The following is based on actual events.
The goddamn rules of the HOA. I look up and down the street, thankful for the breeze with the first smell of winter. Once it gets cooler, people will pay less attention to each other’s lawns. It’s funny. In the suburbs, you’re judged by how well you keep nature at bay––how groomed your lawn is, how the leaves are raked and not left to loam on the ground, how well-behaved your children and pets are. We’re all living in our little squares cut from nature in the delusion that we own something. We are conquistadors planting our flags with our backs to a tsunami of flora and fauna.
I’m in the yard watering plants and filling bird feeders when the HOA president walks by. He isn’t actually talking on his ironic flip phone, just avoiding me. I keep an eye on that yappy dog of his. If it strays from the sidewalk onto the yard, I’ll flatten it under my Crocs. I know he’ll let it use my lawn.
I push my hat up with a finger and nod at him. He returns the nod and looks away, feigning concentration on his call. When I look away, I can feel his eyes appraising the glossy abelia hedge on the property line, the clethra bushes lining the front porch, the white heptacodium tree I’m standing under, and the small sarcococca bushes in the planter by the gate. I’ll be damned if I’m going to plant maples and boxwood bushes like every other house up and down the street.
Stewart Calender, always quick to correct the spelling, sent me four letters over the summer about the lawn. He doesn’t like the careful combination of tall fescue and Kentucky bluegrass that’s untrimmed with the dandelions going to seed even though it’s better for the grass and encourages pollinators. He’s average height, gaunt with sharp cheekbones, his red hair receding, and always wearing ill-fitting clothes at least a generation out of date. On the weekends, he and his crappy bluegrass band play in his garage all day. I watch him walk away and imagine plunging my hand into his chest and feeding his still-beating heart to his little dog.
My .19-acre square is carved out of the old McFarland farm. Sometimes traces of tobacco and cows breeze in even though the farm has been paved over for years. I live on the corner of Osprey and Sandpiper––two birds never seen in Kentucky. The whole neighborhood is named like that: Pelican Circle, Albatross Way, Gannet Road. I’d pay anyone on this street a thousand dollars if they could pick an osprey out of a lineup.
Before going into the house, I take in the subdivision’s smell. It’s a combination of cut grass with wild onions mixed in, leftover hamburger on the grill next door, dog shit down the street where they don’t pick it up. Summers are difficult. Spending so much time outside, I start to get sucked into the suburban mindset. I rage at people leaving their garbage cans out too long after trash day, scoff at weeds springing up next door. Why does it matter? In reality, I’d rather the vines grip every house on the block and drag them down to the old gods. It’s the suburbs, the HOA, the ‘taming’ of nature. It gets to me.
I grab the mail on my way in, and as soon as I see her, back to the door, curled up in a chair with a book, it fades away. My hate and how I hate the way I hate, gone. She’s all I see, all I smell.
There’s another letter from the HOA in the mail, so I retreat to the basement. The washer and dryer are to the right of the stairs, and I pass the long table under lights where I’ll start seeds soon. I throw the letter onto my small workbench. A hidden tab behind the tools on the wall opens a secret room. Not a room, really. It’s just long enough to lie down, tall enough to stand, and wide enough to turn around. There’s a stake in the floor, six feet of it encased in cement below, a big iron chain attached to a u-lock.
I feel the itch on the inside of my skin, just a tickle at first then slowly biting up and down my body. Summer is always the worst. All the time spent outside makes something in me agitated and want to run free. With another HOA letter, I know I’ll change again soon. I don’t know what I turn into, but I’ve woken up in scenes from horror movies. Maybe I’m a werewolf, but it’s not based on the moon. It’s more hormonal. That’s right, laugh. I have a ‘period.’ It happens in a regular cycle, but stress can bring it on earlier.
Ever since I met her, I’ve been careful. She doesn’t know about the secret room in the basement. She doesn’t know what I am. Well, she must know something, but I’ve never told her. We haven’t had ‘the talk.’ We almost did one night. I’d had too much beer, but just when I started rambling, she kissed me. Maybe she knew what I was trying to say. Maybe I just look irresistible when I’m drunk. She never says anything when I spend a night in the basement. She just smiles and nods when I complain about what a big job fixing the toaster is. When she found me, I was in a bad place, letting the wolf run wild, unwashed and feral in both forms. The moment I saw her, I wanted to be ‘civilized.’ She’s never asked me to be anything but myself.
I open the latest HOA letter and see red.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
“What the hell, Stewart?” I shove him, and the wolf eats the part of me that knows it’s a mistake. “Are you seriously giving me over to a collections agency over grass?” I watch myself almost lose control. The wolf wants to eat him alive, but just like the collections agency, it would be a threat to her. I stand over him, panting, clenching my fists. He scrabbles backward on the sidewalk, clutching his dog to his chest as a shield. His eyes are swimming in fear, the smell of it squirting out of him. The slightest pang of guilt makes its way around the wolf’s jaws, and I walk away.
I pay the HOA fine just to make it go away. She doesn’t need to know. I break three pens writing the check, making a huge mess. Stewart didn’t call the police even though I had fully expected him to.
The rage over the fine stays hot as the weather cools and the lawn turns brown. Halloween and Thanksgiving come and go. The itch below my skin is chronic, and I spend most of my time hovering near the secret room expecting the change. She leaves the Sentinel out for me, it folded over to a story titled, “Livestock Mauled in Vicious
Attacks in Waddy.” Sic.
The article gives gory details of several attacks on livestock over the past week, parts of faces torn off. Several goats were mauled and later put down. Two people were chased by something into their garage and were pretty hysterical, convinced it wasn’t a dog or coyote, positive it was something supernatural since it had gotten in and out of locked pens and had made strange noises.
My eyes go back to the byline of the article over and over, Waddy Werewolf. Yokel superstition and hyperbole to sell newspapers, but nevertheless, unease crawls along my skin. The attacks happened less than two miles south of my house. The paper tells of an idea of a town meeting, making me laugh at visions of torches and pitchforks. I consider sitting in on it––it might be fun to smell all that fear in one place.
The day of the meeting, I’ve almost forgotten about it, my mind more focused on how insistent the itch is getting. I’m carrying out the trash when Willy from down the street pulls over.
“I’m gonna haveta call you back, baby.” He drops the phone from between his ear and shoulder, one free hand on the wheel, the other holding a soda and a cigarette between two fingers. He calls out the window, “Hey, man, you goin down to the town meetin?”
I have no idea why Willy talks to me. He has ever since we moved in, some kind of old-fashioned sense of neighborhood. He’s wearing an XXL North Face pullover, jeans I assume are tapered down to white New Balance sneakers, the uniform of the suburbs. I shake my head, “Naw, I don’t think so.”
“Coo, coo.” He bobs his head up and down. “I thought I’d head over and see what’s goin on. You know, about the werewolf.” He grins. “Anyway, you seen Ed’s new car over there?” He jerks his head. “He got the XLE package. Can you believe that? Just showin off. I do like that color, though…”
I look down the street. A new Camry with a temporary tag is in the driveway a few doors down. It matches every other SUV or sedan in all the other driveways, some sort of silver.
“Damn Asian cars,” Willy says. “People should buy American, amiright?” I nod and smile like he expects. “Anyway, gotta get goin. Catch ya later.” He drives off in his silver Honda. I shake my head. It’s not just nature that’s conformed in the suburbs, people conform too like roaming topiaries.
I read up on the town meeting the next morning. It sounds like a goddamn hoot. The couple suggesting the supernatural was basically shouted down by people expecting wolves or dogs or coyotes or some kind of hybrid. More concerning is how the Fish & Wildlife guy pointed out people are well within their rights to shoot an animal on their property if they feel it’s dangerous. That’s all this town needs.
Things are quiet until later in January when two sisters wrestle a pit bull that attacked their horses and dog. The next day, the owner of the pit bull comes forward saying he was not ‘the Werewolf.’ I can almost see the Jerry Springer stage the way the Sentinel describes the feud. The animal shelter refuses to release the pit until the owner can prove he wasn’t responsible.
That bothers me for some reason. I keep imagining the pit bull in the shelter. If he’s a gentle house pet, he’s lonely, scared, missing his people. The thought keeps me awake and scratching at my arms trying to soothe the itch. I don’t know what makes me do it, but I go to the basement and check on the u-lock in the secret room.
It seems to lock firmly in place, but I pull on it a few times to make sure. When I set it down, something small pings against the floor, a small pin fallen out of the lock. I pull on the lock again, and it slides open. Without that pin, it looks secure, but the lock opens with just a little effort.
I sit down, stunned. That was the one thing that made me feel secure, that she was in no danger from me or, by extension, the outside world. When I feel the change coming, I lock myself down here, content that I’ll cause no harm. How long has the lock been faulty?
Since that day with Stewart––I know it with certainty.
I sabotage the lock and myself. All that rage from the summer has snuck out, creeping along my fingers. What if something had happened to her? What if I had killed someone in the neighborhood? What if I had attacked a bunch of penned-in livestock and caused a panic in the community? Shit.
I don’t know how long I sit there with the lock in my lap. My anger chases the rest of me around and around. I did this. And now an innocent dog is in custody while it’s ten-year-old owner cries at home. I have to do something.
I can’t come forward. Who would believe it? I can’t break him out of dog jail. They’d just come looking for him again and suspect the owner. If I replace the lock and the attacks stop, that just proves his guilt. There has to be another one. It’s going to be so dangerous. What if I kill a person? Will maiming or killing other animals really balance the scales?
I do it anyway. All my anxiety and anger keep the underside of my skin humming for weeks. Every morning, I check the paper for more reports and collapse in relief and disappointment every day there aren’t. It goes on until late April, and I question the wolf’s ability to get the job done. Finally, there’s news. A calf was killed in the same way as before. I grimace. The pit bull is released. I try to summon memories of the attack, the taste of flesh and blood, a belly full of meat, but there’s nothing.
I don’t change much after that. I mostly busy myself in the yard pruning and pulling weeds. I feel a little better. I have a new unsabotagable lock in the basement, and I’m optimistic that the coming summer will be better than the last.
The talk around town has almost moved on, but the Sentinel pops back up in May that DNA results came back from one of the attack sites. It’s conclusive that the ‘Werewolf’ was a dog. Huh. I guess that’s what I turn into. Kind of disappointing.
I mull it over when the mail comes. I sort through the letters and scream internally. I think. It’s another goddamn letter from the HOA and summer hasn’t even started yet.
I wait. I know Stewart will be coming by with his dog soon. He steered clear of my side of the street for a while but eventually fell back into his old patterns.
I stalk over to him immediately and can’t stop the grin from spreading across my face when I see him cock his arm back. Finally, it’s coming to the surface. As his fist comes at me, the coiled spring in my gut snaps. I don’t even feel the impact against my cheek and teeth.
I roar and laugh and roar. I can let all of it go. The first dozen or so blows are gone, and I regret not savoring them. After that, I take my time with each strike to his face until I can’t tell what should be on the outside and what should be inside. The skin of my knuckles is all gone, just bone on mangled bone.
The red I begin to see isn’t just Stewart’s blood flying. I gasp for breath and finally stop, never feeling so spent before, so satisfied. I lie beside what used to be a man and bask in the warmest afterglow of my life.
It’s broad daylight, but I don’t care. Most of his body from the shoulders up stays on the sidewalk when I drag it into the house and drop it down the stairs. I slump into the secret room, too exhausted to lock the chain.
When I awake, it’s obvious that time has passed. Outside, the sun is just rising. I stoop over the sidewalk, but it’s clean. Licked clean. Stumbling back downstairs, I realize the body is gone too. I belch long and hard and pat my distended belly.
Don’t let the suburbs tell you anything different. We’re all animals.