Night of the Wolf

Many years ago, in the mountain village where I was born, the dark forest that surrounded us would, for a single night, awaken with a shudder from its silent, yearlong slumber. The spiderweb mists would melt away, the moon would flee from our darkened skies, and in the longest hour of night, the wolves would emerge from the shadows to descend upon our homes and roam freely amongst us. As a peaceful, farming people, our only hope was to bar the doors and huddle together in shivering corners, praying for a mercy we knew would never come. The terror would befall us each year on the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, and one whose significance was not lost on our village elders. But neither wisdom nor boldness alone could provide an answer to the riddle: why? There would be no reason for why these beasts set their will upon us, as we dared not even whisper a guess. My village chose ignorance; better to live in weakness than to die in knowledge. The elders of our tiny community had granted a name to this torment: they called it Wulfeniht, The Night of the Wolf.

“Get out of bed, you bitch!” one of the wolves howled. They’d barged into my bedroom, completely unannounced. “We’re getting hammered tonight, bro!”

“Yeah dude, quit being a puss and get out of bed,” another would growl, as he carelessly sloshed cheap beer onto the brand new fleece comforter my grandmother had given me.

I’d been lying in bed when the attack happened. My bucolic dreams of wheat as far as the eye could see came to an abrupt end when I awoke to find one of the beasts standing directly on top of me with his front paws planted menacingly on either side of my neck. I stared into the lattice of his red-stained fangs and I watched them ooze saliva. Jets of his burning breath scalded my face like steam from a nightmare tea kettle. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that his companions were rifling through my things. By my bookshelves, a thin, gray wolf stood on his hind legs and stared greedily at my prom photos from last Spring, quizzing me on such details as the color of my date’s underwear. When I failed to provide an answer, the wolves began taunting me in unison with the repeated chants of  “Friend Zone! Friend Zone! Friend Zone!”

A third wolf rummaged through my closet and sarcastically commented on my obvious lack of fashion sense with each and every item of clothing he examined. The last of my assailants attempted to log in to my laptop while barking something over his shoulder about a video he wanted to show the others called “Two Wolves, One Pine Cone”.

“Did you change your password from last year, dude? I gotta show these guys that clip,” he said before turning to his companions. “Swear to God, fellas, you’re gonna fucking puke when you see this shit.”

“Why you still laying there, bro? I’m starting to think you don’t even like hanging with us anymore, dude,” growled an annoyed voice from deep within my closet.

The wolf by the bookshelf added, “I bet he thinks he’s too cool for us now that he’s heading off to college next year and shit.”

I sighed loudly.

“Fine, fine,” I said. We were less than half an hour in, and yet I was already losing patience. “I’m getting up, all right? I’m fucking getting up!”

The leader snapped his head in my direction, clearly startled by the tone I’d used. His widened eyes and arched eyebrows tugged on his jowls and, as if raising the curtain on a stage, pulled the corners of his mouth apart to reveal a crude grin full of sharpened fangs. I hoped it had been an unintentional show of force. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What’s with the attitude, bro?” he snarled. “Forgive us for getting excited about hanging with our boy, it’s not like we’ve spent a whole year looking forward to this or anything.”

“Told you guys, what did I tell you? Now that he’s heading off to college, we’re not good enough to hang with.”

“I never said that,” I countered.

I heard a commotion downstairs, and I knew in an instant that the wolves had found their way in to my parents’ bedroom. I pictured what my mother and father must have looked like down there: cowering in a corner, wide-eyed with panic and shivering uncontrollably in their pajamas. And though I should have been alarmed by the danger my parents likely faced, I couldn’t help but marvel at the wolves’ ingenuity in besting my father’s latest security measures.

I checked my watch. A dread-filled lump swelled my throat shut and dried out my mouth. Please God, no, I thought. It was time for the beasts to crank up the party tunes, time for them to torture us with their favorite EDM tracks from the past year, from playlists with titles like Panty Dropper Mix 2.0 or 10 Songz 2 Get Blown 2. Unimaginative mash-ups using sampled beats and Nintendo sound effects would soon be blasting their way through the air, tearing apart the tranquility of the night in much the same way that their ravenous fangs tore through the soft, fleshy tissue of our leftover lasagna. Lasagna, I might add, that Mom had carelessly left sitting in the refrigerator, completely unprotected, instead of locking it up in the safe like I’d asked her to do only about a million or so times. It depressed me to no end, having to stand there and watch those wolves gorge themselves on my would-be lunch, their greedy jaws snapping up and gulping down entire chunks of lasagna with each swallow. You can’t even taste the food when you eat that way! And I’d really been looking forward to taking that lasagna to school, too. But this was no time for mourning lost Italian foods.

“Hey, where’s that sweet-ass speaker setup you had last year?” one of them howled. “You know, the one I could plug my iPhone into?”

Another interjected, “Bose system, right? Fucking class act, bro- come here, give me one, dude.” He offered an eager paw and invited me to pound him one. When I touched my knuckles to his, the wolf drew his paw back quickly and made an explosion sound with his mouth that sounded like boosh. I tried pretending I didn’t see him do that. Turning back to the first wolf, I pointed at the armoire in the living room. “It’s in there, top shelf,” I said, recalling what had taken place the prior year when this guy from my History class named Luke Reynolds made the mistake of telling the wolves that dubstep was “for queers”.

Though a good bit of time had passed since the incident, Luke still remained little more than a toddler’s drawing of his former self. The trauma of that night had persisted throughout the entire year, like a bee that chases you through a crowd and never once wavers from your trail. Last year, immediately after Luke remarked that EDM was gay, a group of rambling and nonsensical wolves cornered him and loudly argued that electronic dance music was no different from Hip Hop or Rock n’ Roll in that it, too, had upset the establishment of its time and was insanely misunderstood by the older generation, and so forth. Sensing the depths of the wolves’ humorlessness, Luke tried to extricate himself by offering to give EDM a chance by listening to what he thought would be a handful of songs at the most. He’d gravely miscalculated. There on his living room sofa, Luke paid the ultimate price, enduring hour after torturous hour, his ears assailed by mixes from “artists” like Skrillex, Tiesto, and about fifteen different people with vaguely Scandinavian-sounding names. And not a single bar of a single song was allowed to just play without the accompaniment of some inane comment from one wolf or another, the endless undertow of “Dude, dude, listen to this part right…here!” driving Luke to the very limits of his sanity. The village doctor had ruled him unfit to return to school for several months following the incident.

Hearing female voices outside my window, I instinctively peered through the curtains to see who they belonged to. They were wolves, of course, three of them. A large gray and white one crouched in the snow beside my house and wept bitterly while the other two huddled on either side and tried to console her. It was a strangely fascinating scene. I felt like I’d been granted a peek into the private corners of these monsters’ hearts, finding a familiar form of love and compassion where I’d expected to find nothing but emptiness and possibly some spray-on tanner. I wondered what else we held in common, how different from each other we really were. Perhaps the wolves deserved a second look, perhaps we’d been unfair in how we’d shunned them. Suddenly, the wolf who I thought had been crying, loudly retched and unleashed into the air a thick stream of beer-colored vomit. Before I knew what was happening, she’d snapped her head back up as if nothing had happened and yelled, “Let’s get back to the motherfucking party! Woooo hoooo!” I chided myself for having entertained such foolish thoughts.

I trudged down the stairs, closely followed by the same four wolves who’d broken in to my bedroom, feeling like the deposed president of some banana republic being paraded through the streets on my way to a kangaroo court. My parents were in the kitchen, toiling away amidst the various food requests that flew at them, trying their best not to upset any of the wolves. They’d seen firsthand what kind of damage the wolves could do, and they knew better than to provoke them. The memory of The Ragland’s kitchen and all those urine-soaked burritos stuck with my parents, though not nearly as much as the endless whining and complaining had. And so my mother and father cooked their asses off. I stood there on the stairs for a moment, watching them. Though I’d heard the story of the piss-burritos many times from my parents, their easy compliance still bothered me in some wordless way, like bones that ached before the storm’s arrival. My mother and father were so preoccupied with the pizza rolls and hot pockets that they scarcely acknowledged my presence. Or perhaps they’d just avoided eye contact because they knew what was lying in wait for me just around the corner.

“You know what time it is, bitch,” said a new wolf as he leapt at me from around the corner. His unsubtle smirk showed how pleased with himself he was over such a well-timed comment. This particular wolf was named Rex and he was one of the few wolves that I could easily distinguish from the others, though it wasn’t because of any physical characteristic of his. He was the same mix of black and gray and white as the other wolves and he wasn’t any larger or smaller than average. Rex didn’t have any scars, and there were no tell-tale injuries that might have betrayed his identity, like a limp or a clipped tail. The only way I could tell that Rex was Rex was because he was the only wolf wearing wraparound, orange-tinted sunglasses He’d worn these same absurd shades every single year- that he wore them in the middle of the night, no less, only served to make them even more noticeable. Of course, any mystery surrounding why a wolf of the forest would be wearing a pair of sunglasses was quickly dispelled by Rex himself, who would offer up an explanation to anyone within earshot.

“Dude, I’m rolling my nuts off right now,” he’d explain. “By the way, any of you cocks seen my date? My date Molly?” Rex was so proud of himself for having known the street name for MDMA. “Oh that’s right, I remember now- I swallowed that bitch!”

My relationship with Rex had always been an uneasy one. For one, he laughed at his own jokes. His own terrible jokes. At first, I tried to play along and patronize Rex, I really did.  But after a couple of years, when it had become crystal clear that he was just a tragically unfunny wolf, I found myself unable to crack even the tiniest of smiles in response to one of his knee-slappers. All I could do was just sit there and try to change the subject, but I knew it bothered him. The whole thing was about as awkward as a sudden onset of loud stomach cramps.

There was also the fact that Rex always went out of his way to challenge me in a game of Just Dance (Versions 1-4) on our Wii, with the sole intent of making me look like a fagmo, which, Rex explained, was a word he’d invented by combining the word fag with the word homo. To this day it remains one of the most baffling things I’ve ever heard. And while our contests were mostly friendly, I couldn’t help but feel a hostility lurking just beneath the surface of Rex’s challenges. I suspected that he’d been holding a bit of a grudge against me ever since that very first night; ever since, in his mind, I’d disrespected him.

Rex and several of his wolf bros had barged in to our house and were devouring an ice cream cake meant for my mother’s birthday when I came downstairs to see what was going on. There were several young female wolves there and Rex had apparently wanted to impress them, so he loudly asked in front of everyone if I’d been upstairs “jacking it”. He then pointed out to his fellow wolves that I was the kind of guy who probably jerked off three or four times a day. After their laughter faded, I replied with what I’d thought would be interpreted as a pretty good joke of my own, quipping, “According to science, ninety-five percent of all adult males masturbate, with the other five percent being compulsive liars.” As soon as the last syllables left my mouth, Rex’s amused smile hardened into what I imagined was his hunting face. With no warning, he flew at me and pinned me down on the floor. With his face mere inches from mine, Rex snarled, “I don’t do that shit, motherfucker- you take it back right now.” It took the rest of the night for me to put things back right with Rex. Even after he finally assured me we were cool, I’ve always sensed a razor-thin resentment in his eyes over the years. I learned an important lesson about the wolves back then: they were essentially humorless animals who could dish it out infinitely more than they could take it. That night also set into motion my curiosity about the wolves and their annual forays into our lives.

Wulfenicht had been a blight on my village for as long as any of the elders could remember. The wolves had been coming for so long that there was no one left who remembered life without them. This periodic crisis, nature’s sick idea of shaking things up, had always just been interwoven into our culture, our shared history. They were as much a part of our village as any landmark or tradition, maybe even more so. Wulfeniht was as core to our collective identity as, say, the ancient well first dug by our founding elders was, or the row of guillotines in the main square, or the annual Rolling of the Children celebration. And yet, strangely enough, nobody really knew why it happened, why the wolves had first decided to broach the invisible line that separated us from them, why they kept coming back, year after drunken year.

So I decided to ask.

“Hey, Rex,” I asked between breaths. “Can I ask you something?” Our eyes were both locked on to the screen in front of us, our bodies moving in approximate unison to Wham!’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, our tongues both jutting out of the corners of our mouths in the concentration face worn by most imbeciles. There was roughly a minute to go in the contest, and Rex and I were in a dead heat. When I’d selected this song for our showdown, his eyes lit up as if the family inside his head were just returning from an all-day trip to the beach. In selecting a George Michael song, I’d presented Rex with the rare gift of a layup, the free-and-clear deed to a vast, black-soiled acreage. In every direction he looked, Rex beheld miles upon miles of fertile insult farm lands.

“Why am I not surprised that you’d pick this song, bro?” Rex asked, the corners of his mouth upturned as he slipped free of self-restraint. He began to pant with excitement as quip after quip lined up at the turnstile just on the other side of his tongue. “Is there something you’ve been meaning to tell us, dude?” He laughed, his head on a constant swivel, relentlessly scanning the room for congratulatory eye contact, and each time, making none.

“I always knew you were pretty gay, bro, but this just confirms it,” he snickered. “Though it’s kind of not fair, actually, seeing as how you’ve probably danced to this song like a thousand times in your bedroom, getting a boner with your George Michael posters and shit.”

“You’ve been in my room several times, Rex, you know that’s not true.”

“You probably stash them in the closet with your homosexuality,” he gasped. Rex was nearly breathless by now. His rapid-fire zingers were overheating him like the barrel of a heavy machine gun when the targets just kept coming over the wall.

“I can pick a different song if you want,” I offered.

“No, it’s cool, keep this one,” Rex whispered, his response barely audible.

“Look, back to earlier, Rex. Can I ask you a serious question?”

“No, you can not sniff my butt,” he said, wheezing with laughter.

“This is serious, man, can you not be serious for a second?”

I paused the game with twelve seconds remaining. He growled, deep and slow, and turned his head in my direction. I had a feeling that I might wind up getting my answers in a way I’d not counted on. But this was too important to me to just leave hanging, especially since Rex and I were alone in my living room for a rare moment, and I didn’t know when I’d ever be presented with another opportunity like this one.

“Why do the wolves come into our village every year, and why do you stay away all the other nights?” I asked in a muted voice, my lips barely moved. “Why does this happen?”

He looked at me, looked directly into my eyes. Everything about him was changed, unrecognizable. His ears were active, pointed, vigilant. I watched the pupils in his wide amber eyes dilate as Rex brought me into focus. The hair on his neck and shoulders bristled, as if under the spell of some wicked tesla coil. A menacing Rex. I’d forgotten what a jarring scene it could be, how unbelievable the sight of a playmate turned cold-blooded killer.

“What did you say?” he asked. A distress signal from my closing throat alerted me to the difference between a merely pissed off and complaining wolf who, worst case, might storm out of the room to pout, and the creature of nature before me, who honored no morality, who viewed the taking of another life without judgment.

“Nothing, Rex, sorry. It was a dumb thing to ask,” I apologized. “Let’s just finish the game, ok?”

Rex gave no reply. I don’t know that he even heard me. He just continued to stare with tensed muscles and twitching lips. I could almost see the back and forth in his mind, the see saw between civility and brutality. When I realized that, in returning his threatening gaze with my own imploring one, I’d actually been challenging Rex, I quickly averted my eyes and his panting eased a bit. A tentative voice cracked the sheet of ice that covered the room.

“Everything all right in here?”

The voice belonged to a female wolf, one that I’d earlier seen Rex tracking around the perimeter of my kitchen, his ears tracing her movements, his eyes stealing nervous glances in her direction. I’d sensed a melancholy in him, and I could tell that Rex probably laid awake at nights, sighing and thinking of her. Without saying a word, Rex rose and padded over to her. I remained in front of the television on my knees, eyes lowered like a parishioner. My vision still trained at the same pattern on the rug, I heard Rex pause at the edge of the doorway.

“We’re fine,” he said. “But I want to go somewhere else, this party’s fucking dead.”

And then there was just me. The glow from the paused game projected shadows across the side of my face not awash in static. Outside, the music was receding, its thumping replaced by an increasing number of chattering voices, the sounds after last call where clusters of anxious bodies formed and plans were made in rebellion against the dawn. Daylight was approaching, and the wolves would soon be returning to the wild. My parents tiptoed in from the kitchen, their faces haggard and sagging from exhaustion.

“Oh, it’s just you,” my mother commented. “We thought Rex was still in here too.”

My father was already at work with the cleaning supplies, scanning the strange twilit shadows with the black light for any territorial markings our guests may have left behind. My mother orbited the dinner table with a trash bag and collected the empty cans and bottles like an unambitious thief. The hint of daybreak filled our home with this strange kind of bright grayness. I was stuck in a prior moment, sorting through what had just happened, confused by Rex’s sudden hostility, searching for some meaning in it.

“You okay, honey?” my mother asked, tilting a plate that held several slices of pizza, trying to judge its riskiness to go in my lunch the next day before eventually pitching it into her swollen trash bag. She looked like the Anti-Claus, like his reciprocal. It took me a moment to answer. I didn’t know if I was okay, and I had a long journey to make back from the frozen world of the past.

“I asked Rex why the wolves came down here every year,” I finally said. Both of my parents gasped. My mother dropped the bag and covered her mouth and nose with both gloved hands. My father’s chin began trembling. I could see his lower set of teeth.

I’d never experienced time quite like I did that night. For most of my life, the passage of time had been like a slow and steady stream, its smooth calmness so reliable that I never noticed the speed by which it unfolded. Time was just a constant, present and slow. Consistent. Part of the background, like air and breathing, or how I didn’t have to constantly make sure my heart was beating every second. Time never deviated. It was a straight line.

But that’s not how I experienced time that night. No, on that night, it became rubbery and elastic. Time kept stretching, slowing more slowly, as if being extruded. Its passage inched to a near halt. It was physical. It suppressed my next breath. And then time rebounded, as if something very real had snapped, slingshotting me with such a force that I was powerless to keep up, too slow to apply restraint as the past caught up with the future and returned me to my rightful present. When I told my parents what I’d said to Rex and they, in turn, revealed such an obvious fear, time must have gotten hung, as if on a loose nail or wayward thorn, because a corner of that instant remained stuck there as the rest of us moved forward, though we gradually slowed like stones tumbling uphill, the room a slowly freezing pond, in increments, until it was obvious that something had to give, that this single tick of the big hand couldn’t last forever, that a tear was inevitable somewhere. And so it was. Something gave way, and it was from inside me.

I was outside and high kneeing my way through the snow when time finally rocketed back into place, filling the pre-dawn present with fading cries from my parents. Their hearts weren’t into it, though, and they quickly gave up and went back inside. It should have been more sad than that. Overhead the stars crowd so thick that I imagine a giant mirror far away in the sky reflecting our own little lights back onto us. Steadying myself with arms stretched out to my sides, I must have looked like an infant taking my first steps as I tried my best to keep balance with each unsteady step forward. I didn’t know why I was out there. I didn’t know why I was chasing answers for questions I couldn’t even ask, out there in the unknown.

Dawn’s first long, thin shadows carpeted the snow as I crossed over into the forest. Leaving behind the sunrise to plunge headfirst back into the darkness, I must have been out of my mind, I thought. Chasing killers to ask them what? I was mere steps into the dense, crowded woods but already I felt the cold, unwelcoming eyes upon me, and I noticed that I was whispering to myself.

They won’t hurt you, they won’t hurt you. They’re all talk and they will not hurt you. 

The pines were skeletal and gaunt and so densely huddled together that, deep enough in, they allowed no light to dwell among their numbers. They were ancient misers, granting not even a sliver. Patches of snow littered the ground, and my steps produced a range of crunching sounds, muffled when my feet fell on merely dead brown pine needles. Shadows rippled at the edge of my vision. I stopped. The wind whistled overhead like a hard bow across cold strings. I could hear my own breathing and it was desperate and scared and I felt silly.

I had wanted to search for traces of the wolves, for footprints or trail or some remnant of their long retreat back to the depths. I wanted to see where they went, where they hid on all those other days when they weren’t inside my home. I needed to know why. Why they came, why we never questioned it, why I was so different than everyone else for even daring to ask these things.

But in the end, twitching and recoiling at a familiar sound behind me, the forest closed in all around, and I finally understood that knowing why would have changed not a thing about the village I lived in and the family that I loved.