Page 51 (1/2)
These days, we go to work We come home We put on dresses the color of steel and suits the color of winter We go to cafes and drink lattes hiskey and without sugar or bars where we drink whiskey without ice and without water Bars aren’t noisy anymore It’s a murmur, not a roar They keep the music turned down so we can talk So we can tell our wolf stories Outside the here the frost crackles the ja it with their breath
Calittering ice because they like it that way They watch you, when you shine Her lavender hair catches the lairl’s hair She says:
“I alking to the store for coffee We always run out; I just never think of it until it’s already gone I thought I’d get some cookies, too The kind with jauess that doesn’t matter You know, I always fuck up jokes, too Anyway, it was snowing, and I just wanted so next toas a horse, and white, so white in the snow and the streetlight, his fur so thick your hands could disappear in it All I could think of was the horse I used to love when I was a kid Boreal Myand I’d brush him and say his name over and over, and the hite like Boreal, and tall like hi because, well, shit, he’s a wolf Running toward the store, like I could still get coffee and cookies He ran with ether through the snow, his breath puffing out next to old I was red and he was gold and ere running so fast together, as fast as Boreal and I used to run; faster We ran past the store, into the park, and sno out under e—the as gone and I had just kept on running out into the frozen grass”
The wolves never cross the bridges Soht up to them, and sniff the air like Brooklyn has a es, like they accidentally came too close to the end of the world They turn around and walk back into the borough with their tails down They stop right at Queens, too They won’t cross the borders; they know their ho else, and all our friends in Manhattan wanted to coraph them, write about the, they don’t like strangers This girl Marjorie Guste wanted to do a whole installation about theht a film crew and a couple of ot a shot The wolves hid from her They jumped onto the roofs of brownstones, dipped into alleys and crawled into sewer gratings We could see where they’d gone soone, leaping across the treetops in the snow
Geoffrey, despite the nairl It’s a joke left over fro the four hundredth Jenny in her grade She’s got green sequins on, like a cigarette girl from some old movie theatre I love how her chin points, like the botto to school We were too lazy, though The way you just wake up sometimes and the house is a disaster but you can’t reot that way is that you didn’t do the dishes or pick up your clothes Every day you s and it added up to not being able to get to the door over the coffee s and paperbacks piled up on the floor But still, she was at oes both ways
She says: “Most of the time, you know, I really like them They’re peaceful Quiet
But the other week I was down on Vanderbilt and I saw one come up out of the street Like, ok, the street cracked open—you know there’s never any traffic anymore so it was just cold and quiet and the stor, and the street came open like it had popped a sea and scrabbling its hind legs against the road to get a grip on it Just like a fat little puppy It clie of the hole it had ether I looked around—you kno it is now Not a soul on the sidewalk No one else saw The wolf looked at ue lolled out, red in the snow, really red, like it had just eaten Then it trotted off I went out and touched the place where it broke through The road was hot, like an iron”
The wolves have eaten people Why be coy about it? Not a lot of people But it’s happened As near as anyone can figure, the first one they ate was a Russian girl named Yelena They surrounded her and she stood very still, so as not to startle them Finally, she said: “I’s, sometimes You can’t help it, all these old wounds co to a ho never says anything back She said: “I’m lonely,” and they ate her in the street They didn’t leave any blood They’re fastidious like that Since then I know of about four or five others, and well, that’s just not enough to really scare people Obviously, you’ll be special, that they’ll look at you with those huge eyes and you’ll understand so about each other, about the tundra and blood and Brooklyn and winter, and they’ll mark you but pass you by For ot eaten, though It’s surprising how you can get used to that I don’t knohat he said to them To tell you the truth, I didn’t know Daniel that well
Seth’s eyes have grown dark circles He carey lapels, wolf pack boy with a rat pack look The truth is I’ve known Seth since seventh grade, but we never talk about it We lived on the saian cul-de-sac, we conquered the old baseball dia steps backward until ere far too outfield to ever have to catch a ball We’d talk about poetry instead: Browning (Elizabeth only), Whit to be, what? A writer and a dancer, I guess is the official line We run with the same crowd, the crowd that has an official line, but we’re not really friends anyate French verbs and ride our bikes hoh the rain
He says: “I ca in my hallway He still had snow on his ears; he took up the whole stairwell He just stood there, looking at ets fixed flickering and popping His eyes were dark, really dark, alht actually have been purple, if I could have gotten close enough He just stared, and I stared, and I sat down on my doorstep eventually We watched each other until my shift would have ended I reached out to touch hiht I could, I just liked how black his nose was, hohite and deep his fur looked He h I am a pin in his memory and he wants to pull me out, so that the next part can be his alone, so that I can retroactively never have pulled do branches for a crown, “…of this one place I used to go when I was a kid, in the woods by s on the ground before first period, and they were always gone when I got back, like soifts The wolf looked like the kind of thing that ht have seen a bunch of sticks and moss and taken them as tribute But he didn’t let me touch him, he howled instead—have you heard one howl yet? It’s like a freight train The lightbulb shattered I went inside like that wasThe next one off”
Seth was my first kiss I never think about that anymore
I know this guy named David—he never co on a bench, his long thin hair in a ponytail, punching a netbook with a little plastic snow-cover over it The snow never stops any to track the orthat can be charted Like a subwayclose—there’s a structure, he says A repetitionHe can almost see it More data, he always needs more data
Ruben always looks sharper than the rest of us Three-piece, bow tie, pocket watch and chain, hair like a sculpture of some kind of exotic bird Soh He looks like he was born that way, like he was raised by a very serious faeneration why-can’t-you-s here more than any of us
He says: “I keep wondering why I mean, don’t any of you wonder why? Why us, why them, why here? I feel like no one even asks that question, when toI asked my uncle and he said: son, sometimes you have to just let the world be itself I askedis broken and that’s its natural state And, well, I think that’s bullshit Like, ok, it’s either zoological or rated here, or they didn’t, and they aren’t”
Camille interrupts him She puts her hand on his knee She says: “Does it matter? Does it really matter?”