I have a scar at my shoulder. I was told a dog gave it to me when I was eight.
It is not a dog scar.
For three years I have been collecting wolf-man stories in these Appalachian mountains, certain I was studying culture, not creatures. Then he walks into my office — tall, dark, hollow-cheeked, still as stone — and he sees the scar through my cardigan, and his face does something I cannot stop thinking about.
He says his name is Marcus. It is not. He is a chaplain. Of what, he will not say.
There is a wolf inside me, he tells me. She has been sleeping for twenty-six years. His presence is waking her up. If she wakes too fast, my body cannot hold her, and I will die.
If I walk away, she goes back to sleep. I live. Safely. Alone.
Where would you go?
