My Mother is a Wolf By Meg Sefton

My mother is a wolf. She is with me at the campsite. There is a sign that specifically says do not keep food accessible to wild animals. She sits at the table and has tea with me. She is sitting on her haunches.

My mother is crying. She says there are things she never taught me: how to sew from a pattern, how to manage my accounts, how to plan for a week’s worth of shopping. Her paw is on my hand. It is warm from scrambling over the sun-kissed rock, from a blood that has become different from the way my blood runs, which is almost reptilian by comparison.

I have no feeling any more, mother, I say, no regrets. I am serving the cinnamon tea. I am serving it in delicate white china.

In the sun, my mother is beautiful. In the sun, the blue of her eyes like the sky penetrate my defenses.

I did not raise you this way, to take the hardships of your life this way, she says. I never told you it would always be the same. There are things you must do now to become who you must become.

The smoke of the fire curls up into the air. I wonder if my mother will return that evening with the other wolves, to threaten me for my meager fare — a bird shot in midflight, a rabbit caught in a snare. I wonder if she will return for me.

She had come to see me during the day at other times, and not for tea, and not for any reason. I have felt the presence of the others hovering about the trees. So far, it has not resulted in anything, only a mild abrasion on the cheek when we kissed, an unintentional scraping, drawing a faint line of blood.

I am disappointing her, I feel, and yet I cannot move on. My old life is behind me, in ruins. I mourn it as for an ancient city, burning. My beginning has no map. My mother is not the woman in the yellow dress cooking dinner for my father and my brother and sister. All histories have melted away and these old regrets live on top of the mountain. And yet, except for a few tears, my mother runs in packs at night. I know she protects me, for in the morning, there is a drop of blood in the corner of her mouth or in the web of her paws that she does not explain but wipes away on a napkin.

And yet I continue to straighten the napkins and check the egg timer for steeping.

© 2013 Meg Sefton

Meg Sefton’s work has appeared in Best New Writing, The Dos Passos Review, Danse Macabre, Dark Sky Magazine, Emprise Review, Atticus Review, and other fine journals. She received her MFA from Seattle Pacific University and lives in Central Florida with her son and their Coton de Toulear “Annie.” Her blog “Within a Forest Dark” can be found here: http://brokenwriterblog.wordpress.com She has also written and blogged under the Scandinavian pseudonyms Quenby Larsen and Gry Corvin.

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