In the morning she wakes up and grins at me slyly. I’ve seen a side of her that few people have. She gets up and puts her clothes back on, telling me she has to go to some meetings and that we should stay in touch. I give her my card, walk her to the door, and kiss her lingeringly, almost pinning her to the wall. Then I realize I have to let her leave.
If she wants to call me, she will.
I haven’t heard from Monica since then, but I think about her often. When I see that she’s going to be on TV, some big interview, I smile to myself, because I know more of her secrets than will ever be told to some reporter. I wonder whether she thinks of me, if she’ll give me some secret signal during the broadcast, if when they ask about her sexual appetites she’ll remember our wild night together. I hope so, because I certainly do.
If you’re reading this, Monica, I have more tricks up my sleeve.
Lots of them.
Blood and Silver
Patrick Califia
Once upon a time (and still), there was a young woman who was very tired of being treated like a little girl. Her name was Sylvia Rufina. Like most female persons in her predicament, the only available avenue of rebellion was for her to pretend to obey the commandments of others while protecting a secret world within which she was both empress and impresario. Having frequently been told, “Go out and play,” more and more, that was what she did. Her family lived in a small farmhouse that felt smaller still because of the vast wilderness that surrounded it. She was at home in this untamed and complex landscape, if only because there was nothing false or sentimental about it.
One of the games she played was “holding still.” This was a game learned under confusing and painful circumstances at home. But hidden within a stand of birches or scrub oak, she was not molested. Instead, if she learned to let her thoughts turn green and her breath slow to the pace of sap, she became privy to an endless variety of fascinating events: how beavers felled trees, how mice raised their children, the way a fox twitched its nose when it spotted a vole.
One day, when she was studying the spots on a fawn that dozed in a copse just a few dozen yards from where she held her breath, the wolf appeared. He (for there was no mistaking the meaning of his big face, thick shoulders, and long legs, even if she had not espied his genitals) was an amazing silver color, with dark black at the root of his stippled fur. His teeth were as white as the moon, and his eyes were an intelligent and fearless brown. They studied each other for long minutes, wolf and woman, until he lost interest in her silence and relaxed limbs, and went away.
The next time he came, he walked right up to her and put his nose up, making it clear that he expected a greeting of some sort. So she carefully, slowly, bonelessly lowered her body and allowed him to examine her face and breasts. His breath was very hot, perhaps because it was autumn and the day was chilly. His fur smelled of earth and the snow that was to come, and the air he expelled was slightly rank, an aroma she finally identified as blood.
Satisfied with her obeisance, he went away again, tail wagging a little, as if he were pleased with himself. This was the only undignified thing she had seen him do, but it did not make her think less of him. She appreciated the fact that the wolf did not caper, bow down, yelp, or slaver on her, in the slavish and inconsiderate way of dogs. The wolf was no whore for man’s approval. He fed himself.
She did not see the wolf again for nearly a week. But when he returned, he brought the others: two males and three females, one of them his mate. This female was nearly as large as her spouse and as dark as he was metallic, the eclipse to his moon. Some instinct told Sylvia Rufina that she must greet them on all fours and then roll over upon her back. This seemed to excite everyone to no end. She was nosed a good deal, fairly hard, licked three or four times, and nipped once. The surprisingly painful little bite came from the leader of the pack, who was letting her know it was time to get up and come away with them. It was later in the day than she usually stayed out-of-doors, and as she fled, lights came on in the little house, dimming the prettier lights that bloomed in the deep black sky.
Racing with the wolves was like a dream, or perhaps it was normal life that was a dream, for the long run with the wolf pack was a flight through vivid sensations that made everything that had happened to her indoors seem drained of color and meaning. She never questioned her ability to keep up with them any more than she questioned the new shape she seemed to wear. Her legs were tireless; running was a joy. Even hunger was a song in her belly. And when the group cut off and cornered a deer, she knew her place in the attack as if she had read and memorized a part in a play.
After they ate, most of them slept, yawning from the effort it took to digest that much raw, red meat. Unaccustomed to so much exercise and the rich diet, she slept also.
And woke up miles from home, alone, in harsh daylight. Every muscle in her body hurt, and her clothing was ripped, her hair full of twigs, leaves, and burrs. Her shoes were gone and her stockings a ruin. Somehow she made her way home, hobbling painfully, trying to think of a story that would excuse her absence without triggering a proscription against hikes in the mountains.
There was no need for an alibi. Her family had already decided what must have happened to her. She had followed a butterfly or a blue jay or a white hart and gotten lost in the woods. When she crossed the threshold and heard inklings of this story, she saw that each of her family members had picked a role, just as the wolves had memorized their dance of death with one another. And she gave herself up, too exhausted to fight back, letting them exclaim over and handle and hurt her with their stupidity and melodrama. Though a part of her sputtered indignantly, silently: Lost! In the woods! Where I’ve roamed for three-and-twenty years? I’m more likely to get lost on my way to the privy!
Unfortunately, when she had gone missing they had called upon the Hunter and asked him to search for her. He was someone she avoided. His barn was covered with the nailed-up, tanning hides of animals, and thatched with the antlers of deer he had slain. Sylvia Rufina thought it grotesque. Her father had taught her to recognize certain signals of an unhealthy interest. After having finally grown old enough to no longer be doted upon by her incestuous sire, she could not tolerate a stranger whose appetites felt revoltingly familiar. When the Hunter lit his pipe, waved his hand, and put a stop to the whining voices so glad of their opportunity to rein her in, she gaped at him, hoping against her own judgment that he would have something sensible to say.
He had brought something that would solve the problem. No need to restrict the young woman’s love of nature, her little hobbies. No doubt it gave her much pleasure to add new leaves and ferns to her collection. (In fact, she did not have such a collection, but she was aware that many proper young ladies did, and so she bit her tongue, thinking it would make a good excuse for future rambling.) The Hunter shook out a red garment and handed it to her.
It was a scarlet sueded-leather cloak with a hood, heavy enough to keep her warm well into winter. The lining was a slippery fabric that made her slightly sick to touch it. He had kept hold of the garment as he handed it to her, so their hands touched when she took it from him, and her eyes involuntarily met his. The predatory desire she saw there made her bow her head as if in modesty, but in fact to hide her rage. Even during a killing strike, the wolves knew nothing as shameful and destructive as the Hunter’s desire. She knew, then, that he had bought this red-hooded cloak for her some time ago and often sat studying it, dreaming of how she would look laid down upon it. If she wore it in the forest, she would be visible for miles. It would be easy for a hunter, this Hunter, to target and track her then.
She was poked and prodded and prompted to say thank you, but would not. Instead she feigned sleep, or a faint. And so she was borne up to bed, feeling the Hunter’s hard-done-by scowl following her supine body up the stairs like an oftrefused man on his wedding night.
It was weeks before she was deemed well enough to let out of the house. The red cloak hung in her closet
in the meantime, its shout of color reducing all her other clothes to drab rags. It would snow soon, and she did not think she would survive being stranded behind the pack, in human form, to find her way home in a winter storm. But she must encounter them again, if only to prove to herself that the entire adventure had not been a fevered dream.
Her chance finally came. A neighbor whom nobody liked much, a widowed old woman with much knowledge about the right way to do everything, was in bed with a broken leg. This was Granny Gosling. As a little girl, Sylvia Rufina had gone to Granny Gosling with her secret troubles, mistaking gray hair and myopia for signs of kindness and wisdom. Her hope to be rescued or at least comforted was scalded out of existence when the old woman called her many of the same names she had heard in a deeper voice, with a mustache and tongue scouring her ear and her long flannel nightgown bunched up painfully in her armpits. The child’s hot sense of betrayal was quickly replaced with stoicism. We can bear the things that cannot be altered, and now she knew better than to struggle against the inevitable.
Other neighbors, a prosperous married couple with a bumper crop of daughters overripe for the harvest of marriage, were hosting a dance with an orchestra. People were to come early to an afternoon supper, dance in the evening, and spend the night. Mother and father had their own marketing of nubile damsels to attend to, but their house stood closer to Granny Gosling’s than anyone else’s. They were expected to go and lend a hand. What a relief it was to everyone when Sylvia Rufina said quietly at breakfast that she thought it might do her soul a great deal of good to visit the sick and unfortunate that day. She was young. There would be other cotillions.
As the other women in the household bustled around, curling their hair and pressing the ruffles on their dresses, she made up a basket of victuals. She picked things she herself was especially fond of because she knew anything she brought would be found unpalatable by the injured granny. She helped everyone into their frocks, found missing evening bags and hair ribbons, sewed a buckle on a patent-leather shoe, and kissed her mother and her sisters as they went off, consciences relieved, to the dance. Her father, realizing no embrace would be offered, avoided the opportunity to receive one. As soon as their carriage disappeared around a bend in the road, she set off in the red cloak and kept the hateful thing on until she had gone over a rise and down the other side and was out of her family’s sight.
Then she took off the cloak, bundled it up as small as she could, and put it inside a hollow tree, heartily hoping that birds and squirrels would find it, rip it to shreds, and use it to make their winter nests. At the foot of this tree she sat, snug in the nut-brown cloak she had worn underneath the Hunter’s gift, and ate every single thing she had packed into the basket. By the time she finished her feast, it was nearly dark. Cheerful beyond measure to be free at last from human society, she went rambling in quest of her soul mates, the four-footed brothers and sisters of the wind.
Faster and faster she went as her need for them became more desperate, and the world streamed by in a blur of gaudy fall colors. The cold air cut her lungs like a knife, and she found herself pressing the little scar the wolf had left on her collarbone, using that pang to keep herself moving forward. The sun plunged below the hills, and she ran on four legs now, chasing hints among the delicious odors that flooded her nose and mouth. At last she found a place where they had been, a trail that led to their present whereabouts, and the reunion was a glad occasion. There was a happy but orderly circle of obeisances and blessings—smelling, licking, and tail wagging—and favorite sticks and bones were tossed into the air and tugged back and forth.
Then they hunted, and all was right with the world. She was happy to be the least among them, the anchor of their hierarchy. Despite her status as a novice, she knew a thing or two that could be of value to the pack. The crotchety neighbor would never be in pain again nor have occasion to complain about the disrespect of young folk or the indecency of current ladies’ fashions.
But this time, forewarned that dawn would put an end to her four-footed guise, the young woman took precautions. While everyone else turned in the direction of the den, where they could doze, meat-drunk, she bid them farewell with heartbroken nudges of her nose, and retraced her footsteps back to the hollow tree. There, she slept a little, until dawn forced her to put on the hateful red cloak again and return home. She was lucky this time and arrived well before her hungover, overfed, and overheated relations.
She thought that perhaps, with what she now knew, she could endure the rest of her life. She would have two lives, one within this cottage and the other in the rest of the world. Knowing herself to be dangerous, she could perhaps tolerate infantilization. And so she made herself agreeable to her mother and her sisters, helped them divest themselves of their ballroom finery, and put out a cold lunch for them. She herself was not hungry. The smell of cooked meat made her nauseous.
She had not planned to go out again that night. She knew that if her excursions became too frequent, she would risk being discovered missing from her bed. But when the moon came up, it was as if a fever possessed her. She could not stay indoors. She pined for the soothing sensation of earth beneath clawed toes, the gallop after game, the sweet reassuring smell of her pack mates as they acknowledged her place among them. And so she slipped out, knowing it was unwise. The only concession she made to human notions of decorum was to take the hated red cloak with her.
And that was how he found her, in the full moon, catching her just before she took off the red leather garment. “Quite the little woodsman, aren’t you?” he drawled, toying with his knife.
Sylvia Rufina would not answer him.
“Cat got your tongue? Or is it perhaps a wolf that has it, I wonder? Damn your cold looks. I have something that will melt your ice, you arrogant and unnatural bitch.” He took her by the wrist and forced her, struggling, to go with him along the path that led to his house. She could have slipped his grasp if she had taken her wolf form, but something told her she must keep her human wits to deal with what he had to show her.
There was something new nailed up to his barn, a huge pelt that shone in the full moonlight like a well-polished curse. It was the skin of her master, the lord of her nighttime world, the blessed creature whose nip had transformed her into something that could not be contained by human expectations. The Hunter was sneering and gloating, telling her about the murder, how easy she had made it for him to find their den, and he was promising to return and take another wolf’s life for every night that she withheld her favors.
His lewd fantasies about her wolfish activities showed, she thought, considerable ignorance of both wolves and women. The wolves were lusty only once a year. The king and queen of the pack would mate; no others. The big silver male had loved her, but there was nothing sexual in his passion. He had been drawn by her misery and decided out of his animal generosity to set her wild heart free. And her desire had been for the wilderness, for running as hard and fast and long as she could, for thirst slaked in a cold mountain stream, and hunger appeased nose-down in the hot red mess of another, weaker creature’s belly. She craved autonomy, not the sweaty invasion of her offended and violated womanhood. But the Hunter slurred on with his coarse fancies of bestial orgies, concluding, “After all this time I pined for you, and thought you were above me. Too refined and delicate and sensitive to notice my mean self. Now I find you’re just another bitch in heat. How dare you refuse me?”
“Refuse you?” she cried, finding her voice at last. “Why, all you had to do was ask me. It never occurred to me that such a clever and handsome man would take an interest in someone as inexperienced and plain as me. I am only a simple girl, a farmer’s daughter, but you are a man of the world.” Where this nonsense came from, she did not know, but he lifted his hands from his belt to wrap his arms around her, and that was when she yanked his knife from his belt and buried it to the hilt in the middle of his back.
He died astonished, dribbling blood. She thought it w
as a small enough penance for the many lives he had taken in his manly pride and hatred of the feral. She took back the knife, planning to keep it, and let him fall.
By his heels, she dragged him back into his own house. Then she took the hide of her beloved down from the barn wall, shivering as she did so. It fell into her arms like a lover and she wept to catch traces of his scent, which lingered still upon his lifeless fur like a memory of pine trees and sagebrush, rabbit-fear and the froth from the muzzle of a red-tailed deer, the perfume of snow shaken off a raven’s back. It was easy to saddle the Hunter’s horse, take food and money from his house, and then set fire to what remained. The horse did not like her mounting up with a wolf’s skin clasped to her bosom, but with knees and heels she made it mind, and turned its nose to the city.
Since a human male had taken what was dearest to her, she determined, the rest of the Hunter’s kind now owed her reparations. She would no longer suffer under a mother’s dictates about propriety and virtue. She would no longer keep silence and let a man, too sure of his strength, back her into a corner. The wolves had taught her much about wildness, about hunters and prey, power and pursuit. One human or a thousand, she hated them all equally, so she would go where they clustered together in fear of the forest, and take them for all they were worth.
In the city, the Hunter’s coins obtained lodging in a once-fashionable quarter of town. Down the street, she had the red cloak made into a whip with an obscene handle, cuffs, and a close-fitting hood. For herself, she had tall red boots and a corset fashioned. The next day, she placed an advertisement for riding lessons in the daily newspaper. Soon, a man rang her bell to see if she had anything to teach him. He wore a gray suit instead of the Hunter’s doeskin and bear fur, but he had the same aura of barely controlled fury. He was wealthy, but his privilege had not set him free. It had instead deepened his resentment of anything he did not own and made him a harsh master over the things that he did possess.
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