the scent of honey bought from bees, of berries bought from bears. Birds, bears, and bees? They’re all on the side of things that rise.

Sometimes you have to let the wolf eat you, if you want to see what’s inside it. We see the women the wolf has absorbed, the ways he’s used us, his thick fur and strong body, his accomplishments. This wolf came to the door with status, declarations, medals, degrees. This wolf arrived and rang my grandmother’s bell, and though everything in her house shouted at her, she was considering the planets and didn’t pay attention to what was walking in from the wood. Everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes witches are busy with the big things.

Witches grown from a starter of sourdough can live for a long time between feedings. We begin to eat the wolf from the inside out. We’re surrounded by snores and by wolf dreams. We inhale. We exhale. In the wolf’s belly, my sister and I rise, pushing our hands into pink flesh, propping up the wolf’s stomach until it begins to give. I insert the point of my knife and press it through, just below the belly button until I can see a point of light. Even as we cut, though, I feel movement from outside the wolf, and hear a voice I know.

“Girls?” says our mother. “The quilt came to see me. I assume you’re in there somewhere.”

And with that, the wolf’s belly is torn open, and our mother is above us, chef’s knife in hand, metal apron on. The wolf snores on, fed on the sleeping dose my mother ground into my filling.

I take my mother’s hand and step out, risen to full size on wolf by now, and my sister comes out behind me. Our mother makes a sound of fury, kneels, and reaches for our grandmother, pulling her out hand over hand, braids first, then pale hands and feet, then blue lips, then green eyes, made long ago of gooseberry.

“What happened to the three wolves?” I asked my grandmother once, in this very kitchen, where the pots were full of meat aged in her own closet. And where did that meat come from? We never asked. “The ones that aimed their rifles at you, when you’d drowned their brother?”

“Oh,” she said, and made a gesture suggesting a spiderweb being broken up in the air before her. “That old time.”

“That old time,” I said, and my sister said, “Tell us how you killed the wolves, Grandmother.”

“I didn’t,” said our grandmother. “There were too many of them, and in those days, I only had the magic of a little girl, not enough to save the world.”

My sisters and I looked at our grandmother, and imagined our own ladles, our own buckets, the water we’d carry, the wood we’d chop, the work we’d do.

“I could run, though, faster than the usual girl, because I was a witch. The wolves chased after me, bent on killing me, for I’d killed their brother, and he deserved comfort in these hard times, he deserved his share of the world’s women to do his work and clean his kitchen, to decorate his bed and bear him children. I had his skin slung over my shoulder, wet fur, and behind me there was a trail of wolf blood, because I’d begun to eat their brother for lunch. I’d torn off a leg and gnawed it, and none of the wolves liked that one bit. I ran down the banks of the river, and found a group of laundresses, scrubbing sheets in the current, girls from my village, their hands rough and their hair braided tightly. Listen, if you like, granddaughters, you can hear the laundresses singing as they scrub blood out of the sheets.”

We paused and listened, and our grandmother was right. The voices of the laundresses rose around us, singing loudly, bright and furious, scrubbing blood from plain cotton and linen, bleaching the bedsheets back to blank slates.

“And the laundresses saved you,” said my sister.

“The laundresses saved me,” said my grandmother. “They stretched their sheets and held them taut and I ran across the river. The wolves held their guns to the heads of the laundresses, but everyone knows that laundries used to be where they sent you if you were pregnant and they wanted to steal your baby. Everyone but wolves knows that laundresses took the laundries back somewhere along the line and became the ones who dispose of wolves. The laundresses stretched the sheets across the river again, and told the wolves to cross the bleached bridge they’d made of cotton and linen, embroidered edges, all stitched with red roses sewn out of the heat of summer. The three wolves in their uniforms stood for a moment on the bank, worried about the water, then kicked off their boots and knotted the laces together, rolled up their cuffs and stepped onto the bridge of sheets. Listen, if you like, girls, to what the laundresses said.”

We listened, and yes, we could just hear them, the laundresses laughing. “Come, wolves,” they called. “Cross here, where the water is shallow, come, wolves, cross here on this bridge, and we will hold you safe and sound, like we’re your own sweet mothers.”

We felt better, hearing the laundresses. We save each other, was the moral of that story, and though that moral might have been a moral made a long time ago, by bakers and laundresses, by those who bargain with bears and bees, by wives locked in rooms by their husbands, by daughters walking alone in the woods, it was still the truth.

“In the center of the river,” my grandmother said, “where the water was coldest and deepest, the laundresses let the three wolves stand on the bridge of sheets, slavering, waiting for the moment they could get their hands into my hair. They grinned, looking across the water at the murdering girl on the bank, and then the laundresses let go of the sheets, and the wolves were washed into the current and swept screaming away, their arms akimbo, their bellies distended with water, their noses full of salt as the sea towed them under to be food for sharks.”

“Is that the end?” I asked my grandmother.

She didn’t answer me. Instead, she shouted to her team of planets, and went out into the yard, cape flapping, white hair whipping in the wind, ready to put them in their traces and be about her business someplace other than a dark wood full of wolves and witches and granddaughters.

Now, my brilliant mother bends over her brilliant mother, broken into pieces on the floor of her own house, claw marks in her arms and cheeks, her heart opened by teeth, her skull marked by gnawing. Her bones are splintered and her skin is torn. Her white nightdress is stained, and the pale paisleys on her shawl have gone pink.

We wait for our mother to save her mother, but she doesn’t. She unbraids her hair and spreads it out across the floor. Out of the corner comes the log cabin quilt, and it wraps around both women. She lets it hold her, then kneels over the body and cries for a moment. Then, of course, because she is our mother, she stands up straight and tall, and gets on with it.

“Rocks,” she says, and we get on with it too. Out to the garden wall, where the roses are suddenly blooming, dark red and fragrant, where the bees are suddenly swarming, bright golden sparks of light, where the strawberries are suddenly juice beneath our feet, where the birds are singing as though their hearts will break.

We bring them in two at a time, the biggest rocks we can find, and pack the wolf full, and my mother stitches him up with a curved needle and waxed thread, and knots each stitch, folds it and tucks it until the wolf is smocked down his center, elegantly finished, like a sundress for a girl in a summer mood. The wolf sleeps on.

Over the fire, our mother boils a giant pot of water, and we hear it rattling over the flames. She says nothing to us as she hauls it from the hearth and carries it to the copper tub in our grandmother’s bathroom, and says nothing as she pours it into the tub, and says nothing as she returns to the room we’re in, and picks up our broken grandmother in her white nightdress. She gently places her mother in the tub, with her a bucket of blood from the wolf, and with all that, a handful of oak galls.

“Stir,” she says to me and to my sister, and hands us each a broomstick. “The mordant makes the color hold, and all of her must be bitten before we’re done.”

She leaves the room, and we hear her changing the channels on the television, moving over the news of the complicated world, the meetings of men out there, an item about a roomful of men who’ve choked on pastry and found themselves speaking in new voices, changing their votes and shifting their opinions for the record.

We stir our grandmother, limp and drifting. We stir her like laundresses in reverse, making the blood stains stay, sealing them to the cotton and the silk, turning what was pale into something crimson. Now she’s dressed in a Turkey red dress, and now she’s wearing a Turkey red shawl, and now her long white hair is scarlet, and now her lips are burgundy. And now, in the tub, all red, all bright, our grandmother is whole again, though changed, a witch made of wolf blood and water, of oak galls and her granddaughters’ fingers, pinching into her bath the wild culture of sourdough started thousands of years ago. Our mother comes in and pours honey from a comb, and outside the bees are orbiting, and in the yard, bears are trundling past, bringing berries, and some of those go into the bath too.

In the other room, the wolf is waking, his belly full of boulders. He blinks, and sits up, and our mother looks at him, a look we know. She’s been awake since four in the morning. She’s done with trouble now. The wolf stands. He puts his clothes back on. He walks out the door, heavier than he came in, stumbling, heaving, carrying the weight of women, granite and marble, ancient clay. He walks down the road, back toward the town. And now, in the tub, our grandmother opens her eyes, green berries from seasons long since parched. She rises, her hands on the sides of the bath, her skin like sheets fresh from the laundry, her hair like skeins of silk.

We rise with her. We help her from the bath, and walk her, steady, into the room, where we sit down, at last, to dinner. Jam and rolls, cured meats, cheeses from the goats, wine from the grapes down the hill. As we eat, our sisters join us, walking down the road from every town they’ve been to, all in their red hoods and capes, all with their baskets empty.

“Is that the end of the story?” I ask my mother this time.

“That’s never the end,” she says. “You never finish all the wolves in the world. But they never finish all of us either.”

My mother shakes our vessel in her hand, and my grandmother braids her hair back into coils, and the bees, drowsy now, return to their hive, and the bears return to their caves, and outside the window it’s snowing again, and the fire in here is roaring up, and we breathe in and out, our breath sweet as honey, our bodies made to thrive. We wrap ourselves in log cabin quilts, and feel the quilts embracing us as we fall asleep. Morning will be coming soon.

There will be another 4:00 a.m., and in it, the coffee will be ground, the bowl behind the stove will be warming. Even now, the wild song of everything on earth is in the drifting dust, dried blood, wolf fur. Into the bowl it goes, making someone new.

“What do you do when the wolves aren’t finished?” asks my sister.

“Rise,” says my mother, quietly for now, though sometimes she screams these words. Sometimes we scream them too. Sometimes we march, and raise our fists high, but today we stay inside while it snows. We sleep, and read, and wait for the moment when we’ll change the world.

My mother stretches her hands, smoothing them over a scarlet quilt, counting stitches, and somewhere outside a wolf falls to his knees, his belly full of stones.

“We rise, and we rise, and we rise.”