Bad girl. Bad wolf. Bad dog. These men do not like it when I sniff at them. They think me an orphan wolf pup who rolls and plays in the clearing, heedless of the ninety-pound bobcat approaching from the shadows. They make all my grotesqueries ‘pretty’: soft cherry cola lips, bubblegum voice, strawberry lemonade cheeks, delicate, delicate hands. Among animals there is a psychic dance between predator and prey. If the prey gives a certain kind of servile eye contact, and a certain kind of shiver that causes a faint rippling of the skin over its muscles, the prey acknowledges its weakness to the predator and agrees to become the predator’s victim.
I look up at them for answers, my eyes wide, innocent.
“Ain’t she,” one man begins while taking a staggered step back, his speech slurred, his eyes bloodshot, “ain’t she? Pretty?” His breath smells of boiled rotten eggs, a burning match, raw sewage. “We hit the fucking jackpot.” He belches and it hits high on my palate. Any human would clench their throat closed, gag and retch for air. With one eye open he leans in closer, his grip loosening on the 40oz bottle he’s holding. He squints at me after stumbling back and forth, perhaps seeing double. “Like one of ‘em dolls.”
His companion looks at me like I am a deer he has chased for miles during a seasonal shortage.
I do not blame him. Wolves live a ‘feast or famine’ existence. We survive on the less fit, the most vulnerable of the deer population. The very young, old, sick, injured, the nutritionally compromised. He leers at me because he knows he can catch me.
“Can’t be no older than fourteen,” his equally-intoxicated companion says, the sound of his words running into each other. There are deeply-inflamed abscesses on his face filled with pus a few centimetres in size. He is enormous, standing at roughly six feet, nine inches. He wears pounds of muscle like armour, perfectly curved with visible popping veins. He could break a chain tied around his chest. He could lift me with one arm. “Imagine how much money she’ll make us.”
I was the bone on the road waiting for them. I have the luscious stink a dog can hardly refuse: creamy coconut and delicate pink rose petals. I rolled out of bed and directly into vats of caramel and vanilla-sugar dust.
“Whaddaya say you work with us? Be a good girl and say yes, or things’ll get ugly real fast,” the bigger one says, hoping to intimidate me with his musculature. A wise provision of nature ordains that woman shall be sought. She flees, and man pursues. Woman is endowed with a sense of shame, an invincible modesty, her greatest protection, and her greatest charm. ‘Sweet’ only makes the predator smile. I have attempted to follow the orders of my predators, but I can only comply for so long. I am not afraid of the darkest dark. I am not afraid of offal, refuse, decay, stink, blood, cold bones, dying girls, or murderous husbands.
I am no longer naïve. I am no longer a mark or a target.
“It’d be a shame if I had to knock out them pearly teeth.” And what big teeth I have. Extremely sharp so I can sheer meat away from bones, so I can grind them, crush them. They come with killer instincts, and senses so precise I can hear their beating hearts, their guttural breathing.
He stares at me, openmouthed, slack-jawed, empty-eyed. When he reaches towards me, a twisted smile stretches across his face.
“Ain’t no girl looking like that going to let herself get cornered into a dead-end alley by two guys three times her size,” the man holding the bottle says, wobbling around me. His brain is unable to communicate well with his legs. “This one is experienced, she ain’t even put up a fight. See, watch.”
He takes one last swig of his drink, feeling the burn as it coats his larynx on its way down, resting like a fire in his stomach. He punches me in the face. When he pulls his fist back, it is bowed at the wrist like a banana, having shattered all the bones in his hand. What he sees turns his blood to icy slush. His shriek is the raw sound of panic, fear, and disbelief. It lasts until he runs out of breath. He tries to suck in more air and begin again, but before he can his gut churns, caves inwards. Waves of nausea force bile into his throat. My mouth is full, overflowing with saliva.
I could have punched him back. He would have died before he felt it. I would have knocked the atoms out of him. The protons. The neutrons.
He looks back at me, his bulbous stomach bouncing as he starts to giggle from mania. He continues laughing, his chuckling turning into a loud cackle. “You worthless fucking cunt!” His face sours as he spins to look at me. “Kill this stupid bitch, Lyam!” Every hair on his companion’s body stands on end. His legs become jelly, his nerves rattling, his hands shaking. He walks towards me, each step a hesitation. As he gains confidence, he swallows the lump in his throat, afraid of what might happen if he doesn’t do what the other man says. “Kill her! Kill her!”
Before either of these men were born, I was carrying solar systems on my back and destroying them with a single sneeze. God feared I would break heaven. I could shatter a black hole.
Chords of muscle bulge in Lyam’s neck as I strike, ripping his flesh with my teeth, shredding skin with my paws. The drunkard sees the rippling of my muscles, the snapping of my canines, and the desperate look in Lyam’s eyes, the hollow, beastly expression on my face. He can hear every growl of aggression, every grunt. His eyes grow wider, wider, focused entirely on my bloodied teeth, my smirking mouth. “What the fuck, she’s not human! There’s no way she’s human, we gotta get out of here Lyam, forget it, forget this shit! Lyam! I don’t want to die Lyam!”
Lyam’s ears are torn, his hair soggy with blood. His thick body strains for breath in great heaving sighs. I stare at the other man from over Lyam’s shoulder. His eyes are fixed rigidly on me.
I do not require the nutrition that human flesh provides, I eat because I simply enjoy it. My pleasure is purely gustatory. Does a corpse have the right not to be eaten? A corpse is no different in kind from any other dead body. When someone eats you, you eat them back. When someone treats you like meat, you owe it to them to treat them the same, and eat them. By killing these men, I will make this world better than I found it.
I snap my jaws shut with terrifying strength. Blood pumps from Lyam’s neck like water from a hose. The trees around us are moving, clawing at the clouds, scratching at the noxious air as if jerked by subterranean horrors writhing and struggling below their black roots. A salty tang fills the air. It speaks of years and years of dried and matted blood, of old rotten meat, the dark breath of corruption.
I reach into his throat and pull his tongue free. It is slimy, covered in yeast. I hold it for a moment, letting it dangle from my hand, admiring it before I open my mouth and pull it away with my teeth, certain the other man can see. With both hands I feed the tongue into my mouth and begin to chew. Human tongue is a muscle, just like more common cuts of meat such as lamb shank, filet mignon or flank steak. It is much fattier, and mild. I have hunted every animal but there is no flesh like man’s. It is sweet, more subtle than game, a little softer in texture. No person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal.
The drunkard’s breath comes out in sharp gasps as he watches me feast on his friend. The fear of his own death is so close he can smell it, taste it. It is the sudden clarity of that fear that turns his body to stone. Lyam’s head clings to the body, tethered to his spine by threads. His detached head swings back and forth, hitting me in my lower back as I carry his remains to the man who fills the sky with his screams. His face dangles to the cadence of my footsteps. I’ve already eaten half of it.
Humans have been taught that death is always followed by more death. That is not so. Death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one’s existence has been cut down to the bones. Rather than seeing the archetypes of Death and Life as opposites, they must be held together as the left and right side of a single thought. While one side of the heart empties, the other fills. When one breath runs out, another begins.
There is nothing of value without death. Without death there are no lessons, without death there is no dark for the diamond to shine from.
Death must have her share.
★
Bone by bone, hair by hair, the She-Wolf comes back. Through night dreams, through events half-understood and half-remembered, She comes back. She comes back through a story about a woman who is a wolf who is not a woman. No matter where she goes, there are wolves.
All stories are about wolves. In them there is escaping from wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, throwing others to the wolves so the wolves eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Turning into the head wolf.
I cannot die, I am an indestructible aspect of the wild. My wolf bones are forever. I make and remake myself by hand.
I am inscrutable. So powerful that I do not owe allegiance to the Devil or God or even to my storytellers. I am the ultimate tester and judge, the decisive figure of this story that turns the plot in the direction I want it to go. Do not delude yourself into thinking there is an easy way to reconcile conflicts, reader. By chance or choice you have ended up here. Every word is a test. Pay attention.
Where I walk, the smell of mud and the breath of the All Creator follows. I am looking for a girl without beginning or end. I can track her by smell alone, by the swell of her lungs, by the way her feet strike the earth. I am old beyond time, older than oceans, an inimitable and ineffable force, once dead, revived. No matter how sick, how cornered, how alone, afraid, or weakened, the She-Wolf continues. I would run towards her with a bounding stride even with two broken legs.
I make my way down a pedestrian-only sloping lane free of the overhead power lines that mar the rest of Kyoto. The streets are lined with traditional wooden-façade tea houses, cafés and stores selling locally made crafts and souvenirs, the stone stairs lined with old machiya townhouses. I flash across the minds of those I pass on the street, a mix of indistinct shadows of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago. Passerby become sleepy, lie down, fall asleep, forget.
They have felt Death’s breath against the back of their necks. They have braved the clutching forests, the marching trees, the roots that trip, the fog that blinds. They are heroes with no more room to place their medals. And who can blame them? They want to rest. They deserve to rest for what they have been through, and so they lie down. They will lie awake all night longing to be brought back to me, wondering what life might be like without the experience of longing for anything at all. I am the deep drought of oblivion washing their memory, measureless in sweep. I will leave them nothing to reminisce about for eternity.
“Excuse me.” This girl holds tight to her memories, knowing I am a single moment, whole epochs, the ambiguous state of betwixt and between. She grabs me by the hand, pulls me closer. “Would you like a bouquet?” My body remembers, my bones remember, my joints remember. Memory is lodged in my body like a sponge filled with water. Anywhere my flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory flows out in a stream.
She is the Earth. Field, grapevine. I deny spring. I am a polar night, mid-November and the end of January. She offers me a fiery mix of texture and colours, bursts of orange roses and golden craspedia sparking fire amongst the cool blue tones of thistles, every petal, every leaf beckoning.
The girl smiles, and a breath of scented air comes from the hilltops and steals through the branches. “What, don’t you like flowers?” She looks lovely and round and as though drizzled with sunrise. Biting into her would be like breaking open sweet candy running with juice.
This girl is all the things that most mean spring.
“I should have picked a cooler arrangement. You have the grace and stoicism of winter. These are too warm for your chilled bones.” She hums while putting the bouquet back into her flower cart. “I take it you don’t talk much. It’s hard to carry a conversation by myself, you know. Here, I’ll introduce myself first. My name is Juniper. What’s yours?”
This body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of non-conviction. It speaks through its constant tiny dance, sometimes swaying, sometimes a-jitter, sometimes trembling. It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirit, the pit at the center, and rising hope.
Juniper is familiar. Her eyes are the smell of the grass after it has been cut. They are the feel of leaves, vibrantly alive. They slide through my hands like cool silk. They feel like a tire swing in the woods with a sunbeam for a rope. I have met her before. I know those cat-slit pupils.
I feel my soul drawn to her. Who are you really, how are you put together?
I watch, I feel, I record. I close my eyes and respond deeply to the color of her smile. “I am looking for someone.”
When I open my eyes again, I am standing beneath a yew tree split into several separate stems, giving the impression of several smaller trees. Like me, it has survived the ravages of time. The yew is male, but the sex of the tree is changing from male to female as a result of environmental stress. One of the small branches on the outer part of its crown bears a small group of berries. Its vast canopy spreads over broken gravestones, shading the mounds and furrows of the dead. Part of the tree has been savaged by the wind, cold to the touch and damp, like meat or dead flesh.
I look ahead, peering into more time than space, human skulls gleaming in sunset glow, mounted on poles thrust from neck to cranium. One of the skulls is new, still moist. On the ground beside them lay a great many more skulls, sawn off just below the eye sockets and fastened with rawhide for use as drinking cups. I bite clues down out of the air, filling up my lungs with the smells at ground and shoulder level, tasting the air to see who has passed through it recently, my ears rotating like satellite dishes, picking up transmissions from afar.
“Over here, silly.” Her hair: the smell of lavender. Her voice: the texture of velvet. This is her, the one I have been hunting. My body trembles at her wild patience. I have come for her from the other side of the Earth.
It is a mistake to think it takes a muscle-bound hero to have the tenacity to stay with me. It takes a heart that is willing to die and be born and die and be born again and again. She is not afraid to relate to the beauty of fierceness, the beauty of the unknown, the beauty of the not-beautiful. She is my quintessential wild lover who goes beyond running away. She pushes beyond the desire to find herself safe.
She weeps, her tears of passion and compassion mixed together, for herself, for me. She weeps after the accidental finding of treasure, after the fearful chase, the facing of herself, the stripping down to the bones. We love each other in fullest form, a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many many endings and many many beginnings—all in the same relationship.
“I have waited a long time for you. Here, take my heart and bring yourself to life in my life,” she says. Everywhere she goes I follow, into her home, into her consciousness. Stop running, face the wound, give me your heart, the great drum, the great instrument of the wild. I take the heart drum. She gives me the knowledge of the most complicated rhythms and emotions imaginable. Who knows what we will hunt together? We will be nourished to the end of our days.
She hits the ground with a great force from the impact of my body colliding with hers. I let out a loud, savage cry, the scream of a wild animal, as Juniper’s shrieks spike into high-pitched bursts. “Wren?” With a swipe of my claws, I slit her throat open and get a face full of arterial spray. My fingers rip through her sternum and I bend her ribs out until they sing, split. “Wren!” I rip a piece of flesh from her mangled arm, fresh gore dripping from my face in globs. “I did what you asked, I brought her here—” My teeth tear into her neck, my mouth filling with blood as she chokes and gurgles a sob. “Please.”
“Aren’t you devouring and devious!” This woman, Wren, is both a crower and a cackler. She has more animal sounds than human ones. Her whiskers sense the future, she has the far-seeing milky eye of the old crone. She lives among particularly dense, wooded growth, her hut the entrance to death. Protecting the house are death totems: a fence of human bones, spikes of human skulls with staring eyes, human legs for doorposts. Her home is a place of change and peril, where she acts as either a challenger or a helper to those who venture into her realm.
Unlike other villains who may be defeated once, never to be heard from again, Wren is not conquerable in a permanent sense. When she is defeated, she goes not to her death, but appears in the next chapter, a consistent thread in the tapestry of Division by Zero, weaving its threads together regardless of her fate.
“You feast on thunder, on lightning, how is it that you found your way to my forest?” Wren is old. Very, very old, like a woman come back from dust, old like old river, old like old pines at timberline. She laughs with her entire body, her frail, big, short-legged, short-stocked, spotted body. “It’s like you though, preying upon the innocent and the unguarded, killing to kill, never knowing when enough is enough. You kill much more than you could ever eat, much more than you could ever need.”
This old woman stands between the worlds of rationality and mythos. She is the knucklebone on which these two worlds turn. This is an inexplicable place I recognize, but its nuances slip away and shapeshift as I try to pin it down. I can smell Wren’s ravenous hunger, see her physical separation from the norms of society, taste her ancestral mother-lines in the underworld. This was my task, to return through the mists of time to the place of the Mother of Witches. Wren was expecting me.
“Sit down, Isleen Tchaikovsky.” She motions towards a moss-covered tree stump invaded by worms, infested with maggots. “I am going to tell you everything that will ever happen to you. Come on, then, find your knees.” My eyes scan the ground, my hearing sharply tuned, searching under, searching over, searching for a clue, a remnant, a sign of the one I am hunting.
Wren peels the scalp of a severed head with a knife, cracking the head open on a nearby outcrop of rock. She scoops out the brains, chops them, and throws them into a piping hot cast-iron skillet with olive oil, sliced onions, and peppers. The sound of bones crackling and the sizzle of fat makes my mouth water. God ordered the Earth: You will give birth to people and you will devour them; whatever you give birth to, you will eat, as it is yours. “You must first understand what happened at the beginning in order to know where you are going now, and why. It starts like this: you, my little crumb, are evil. You need no motivation and hardly any occasion. Your very situation as the fearless antagonist against Omnipotence makes you either a fool or a hero.”
“If I must contend, best with the best.”
Wren’s smile cracks across her face like a fissure tearing through the Earth. “You come here, fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell. The Earth trembled as you strode! What you cannot conquer by force, you will most assuredly capture by subterfuge.”
“Wren, you are going to kill her, right?” Juniper’s voice is sweet, singsong. She smiles kindly at Wren, but will gnash her teeth like a brute behind her back later. “You saw what she did to me. She hurt us both, she deserves to die.”
“Of course I saw, do you think I’m blind? Hah!” Wren shows Juniper her teeth, snaps and demands she keep up. Wren is fearsome. She represents the power of annihilation and the power of the life force at the same time. To gaze into her face is to see eyes of blood, the perfect newborn child and the wings of angels all at once. I accept this woman, wisdom, warts, and all. Though she threatens, she is just. She will not hurt me as long as I afford her respect. Respect in the face of great power is a crucial lesson.
“Dearest Juniper, this is she who lives at the end of time, she who lives at the edge of the world. She is called, in Hungarian, 0, Erddben, She of the Woods, and Rozsomdk, The Wolverine. In Navajo, she is Na’ashje’ii Asdzaa, The Spider Woman, who weaves the fate of humans and animals and plants and rocks. In Guatemala, among many other names, she is Humana del Niebla, The Mist Being, the woman who has lived forever. In Japanese, she is Amaterasu Omikami, The Numina, who brings all light, all consciousness. In Tibet she is called Dakini, the dancing force which produces clear-seeing within women. And it goes on. She goes on.”
Wren knows my past, my ancient history, and keeps it recorded in stories. She lives beneath and yet on the topside of the Earth. She lives in me, through me. I am surrounded by her, the deserts, the woodlands, this forest. “She is like me!” Wren proudly makes the comparison. “A liminal deity par excellence, dwelling between the world of the living and of the dead, who has female, male, and animal characteristics, abilities of transformation, and is dual. Both terrifying and beneficial.”
Wren offers no comforting pats on the back, but extends her gnarled, clawed hand. Her features are exaggerated, her hut is both tomb- and womb-like. Both her appearance and her actions are the embodiment of ambiguity and paradox. She is accompanied by fragments of body parts recombined into unusual compositions. A fence of human skulls. A door lock made of a jaw with sharp teeth. This reduction to substance symbolizes her all-encompassing, universal nature. She is more myself than I.
Juniper is afraid to bite back, afraid to speak up, to speak against. Sick, sick stomach, butterflies, sour stomach, cut in the middle, strangled, too nice, too meek for revenge. Afraid to stop, afraid to act, repeatedly counting to three and not beginning.
“Yes.” I vocalize my approval of Wren’s words, the tilt of my head clinical. “You are Wren, mighty earth goddess with dominion over life, over death, regeneration, time, and the elements.” I take my gaze towards Juniper, close to tears, trembling like white noise, television static. “You are puny.” What I say is true, so Juniper says nothing. “With frail hair and inability to leap up, the inability to chase. I do not see through two eyes. I am the starry night, I see the world through thousands.” The stars above successively disappear, from left to right.
“I want to leave. I did what you asked. Why won’t you let me leave?”
“Some things are God’s business!” Wren laughs, and it is the laugh of the dangerous, the uncontrollable and the uncomfortable, the forbidden, the terrible, her breasts knocking against her knees. When she is done delighting in Juniper’s discomfort, she pulls her pinched, wrinkled, sullen face back on carefully. “The littlest fly on a lump of goat shit interests me more than what you want. I have to make sure things happen the way they happen. You know your arm will move before it does.” Her gaze is practiced, amiable. She holds both her arms wide in a gesture of motherly love. “Life is a punishment. You are God pretending that you are not, reliving the same life over and over and over and over again until you have gotten it right.”
“And you,” Wren begins, bringing her wild gaze to me. “Patience. You’ll meet Kohana soon enough, volchitsa.” Kohana. My little sun, my pale gold, Koshychka. It is impossible for two people to be each other without destruction of personality bounds, by rending flesh and at last by death. She has reinvigorated me through the sheer force of longing. It is her intolerance to loss that has made me liminal. Every moment has become a search for her.
I gnash at Wren, foaming at the mouth like a mad dog, and gather Kohana to me with greedy jealousy. This is an act of consumption, of consummation. I want to merge myself with her, to sever myself from Wren, from my storytellers, from God. I cannot look down. Her features are in every cloud, in every tree, filling the air at night and caught by glimpses in every object by day. I am surrounded by her, the most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she does exist, and that I have lost her time and again. Yet, when I open my eyes, she disappears. Every element of the physical world signifies Kohana but I cannot see her.
Kohana is an existence of mine beyond me.
“I understand.” The pity in Wren’s voice plucks me from my hallucination.
Wren sees me for what I am, the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be, always haunted by the other, to divide, reject, repeat without one division, one separation, not yet, no longer yet.
“She permeates all words with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer,” Wren continues. “You have my promise, Isleen. She-wolf, she-tiger. A pitiless, wolfish girl with a half-civilized ferocity. One hope within two wills, one will beneath, two overshadowing minds, one life, one death, one annihilation. I will take you to her. Juniper and I, we are part of a three-fold form. Girl, Woman, and Widow. We reflect the complexities of the human psyche, as well as the cycles of life and death experienced by all who dwell in the multiverse.”
The number three is important in this story. The Mother, the Maiden, the Crone. The Echonianetic, the Equilinetic, the Umbrakinetic. Juniper and Wren, they are like Cerberus. Three heads.
All the color drains from her Juniper’s face. She fights off a dead faint. She knows what is coming next. “The person you seek was once in love with Juniper, some few years ago,” Wren mentions offhandedly, biting into a half-cooked sausage. Still-crackling fat gushes from her mouth, rolls down her neck. “You will find them in the depths of her chest. She has killed herself many times, to rid herself of the stench, the taint of that love, but she hasn’t died. Not yet.”
Juniper’s hair becomes matted. Her fingernails like black crescents, her skin gray, her clothes darkened and stiff with dirt, eyes red-rimmed, parched. “Alive and dead, alive and dead. Both happening so fast you can’t see the blur. It doesn’t matter which.”
Give me your heart.
I barrel into Juniper, my full weight shoving her to the ground, jaws snapping at her neck, wolf’s teeth digging deep into her throat. When I pull my head back most of her windpipe comes with it, her furiously-pumping blood squirting across the ground. Her free hand grasps at her neck, touching only hot liquid, sticky veins and pulsing meat. I pull out her slippery intestine and feed the long gray tube into my mouth, the dark venous blood of her thighs oozing into a slow-spreading pool.
Give me your heart.
Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? I always want more, to take it all in, to eat the world. It is the old greed, a plateful of outer space, that craving, to feel what God does to you when you swallow it down. To devour that which wantonly destroys even the faithful. I reach into Juniper’s chest and give her heart a comforting touch, but she doesn’t want comfort. Her heart is still warm, still beating. It looks like a fruit, a wise, ripe cherry, a ruby dripping blood, dripping with kindness. I sever the veins and arteries with a claw and lift the muscle into the moonlight, still-pounding, gleaming as I bite deep into its naked fiber.
Give me your heart.
This is what Death requires of love. I dance with Death. To love is to learn the steps. To make love is to dance the dance. My heart is a lonely hunter.