by Dave Riley
***
The dead tell their stories to the wolves, but the wolves only know the words when they speak them aloud. So Rowena plucks one from the whispers in the air around her, and her mind finds a way to transmute it into speech without much of her input on the matter. She and Malak pass the flask back and forth until it’s nearly empty—have a few swigs and the tang and smell of leftover oil don’t bother so much. Dead drunk, Rowena weaves together the tale of a young girl and a young boy. Long ago, this land was farm and field, not mud and trenches, and they were neighbors. Her family raised sheep. His family grew wheat.
‘No they didn’t have a sheep spotted like a cow’ Malak shoves Rowena’s shoulder in disbelief. ‘Yes they did, it’s true’ ‘Impossible.’ Another swig at the flask. ‘Who’s ever heard of such a thing?’
Malak has shucked her coat. She sits cross-legged, fanning her tank top against her chest. Her skin glistens with the sheen of ever-present sweat. Her lip curls upwards, just a touch, where the scar traces it on the downswing towards her jaw. She has a strong jaw, good for taking a punch, for all those years when she put herself between Rowena’s body and a bully’s fists.
The girl and the boy became the woman and the man, and from there they became wife and husband, and from there they had many children. Most were terrible, as children often are, but who’s to say they shouldn’t be? They were loved all the same.
As the story goes on, Malak draws Rowena’s head into her lap. Rough fingers stroke tender patterns through her hair, and Rowena’s shoulders grow slack. The fingers undo the loose tie of her ponytail. Her brow unfurrows, her head begins to drift. They massage firmly against her scalp. Her chin dips, and she loses herself in half a stammer before giving her head a firm shake to ward away the tethers of sleep. There’s still more story to tell.
They grew old. Their bones grew tired. First the man passed, then the woman, and some of their children were swept away in tears and some of them weren’t. Either way it was a happy sadness, wasn’t it? One that comes at the end of a full life. Maybe that’s why it’s so simple for Rowena to pull this particular tale into her mind—she wants to believe, amid all the grief of all the souls that rest in this place, there are happy bodies lying there beneath the earth, ones who lived whole lives instead of wasting short ones on war. It gives her hope that she might be one of them, someday, somewhere. Still and inert; peaceful and at rest.
As the story comes to a close, she finds herself back in the real world, where Malak has laid them down atop that thin, beaten bedroll with no mind to the pebbles hidden underneath. Her nails trail against Rowena’s arm and Rowena’s cheek, quite naturally, has found the place against Malak’s chest that has always been the most comfortable.
Malak’s fingers rove upwards, underneath Rowena’s shirt, tickling over her bellybutton and further on. The cautious touches edge a forgetful sigh through the air. Dazed beneath the quilt of drink, it’s not until those searching fingers find the edges of the scars across her abdomen that Rowena pushes them away.
Malak says, “It doesn’t bother me.”
Rowena shakes her head. “It bothers me.”
And that’s always been the problem, hasn’t it?
Rowena’s palm presses down upon her stomach. The scars are rigid, the arcing stripes of the claws that long ago inlaid the infection—the curse—into her body. When she touches at them she can feel the bristle of his fur against her skin, painful as needles, stripping away everything she was, converting her to something worse.
Her eyes cloud up, even as she tells herself the memory is as distant, as powerless, as the memory of a thousand mosquito bites as she lingered in the trenches of Cerataran fields, crouching in the mud, waiting for the order to be given. Change your body, Lieutenant Sted. Become a beast, rip a gash of claw and fang across the enemy lines. Kill the opposition, save the day, and add more screaming souls to the legion of dead that cloud out your thoughts in moments like these, in the still before battle comes. We’ve no care for your pain, only your purpose. A wolf’s a tool just as much as a tank or a rifle or a bayonet. Who asks how a hammer is forged? Who asks if a hammer wanted to be a hammer in the first place?