Peter Hale: February Moon
Peter kept his humanity in a box that was small and gray and fireproof. He melted down the key years ago but had mastered the art of picking the lock. He kept it under the floorboards, under a heavy piece of furniture. It took work to get to it.
In preparation for the full moon he rolled up the thick full floor rug in his bedroom. Underneath the floor looked like the inside of a coffin belonging to someone buried alive. It was a wonder his neighbors hadn’t called the cops or that he hadn’t clawed his way down to the sweet flesh of their bellies. Perhaps even the wolf hated the tedium of moving should it give into to its pangs of hunger. Last month the moon had turned huge and red as an alpha’s eye and Peter woken up naked in the woods. The super moon tonight would be rough.
He dressed in his comfortable old Sunday morning clothes and played an old Peter and the Wolf record because he loved irony. He didn’t think about the feeling of the clawed-up floorboards against the skin of his bare feet or how everything was much louder or that he wanted to tear the apartment building apart, break it into unassembled debris, with the strength of his shoulders. He didn’t think of the part of his humanity he had locked away in a box.
Inside the box were all the things he couldn’t let go of, but couldn’t risk getting near. Things he’d extracted from his life like a bullet from a body. They were artifacts of an autopsy. The relics of a chance for Peter to be anything other than what he’d become. Peter had always kept hidey holes, most of them hadn’t lasted the years that stretched his change and his madness. Peter had tucked away those things that had survived. A family bible, a few letters, a couple tomes to magic to burn. He didn’t just store sentimental items. There was, of course, twenty thousand dollars. A little black book of people that if he needed to he could apply a little blackmail or embarrassment. He wondered sometimes if he had always been a wolf, if he had always had teeth. He’d always stored things up for the future, now his artifacts lived in the floor like a telltale heart.
He cared for it best by touching it seldom, by trying not to disturb the past until he needed to look again. The box was where he kept the bird bones of his hope, where he sharpened the knife of his resolve, where he visited his own mausoleum. The box kept his eyes open and his ears listening and his teeth bright and sharp in the darkness.
There was still a small place inside him where his goodness lived. It was bigger than even he wanted to admit to himself, and it grew larger with every second he bored of being alone. He tired of being the antisocial troublemaker he let everyone believe he was because it was better than admitting he wasn't well. Admitting how broken he still was would be like admitting that he deserved six years of emptiness and panic.
He pulled the steak he purchased from the freezer and cooked it just long enough for it to be technically not raw, he ate that one at the table with a chilled beer. The second he ate from the pan, the third he ate straight from the brown paper with his teeth long and his ears listening for competition. The wolf knew he shouldn’t be inside, that he shouldn’t be eating someone else’s hunt. He had a nephew once, too soft for his own good and all those little pups … He snarled, shook his head. His claws dug into the meat of his own thigh. His belly was full and satisfied, but his spirit was anything but. The wolf always was what it was, territorial, wounded, totally lacking in understanding of the nuances of life. It wanted to hunt but didn’t want to leave, it burned under its skin and couldn’t fit the pain in its world philosophy.
The world outside was white and cold and waiting. He stood to go and press himself against the cold glass until he felt himself again. Felt the binary of pain or not pain with the edges of his nerve ends until he could feel out the edges of himself. In the end, he washed his dishes and went into his room.
Time drifted away, the wolf wasn’t settling with a nest of old blankets on the floor, it wasn’t satisfied with a full belly and a penthouse to wander. The full moon was always like a lucid dream, but now it felt more like he was trying to dance underwater. Peter was too far gone to call anyone, and anyone he would have called probably wouldn’t have even remembered him. He needed his pack, he needed to find his pack.
