overwhelm my brain. Eyes closed, nose stuffed into the crook of the leg that was once an arm, I try to block out as much as I can in order to make sense of what’s left. It takes time to identify the soft rhythmic clacking of claws and the infinitesimal creak of the floor. I pick out snufflings as wolves smell one another, the sound of fur shaking.
A damp nose touches mine. Bop. I open one eye, then the other. This time when I open my eyes, I realize that we are the last two wolves left in the Great Hall, except for another huge black one still changing under the watchful eye of the small silver wolf, who circles him, shaking out her back leg.
And a beige wolf writhing around inside a baggy shirt that reads St. Elizabeth’s College of Nursing.
I try to stand, pushing off with my hands, but forget that I have neither hands nor feet and fall backward on my coccyx. On my tail. I have a tail. Evie starts toward the door, then looks back at me expectantly. I can’t follow her. Even through the walls, I can tell that what’s out there is too much.
Evie chuffs and closes her jaws around my long nose and pulls, dragging me stumbling and sliding toward the outside and all the chirping and whispering and barking and things that don’t make any sound at all, but reverberate through the hollows of my skull.
Scents hit me like physical objects made of damp earth and crushed grass and old char and moldering pine and still water.
Evie licks forcefully at my eyes. Opening them mournfully, I catch the brightness of the stars and the rim of moonlight reflected on the torn veil of low, gray clouds and the flash of a wolf appearing in the ragged tree line who says, “Excuse the interruption, Alpha. The Pack is already running toward the High Pines, where there is news of prey.” That is what I understand, though the only sound from his mouth is Growp?
Evie sighs and bops her nose to mine. I bop back, understanding that she can’t babysit me. I’m grateful that she’s not there when I start down from the porch. That first step, as they say, is a doozy. My tail flashes in front of my eyes; the sharp edges of the stairs hit my spine. Finally, I end up face-first on the grass.
With a lurching hop, I pull myself up, my feet planted shoulder and hip width apart. Stupidly, I try to move the front feet first, then the two back ones, hopping forward a few inches before collapsing. I follow with a couple of other combinations that are only slightly better. Finally, I hit on the most reasonable progression of right front and left back forward followed by left front and right back.
Every step I take in the forest seems to release a maelstrom. The scratched surface of the rock, the broken stem of fern, the rapid heartbeat of some small animal I can’t see. Wind tells me so much as it sweeps across my fur (Fur!) and tells me its direction and whether it is saturated enough to mean rain. I feel north.
Beyond the damp woody edges and white flowers with broad heart-shaped leaves is a rotting log with an alien-looking flower sprouting from it that smells sugary and sparkles in the moonlight. Because my nose is now so appallingly long, I jam it right into the middle of the flower, getting its stickiness all over my muzzle. I slap at it with my long, flat tongue. It is sweet and my tongue is soothing on my fur.
Something uncoils from under the log, long and thin with a bright line running the length of its back. Without thinking, forelegs and hind propel me straight up as it writhes away, whip fast. The less I try to define what is around me, the more I understand of the continuum of life between what is seen and what is spoken.
The path that had been no path at all is now supremely clear to me, like the bioluminescent tide I had seen one night in Jamaica, except more complex. I take my time exploring, circling in ever-wider paths, bumping against new things, though whenever I circle close to Home Pond, I smell Cassius, followed by a changing escort. I catch sight of him once, sullen and furious in the bedraggled, muddy French terry he wore defiantly but no longer