You would feel bad for the wolf-man if you met him. Don’t worry: this doesn’t offend him. After all, there are some things worth pitying. The wolf-man is one of them. He attracts pity like flies to a corpse. But the wolf-man does not do himself any favors, sitting atop her grave like that. He should find some shelter from the storm. He doesn’t. Rain falls in thick slabs. Lightning strikes a nearby willow, cleaving it with heavenly imprecision. Thunder follows. Wind howls through the wolf-man’s fur. The wolf-man howls back. 

The grave is unmarked. This doesn’t concern the wolf-man. He knows whose grave it is. He made it. He is not proud of the grave. It was not built well. His wolf-man hands ensured its poor construction. In fact, there was hardly any construction involved. The grave is, after all, just a rock. But for a rock it is nice. It possesses all the pleasing qualities that fine rocks possess: it is round and smooth, and it is very cool to the touch. It is big. It is dark black in color. Anyone watching the wolf-man perch upon it now would say it is a fine rock for a wolf-man to sit atop. They would say: what a nice rock he has found, that wolf-man.

But they wouldn’t call it a grave. 

They wouldn’t say: what a nice grave he has made, that wolf-man. And they certainly wouldn’t call it a grave in a sentence like this: I’m sorry you had to make her a grave, wolf-man. I’m sorry you had to tear Myrtle’s throat out. I’m sorry that in the end all you could give her was a nice big rock that’s black and smooth to the touch. 

Rain falls from the wolf-man’s eyes in thick slabs. He howls and howls. 

***

“This is for you,” Myrtle says. She is giving the wolf-man a locket. The wolf-man opens his large wolf-man hand and closes his inky claws around it. Then: a burning. The wolf-man cries out. His nostrils flare and his honey-bee eyes drip streams of golden tears. He does not howl. He whimpers. This is a conscious choice. He holds it for as long as he can.

But the burning is too much. The wolf-man throws the locket across the forest floor. He immediately regrets it. If the wolf-man could think in rational sentences, he would think: never throw away something pretty that was given to you by someone pretty. But he cannot think in rational sentences. The wolf-man can only think in instinct: Hate the Pain. Fear the Other. Rip the Throat. Love the Myrtle. Why? There is no why. Because feel good. That why.

The wolf-man tries his best to push away instinct. This is difficult. He has been trying for a long time. He must push back against thousands of years. He looks at Myrtle with his petrified amber wolf-man eyes, blinking slowly, imparting a staccato eyelid message in wolf-man Morse code: I didn’t mean to throw it away, Myrtle. It looks nice. I want to hold it. But I am wild and it burned. Do you understand?

“I’m so sorry,” Myrtle says, and the wolf-man can tell from the tone of her voice that she is, indeed, sorry. It is a cooing, gentle hum; the kind of voice that should be accompanied by a gentle stroking of the wolf-man’s fur. 

He thinks Myrtle’s voice sounds as pleasant as roadkill tastes. 

Myrtle crosses to the wolf-man, her boots sinking through piles of soft forest mud and juniper needles, each step dredging up pine and raw earth smell. “That was stupid of me,” Myrtle says. “You poor thing. It’s silver. I didn’t think any of that was true,” she says, looking up at the sky. There is a big moon. The wolf-man thinks Myrtle’s breasts look like moons. “Well, anyway. No more silver.”

Silver? The wolf-man has never heard this word before. What is silver? What has the wolf-man ever done to hurt silver? Silver seems nice. The wolf-man likes how it sounds. He especially likes how it sounds when Myrtle says it. But silver hurts. Silver is a bad thing. He has many conflicting feelings about silver. He decides Myrtle is silver.

Myrtle opens the wolf-man’s palm and inspects it. “You poor thing,” Myrtle says again. “It burnt your hand.” Myrtle gently rubs the wolf-man’s burnt skin with her thumbs. The wolf-man thinks this feels nice.

Then it feels too nice. The wolf-man flares his nostrils and tries not to think about obliterating Myrtle. He thinks about how he should not eat Myrtle’s face. About how he should not gouge out Myrtle’s green eyes and drain their eye juice. About how he should not rip Myrtle’s scalp full of perfect raven hair from her perfect head. Above all, the wolf-man thinks about how he absolutely should not remove Myrtle’s spine and turn it into a chew toy.

The wolf-man wonders: why does Myrtle touch me so? Surely she knows the wolf-man does not have the best self-control. Surely she knows he is considering embroidering his wolf-man pelt with her skin. Surely he has communicated these thoughts. If not with words, then with his eyes. Eyelid Morse code. She must understand.

After all they’ve been through.

“I’ll get you a gold one,” Myrtle says. “To match those eyes. A gold necklace would look better on you anyway.” She strokes his fur, then stands to leave. The wolf-man whimpers. “I’m coming straight back,” Myrtle says. “With a gold necklace.” She looks down at his hand. “And some gauze.” 

The wolf-man does not know what gauze is. He hopes it isn’t like silver.

***

Tonight there is wind but no rain. The wolf-man’s shiny coat gleams under the big silver moon. He snorts once. Twice. Steamy wolf-man air drifts from his nostrils. The wolf-man takes an inky black claw and picks at what will soon be his newest scar. Flesh has already begun to surround the wound-hole. There is still blood around the hole, but it is dry and black. He chips at it like house paint. 

The wolf-man does not like to be shot.

He has been shot many times. Maybe as many times as there are wolf-men left. Maybe more. He can’t be sure. He doesn’t really know how many wolf-men are left now. And how could he? The wolf-man cannot count. The wolf-man does not understand the concept of tallying. He does not know or care about calculations or statistics. They are beyond the grasp of his inky black claws.

The wolf-man’s powers of quantification are limited: I ate a lot. I slept a little. I killed plenty. I spared few. For these reasons, the wolf-man cannot say with any certainty how many times he has been shot. But he is very certain that he has been shot plenty. 

The wolf-man does know a single number: he has only ever loved one.

***

Myrtle is the sun. She is very good at scorching people and wolf-men. On cloudless days she burns them in places like their hearts and minds and in other places too when she is in love, which is not often. The people don’t care. They love the sun. It hurts in a familiar way. 

Myrtle’s reach is all-powerful and near-infinite. The only thing Myrtle cannot touch the way she wants is the moon. The moon belongs to the wolf-man. It is the one thing the wolf-man has and he does not even know that he has it. What a special thing for the wolf-man to not know he has. If Myrtle knew how to touch the moon, perhaps she could touch the wolf-man and it wouldn’t scorch him. If she knew how to light up the sky without obscuring the moon in a hazy blue shadow, perhaps things would be better. Perhaps things would be just right. But Myrtle cannot touch the moon the way she wants and so she leaves the moon to the wolf-man. 

Metaphors are too much for the wolf-man. He must show his love in other ways.

***

The wolf-man visits Myrtle at night. This is normal. It has become a ritual of sorts. The wolf-man likes this. He likes patterns. He likes cycles. He is a distant cousin to the dog, a species that shares this special appreciation for routine: take me out at six. Feed me at seven. Walk me at eleven. Do this every day and I will not have an accident. 

Bound by genetic principle, the wolf-man engages in his ritual. He lifts his nose and welcomes the forest into his wolf-man nostrils. Raccoons eat garbage nearby. A cigarette burns quietly a mile out. A skunk has expressed itself upon a camper. These are all nice smells, of course. But they are not the smells the wolf-man is looking for. 

At last, the wolf-man finds it: Myrtle Smell. She does not smell like rose petals or lavender or anything like that. Myrtle Smell is like earthy soil. It’s one of those one-of-a-kind smells. The kind where a wolf-man could crash into her house and say: I know who lives here. The wolf-man follows Myrtle’s smell all the way out of the forest toward town. From his vantage point atop the hill he can see a gleaming collection of small homes. There is nothing romantic about it to him. To his eyes there is nothing special about a nest of people. 

He chases the smell of earthy soil into town, taking alley pathways he knows are safe and dimly lit. He is not afraid of people alone, especially not in the forest. But a town of them makes the wolf-man nervous. 

The wolf-man arrives at Myrtle’s home. He vaults the fence on the side of the house and prowls to the back where he knows a bay window awaits him. Often times Myrtle gives him a treat when he arrives. Sometimes she is out of food but her voice and hands are treats of their own. The wolf-man can feel his excitement mounting: the dog has returned to its owner. He positions himself in the bay window for Myrtle to see. Amber eyes smiling.

But what is this, this thing he sees in the window reflection? Some kind of half-Myrtle, half-man? The wolf-man demands a closer look. He opens the window with a swipe of his inky black claw. Glass falls. Myrtle screams. Half-man separates from Myrtle, naked, hairless upon the floor. He is not a half-man. He is just a man. The wolf-man asks the man his questions. Why is everyone shaking? He is just asking. It is not the wolf-man’s fault that his questions sound like wolf-man roars.

Myrtle tells him: no, no, no. She tells the wolf-man she does not need protection. She wants this. She tells the wolf-man to listen. But when has a man ever listened to a woman? 

What does the man have in his hand? The wolf-man does not like to be shot.

***

Myrtle appears from behind a tree. The wolf-man knows she was there, of course. He smells her from a mile away. He turns away from her. Seeing Myrtle stroke the man through the moonlit window hurt the wolf-man more than silver ever could.

“You poor thing.” she says. “You poor, poor thing.” The wolf-man isn’t tired of Myrtle but he is growing tired of being a poor thing. She strokes his fur and finds the blood. “There it is,” she says. “Here. Let me make it better.” Myrtle kisses the wound. This is all very familiar.

The wolf-man doesn’t remember much. He only knows what happened because it has happened many times before. Where there are men there are guns, and where there are guns there are bullets and pain. Where there is pain there is blood and where there is blood the wolf-man knows there will be a scar.

A little trickle of blood imprints itself on Myrtle’s lips. The wolf-man looks down at his forest bride and realizes that it is all too much. He howls and sheds amber tears and holds Myrtle. It is an odd sight: a wolf-man, tall and thin and covered in fur, rocking back and forth with a small woman in his arms. A supernatural high school dance. The wolf-man puts an inky black claw on Myrtle’s cheek and rests it there. 

***

They have burned him out, the wolf-man. Like the last ant on a burning log, the forest has been engulfed in fire and fat, black smoke, and the wolf-man has nowhere to run. Myrtle is sorry. She doesn’t want it to be this way. 

“He must’ve followed me,” Myrtle says. She presses a finger into his scar. She knows this is how the wolf-man remembers men. Each one is a different scar. This is the scar of the man from Myrtle’s bed. “He must’ve followed me all the way here,” Myrtle says, her face all tears. A million little lights shine in their reflective glow. Here’s a burning tree. There’s a burning tree. “He was so sweet,” Myrtle says. “They always seem so sweet.” Little burning tree lights drip from Myrtle’s tear-streaked cheeks. 

If the wolf-man could speak, he would say: 

Look, Myrtle! The Starry Night from hell. It’s in your eyes. 

***

The wolf-man cannot think about much when the barrel of a gun rests in his mouth. 

“Don’t move,” the man says. A large chunk of wood blasts off a nearby tree in a fiery display. The wolf-man blinks his amber eyes. He has never been shot in the head before. Will this be another scar? Or will it be different? “Any last requests?” the man asks.

Yes, actually. The wolf-man has a few. He wants Myrtle to be safe. And he wants the forest to stop burning. But wolf-men last requests are not like human last requests. Human last requests are wishful. They begin with I hope and I want. Wolf-men are not wishful. They are powerful. Their last requests begin with a roar and end the same way. In truth, wolf-men do not even make last requests. They simply make it so. 

The wolf-man makes it so with the swipe of an inky black claw. The man falls in a pool of rich blood. The wolf-man is not sorry for this. He is strong. The man was not. Why would the wolf-man be sorry about the way things work? 

Things make sense now. The wolf-man knows what he must do next. 

Now the wolf-man must tear Myrtle’s throat out. It is the only way to protect her, because he is strong, and she is not. This makes sense to the wolf-man. It is not beyond his grasp. If the wolf-man could talk, he would say: look, Myrtle. See this? It’s your throat. I’m sorry I had to tear it out. But you’re safe now. Okay? You’re safe now. After all we’ve been through. No one can hurt you anymore, because you are not around to be hurt. 

Only later does the wolf-man learn that you can save something and lock it away forever at the same time. 

 ***

There is a time before the gold necklace. There is a time before the house and the bay windows and the man. There is a time before the big, big rock. There is a time before the wolf-man sings his wolf-cry. There is a time when it is just the wolf-man running through the forest and smelling of mist and magic. There is a time when the wolf-man, mid-run, runs into a woman sitting at the edge of the forest, and her name is Myrtle. There is a thorn in her palm. He plucks it out with his inky black claws. 

This is a pattern in the wolf-man’s life: being Myrtle’s savior. He saves her from a thorn, a man, a burning forest. In the end he saves her from herself. But the wolf-man does not know this. He does not remember. He is genetically predisposed to forget. He is canis lupus familiaris: forever trapped in the present. He does not think in terms of past and future. He is pure instinct personified, acting on impulses and proclivities whose origin he no longer recognizes: Fear the Man. Protect the Rock. Wear the Necklace.

Be a Poor Thing. Love the Myrtle.