Deborah woke up someplace too bright. Light hurt her eyes, sunlight. Got under her skin and made her itch. Her stomach hurt. Her vagina hurt.
She was going to throw up. She was going to make herself throw up. She had to pee.
Both her stomach and her vagina felt a lot bigger than they used to be. Stretched. A little panicky, she wondered how long she’d been asleep or unconscious or whatever she’d just been, and she wondered what could have happened to her while she was out that she didn’t know about.
The baby.
Deborah put her hands on her stomach and didn’t feel anything except her own thick and hollow flesh. Maybe there’d never been a baby. Maybe she was just fat. Or maybe the baby was gone, killed or stolen or lost. What would those assholes want with a baby?
They’d raped her. Knives at her throat, fists in her belly. Dicks in her cunt, all the way up into her uterus, she was sure, where the baby was. How do you like that, baby? Daughter? You’d better get used to it. This is how you were conceived, you know. It took more than one man to make you. One after the other after the other, penises as far up into her as they would go, not far enough, not big enough for her. They hadn’t dared put them in her mouth. She wished they had.
She’d raped them, too. Actually, “rape” wasn’t the right word for any of this. There wasn’t a word for what she’d done to them, what she could do, what a woman would do to a man. Perpetrator or victim, it was violence, and it was also passion. Not love, she didn’t think it was love, but it was passion. It did transform.
She’d taken them on. She’d pulled them in, and it hadn’t been hard to do. Whether they wanted to or not, they’d stiffened again and again to fill her, but they couldn’t fill her. They weren’t big enough. Nobody was that big. They’d yelled and tried to get away from her but by then she wouldn’t let them go till she was ready, not till she was done. She’d grabbed their tongues with her long front teeth and held on. She’d held on to their necks and heads with her long black claws when all of them together couldn’t hold her down or push her away.
Under them and around them, she’d transformed, so that before it was over they were fucking a wolf. Some of them, all but one, had grunted stupid threats and curses and left her, run away.
One stayed. Younger or older than the rest, smarter or dumber, something. Crazier. So stoned and so spent that he couldn’t move and didn’t seem to care what she’d turned into. She could have made him hard again, easy. She could have killed him, easy, or fallen in love with him.
One way or another, she could easily have had his heart. But she didn’t do anything, and eventually he’d left, too. She didn’t know why she’d just let him go.
Some man was sitting in front of her now, cross-legged, back to the bright sky so he didn’t have a face. On the sloping ground between them was a tape player, bright yellow with big square knobs like a kid’s, like one she’d had as a kid but she’d broken it the first day. Some weird music was playing. Not even music; chanting.
It was Julian. “Julian.”
He said her name at the same time. “Deborah.”
He scooted closer. Now she could see that he was smiling at her. He was wearing a heavy, dirty black coat that was way too small for him. He looked dorky. His breath stank. But he also smelled familiar, pleasant.
“What’s that shit?” she demanded.
“Deborah, I’ve been worried about you.”
“Why?
He looked at her as if she was stupid or something. “Why, because you’re valuable to me.”
“ ‘Valuable’?” she sneered.
He nodded, satisfied. “Valuable. Yes.”
“What’d you do, come looking for me?”
“Yes.”
“What is that shit? Turn it off!”
“Oh, that is a Gregorian chant. Christian liturgical music from the thirteenth century.”
“It’s gross.”
“Really? I find it both calming and invigorating. The Gregorian chant has been most helpful to me in my spiritual practice, since I am not yet sufficiently disciplined simply to clear my mind—”
“Sounds like devil worship.”
He raised his eyebrows and chuckled. When he still didn’t turn the tape player off, she slapped the stupid thing with the flat of her hand and knocked it onto its side. It slid a little way down the bank toward the river, but it kept on playing. High men’s voices sliding under the drone of the city, up and down the river valley.
“Turn it off!” she yelled.
He looked at her some more with that irritating, peaceful, brown-toothed smile. Then, finally, he retrieved the player, pressed one of the big square buttons, and shut it off. For a split second everything was very quiet, before sounds filled the quiet up again. Sounds of the city. Sounds of Julian. Sounds of Deborah’s own heart, own thoughts. And of the baby’s.
“Are you all right?” Julian asked.
“Sure.” She curled her lip in dramatic disgust. They thought they were hurting me they thought they had the power they thought they had me but I had them instead the pricks. Her groin throbbed with excitement when she thought about them.
Especially the last one, trapped inside her until she was finished with him and let him go.
“Deborah?” It enraged her how much she liked the way he said her name. “Deborah.” Her name made her so sad. Her eyes ached for tears. Her throat ached. “Deborah, I’m so sorry.” And no matter how hard she tried to keep herself safe from him, Deborah couldn’t escape believing that Julian meant what he said. “Life expects a lot of you,” he said. She liked that, too.
She didn’t know what she felt.
What she felt was safe.
She was leaning against him, turning her face into his shoulder. She hadn’t planned to do that. He put his arms around her and held her as if he could keep her safe.
What she felt was loved.
She woke up to snow. Every year when it snowed for the first time, it seemed like the first time ever, and she noticed every little detail. The snowflakes were tiny, more like ice than snow. They were falling so fast and hard and so close together that you couldn’t make out any shapes, couldn’t tell whether any two of them were alike or not.
Up above, the wind was blowing hard. Deborah could see snow gusting, traffic lights swaying, people walking hunched over with their heads down into or away from the wind with their hair and clothes whipping. Down here, snow did fall, but not as much of it and not as hard, and there was hardly any wind.
Julian had climbed the steps, limping because his knees ached in the cold but laughing and singing. Now he was standing on the top edge of the riverbank, right along the street. He was wearing his orange Broncos stocking cap; it had an enormous tassel on top with blue sparkles through it. He’d rolled the edge of the cap down flat over his forehead and ears. Altogether, the cap must have been two feet tall. It looked ridiculous.
Especially the way he was standing now, with his head back so far that the cap stuck almost straight out behind him, practically level with the ground. He was holding his hands out in front of him to catch the snow; he didn’t have any gloves. He had his mouth open and his tongue out, too, to catch the snow, which of course would melt the second it touched him. He looked stupid. Watching him, Deborah couldn’t help smiling.
“Deborah! Come play in the snow!”
She scowled and shook her head. She moved her hands in broad gestures to show how disgusted she was, what a stupid idea that was, to push him away. But she did lean out, then scoot out from under the bridge just far enough for some of the snow to fall on her. It was pretty. It felt good at first. But then it was so cold it hurt.
“It’s beautiful!” Julian shouted, not especially to her.
He was dancing. She couldn’t believe it. In the middle of Speer Boulevard at rush hour, calling attention to himself and to her, not even caring that he was making a total fool of himself.
Deborah crawled back up under the bridge, inside the shelter. Julian had made walls and half walls from wooden slats and cardboard boxes stacked and tied together. The baby was moving a lot right now. She wondered if it liked the snow or not.
She’d been with Julian when he’d found the cap, on the bike path right outside their place as if somebody’d left it for them. Left it for him—she wouldn’t be caught dead wearing something like that, no matter how cold she got. Getting her head cold or her ears wouldn’t hurt the baby. Julian had picked the cap up with both hands and held it gently. “Oh, look,” he’d said softly, sadly. “Someone has lost this.”
“You’ve been saying you needed a hat, now you’ve got one. An ugly one, but it’s a hat.”
He’d looked at her with quiet disapproval and said, “But, Deborah, this isn’t mine. Someone has lost it.” Then—to her amazement and intense annoyance—he’d proceeded to stop every bicyclist, every jogger, every bum along the path, had even gone up to the street and asked hurrying college students with bulging backpacks and downtown businesspeople with briefcases. “Pardon me, sir. Excuse me, ma’am. Might this cap be yours?” If they looked at him at all, they looked at him as if he was nuts, which he was, and none of them would even touch the cap let alone claim it. So finally Julian had decided it was all right for him to keep it, and since then he’d hardly had it off his head.
Now the cap sparkled with snowflakes. His beard was white and gray, full of snow. His face sparkled. Behind and above him, snow made the city pick up all kinds of weird colors and tints, peach and blue so pale they were almost silver, purple so pale it was almost blue.
Julian slid down the slope like a little kid, whooping, and came over to her. He was cold and wet and happy. She pulled away from him. He made no move to touch her, but she pulled away from him anyway. He wrapped his arms around his legs and, smiling, looked out over the whitening river. “Back east, where I come from, this wouldn’t be called a river at all,” he informed her, as if she cared. “A body of water this narrow and shallow would be called a stream or a creek. And this certainly wouldn’t be termed a valley.”
Deborah waited, then snapped, “So what?”
Julian hugged himself in appreciation. “Oh, I just enjoy all the many variations of human experience. Don’t you?”
For a minute, hearing him say that, she did. Which was stupid, and dangerous. “Right,” she said with as much sarcasm as she could muster.
“The time has arrived for us to move,” he announced.
Deborah was instantly on the alert. “What do you mean, move?”
“This is the first snowfall.” He spread his hands again and looked up at the sky. “This cold snap won’t last long and the snow will have melted within a few days. But it’s a harbinger.”
“Move where?”
“Aye, there’s the rub.” He chuckled.
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Speak English,” she snapped.
“I’m not sure. Perhaps we can strategize together.” He sat down cross-legged beside her, always ready for a conversation. “There are numerous alternatives, but I don’t believe that any of them will work for us. One year, for instance, I actually lived in an abandoned railroad car, just like the traditional stereotype.” He chuckled. “Then for three years I was able to secure enough math tutoring hours at the college that I rented a room at the Barmouth Hotel, but last week I spoke with the lady in charge of tutoring services, a very nice lady named Veronica McCormick, and she informed me that their funding has been cut and they will not be in a position to hire any outside tutors this semester. I cannot imagine how the students will manage. Some of them—college students, mind you—have not yet mastered basic arithmetic functions, and algebra, I’m afraid, is a complete mystery to them. A sad commentary on our educational system.”
Deborah had drawn her knees up as far as she could and tried to clasp her hands around them, but her stomach was too big and she was afraid she’d hurt the baby or the baby would hurt her. She was cold. She swore she could feel the baby shivering inside her, blaming her for not keeping it warm.
“Some of my compatriots,” Julian said, “spend the cold winter days traveling by bus from one library to another. I know perhaps half a dozen of them by sight—we do not know each other personally, of course. There is one gentleman who comes to the Englewood Public Library every winter afternoon to read both Denver dailies; he seems to take a particularly avid interest in the sports page. There is an older lady whom I see regularly in the main branch of the Denver Public Library, researching somewhat esoteric topics such as the etymology of certain words in English and German and the particulars of subatomic theory.” He paused and then added, a little shyly, “Actually, I have been traveling the library circuit myself recently, researching child development and baby care.”
Deborah had been going to tell him this place was fine and she wasn’t moving anywhere. Now she didn’t.
Julian was still talking. “And then, of course, there are the shelters. It is quite true that occasionally, if the lines of the homeless and needy are not too long, one can in fact secure a meal and a place to sleep at a shelter, but there are definite disadvantages. For one thing, they are not physically safe. I’m afraid that desperation brings out the worst as well as the best in our fellow human beings, and the worst is often more —oh, noticeable, shall we say. For another thing, shelters, like all other aspects of our social welfare system, tend to be disrespectful to the point of actual psychological degradation. The system exacts too high a price for its benefits, in my opinion, in terms of invasion of privacy and other acts of dehumanization.”
Deborah’s stomach cramped. She gasped.
Julian’s odor, strong as she knew it to be, was almost lost in the cold air. She could smell the baby coming. She didn’t want it to come. She was afraid for it to come, afraid of what it would do to her getting out, afraid to bring it into this world. She tightened the muscles of her vagina. That hurt, and made her think about all the cocks and fingers and tongues that had been in there and that would be in there again before her life was over.
Under the bright green, almost new blanket Julian had found in a Dumpster behind a motel and happily brought home to her (Who’d used it, and for what? Why did they throw it away? Maybe just because it was such a gross color. It really was a gross color), she stuck her own hand inside her underwear and probed. Her cunt was different. Bigger. Shocked, she jerked her hand away, then put it back. She could feel where the vaginal walls had already stretched, and where they would have to stretch some more in order for the baby to get out.
She probed. The long nail on the little finger of her left hand, untrimmed now for weeks, probed, and she had to force herself to hold back to keep it from hurting herself and the baby. She didn’t want to hurt the baby. At the same time, she wanted it dead, wanted it dead.
Julian was watching her closely. He knew something was wrong. But he just kept talking in his singsong voice about shelter. “Also,” he was saying, “I don’t know of a shelter that would accept us both. There are some that specialize in working with homeless teenagers, but they would not allow me to stay there. There are some that house only women and children. Those that take single men require that their customers be out on the street, presumably looking for work, during daytime hours. There are a few shelters for families, but I’m afraid they would not consider you and me and the baby to be a true family. It is human nature, an instinct we must all seek to transcend if we are to realize our true potential, to rely on preset rules and definitions to help us interpret reality rather than to look at the reality itself.”
She hadn’t thought about anything like that before, and it made her mad. She didn’t know why it should; she didn’t much like the word “family,” anyway. She didn’t say anything except “Fuck.”
“And so,” Julian said, like a teacher summing up a lecture or something, “I really do not quite know what we are going to do. But it is clear that you will be giving birth soon, and that we cannot allow the baby to be born here.”
Then he just stopped talking for a while. She didn’t know if he was waiting for her to say something or what. The snow made the silence sound weird, kind of muffled and turned in on itself.
Deborah didn’t like this. Who was Julian to tell her he didn’t know what to do? That was why she was with him, because he always knew what to do. How the fuck was she supposed to know? She’d never been homeless before. She’d never been pregnant before, either.
Her mother had been pregnant. Her grandmother had been pregnant. Her great-grandmother had been pregnant—a lot of times, Deborah thought, and a really long time ago. All of a sudden and briefly, Deborah felt herself to be part of a long line of women, all of whom gave birth to monsters and to saviors.
Julian asked carefully, “Would you consider going home?”
“Sure,” she said, to shock him. Clumsily, she crawled out from under the blanket and stood up in the snow. “Let’s go.”
He peered up and out at her. He looked stupid in the stupid Broncos cap. Deborah tried to laugh at him. “I doubt that your family would accept me with open arms,” he said.
“They won’t accept me with open arms, either. But it’s my home, too, and you’re my friend.” She couldn’t believe she’d said that. Now that she had, it hovered between them, something warm and glowing. “Come on,” she said, furiously.
But he hesitated. “Tell me,” he said, “about your family.”
“We’re werewolves,” she told him at once, and then laughed.
He didn’t laugh. He asked, “How so?”
She’d started this, but she could still back off. She could pretend she’d been kidding, or hadn’t known what she was saying. Instead, she demanded defiantly, “Do you even know what a werewolf is?”
“A werewolf,” he replied carefully, watching her, “is a human being who transforms into a wolf.”
“You got it.”
“There have been were-creatures in nearly all cultures,” he went on thoughtfully, as always taking her utterly seriously. “The beast aspect of the dual nature is expressed in the form of whatever animal threatened people in the particular geographic area. Were-tigers in Asia, were-leopards and were-lions in Africa. There have even been were-snakes. The werewolf is primarily based in central European legend.”
“Well,” she said irritably, knowing he was believing her and not believing her at the same time, “we’re it. We’re werewolves. My grandmother and my great-grandmother and me. Not my mother. My mother isn’t a wolf and she isn’t a woman, either. She doesn’t know what she is. She just looks like some lady, except hairier. My mother is nothing. But the rest of us are were-wolves, and so will this baby be, if it’s a girl.”
He kept looking at her steadily. He nodded.
“You don’t seem very surprised,” she accused him.
Then he laughed, shrugged. “Oh, Deborah, I have seen a great many manifestations of human nature in my day,” he told her. “A great many expressions of transformation.”
“You don’t think I mean it. You think it’s”—she struggled for the right word from a long-ago and nearly ignored English class—”a metaphor. An allegory. Whatever.”
He was looking at her now with such gentle intentness that she thought he’d melt the snow. He was paying such attention to her. He loved her. He loved her. Deborah was suddenly enraged, and the baby in her womb kicked, clawed, was starting now to fight its way out.
“You asshole!” she shrieked, and dropped to all fours. Her body swelled and toughened. Her heart and brain exploded. She flung herself at this man who loved her, whose love she couldn’t doubt. Her mouth hit his cheek, which was cold and rough under her parted lips; she felt the hollow left by his missing teeth, pushed her face into the yielding hollows of his skull. She drew his blood, drew his blood again, felt the quick warmth of it on her tongue and its rapid cooling in the snowy air.
He didn’t fight back. That didn’t surprise her. But he was surprisingly strong, and he got away from her.
“Deborah!” he cried. The sound of his voice crying her name broke her heart.
He ran across the river to get away from her. There was no solid ice yet, and she knew his thin holey tennis shoes were getting soaked, even though the water was too shallow to go over their tops. He crawled up the other riverbank, not taking either the steps or the ramp, and disappeared into the pale towering city. She imagined his blood bright red across the snow, but the city twilight faded all colors and, anyway, snow was falling hard now, covering his footprints and his blood, covering his shadow and his scent. She let him go.
She destroyed their place. Raging, she knocked down the wooden and metal walls, which were flimsy anyway and didn’t take much force, didn’t use up much fury. Snow muffled the noise; the wood hardly made any noise, and the metal rattled a few times and then stopped. She shredded the blankets, sleeping bag, clothes, her throat clogging with wool and down. She tore apart boxes and bags of food, hurled cans into the river. She upended the grill, noticed the abrupt absence of the little heat it had generated, bent and tore it apart till nobody but she and Julian would have known what it was for.
He was gone. She’d lost him. She’d chased him away, let him go. And the baby was raging now to be born, clawing at her insides, drawing her blood for its own.
Howling, roaring, Deborah bounded out from under the bridge into the full force of the blizzard. Whipping down the river valley from the northeast, the wind and snow hit her full in the face and chest, but didn’t come close to knocking her down or even breaking her stride.
She had to go home. She didn’t have anywhere else to go.
She had to get the baby home before it was born.