The water is slick with blood. It’s that time of year again, filled with the harsh cries of men and the brief singing of whales. Our livelihood depends on violence, on death, which isn’t much different from anyone else’s we’re just more honest about it. I have my mother’s blond hair and blue eyes. My dad is darker. They met because of a dog. His dog. A skittish mutt she thought beautiful. She told him so and then looked at him and told him he was beautiful. He thought her beautiful too but could not say it. His dog was more exuberant in his greetings, unafraid of love or the unfamiliar. He’d gaze into her eyes, enraptured. 

There’s a photo of my dad in a foreign magazine. He has a long pilot whale rope looped around his forearm. In profile his eyes lock on the sea, his face spattered with blood. This is the same man who crawled on his hands and knees in his hunger for my mom, whose dog whimpered as they made love. There is violence everywhere, even in the most intimate of acts. 

Sliding his knife into the whale was like sliding his body into hers.

She was hungry and cold, her body naked beneath red cloth. She couldn’t remember how she’d arrived here, in this forest of pine needles and snow, the air sharp in her lungs. She felt her limbs with half numb hands. She remembered fur and the heat of muscle, hunger moving through her, teeth long and curved. She remembered howls rising up into the sky and a hunt, the wet steam of fresh meat. She remembered his hands on her limbs, fierce with desire and lust like the lust for the hunt, to possess, to pull apart, her hair being pulled back, her cry of both arousal and pain. She remembered being entered, opened, her body slick with its own wet heat. She remembered being held afterward, briefly spooned as his body cupped hers, then roughly pushed away. She bit her lip in muted protest and pulled the red cloth tight around her nakedness. She was in a hut that smelled faintly of smoke, lying on straw. She got up and walked to the door, pulling it open though the cold iron latch stung her hand. She gazed out into the snow-laden forest and early morning quiet. An anger she did not understand rose and burned through her, as hot and as fierce as the lust she had felt the night before. She flung off her red riding cloak and stood naked in the doorway, her body pale and exposed. The red wool of her red riding hood lay like blood on the snow where she had flung it, her own thighs sticky with the same color. Inside her, a wolf paced, its eyes black as night. She shivered in the doorway and grabbed a blanket from the bed of straw she had been lying on, wrapping it around her. She had just turned eighteen, and with the turning of the year and the turning of the wolf that she could still feel inside her, came the man. She could say she’d been raped but it wasn’t true. She’d wanted him as much as he’d wanted her, their wolves colliding into each other at night after a day spent hunting and playing together. They’d exhausted themselves running, hunting, playing, finally falling asleep wrapped around each other in an abandoned cave. They awoke what felt like hours later, but could have been minutes or days as the sun set and the full moon rose, the camaraderie between them charged and uncomfortably intimate so that they sprang apart and growled at one another, hackles raised. She had left the cave first, her lips curled to reveal sharp white fangs and he’d let her go, his body quivering and taut. He followed her and they danced around one another, growling then silent before they leapt at each other and their bodies met with a force and a heat that stunned them both, that filled them with a hunger and a fire they could no more deny than the movement of their own blood. They howled long, low and fierce, their howls changing from the song of wolves to the cries of humans as their bodies changed. They stumbled to a hunting hut not far from the cave and fell on to a bed of straw as they took from each other and gave to each other, as they moaned and groaned, licked and bit, as their hands moved voraciously along their sweat slick skin, as his finger, then fingers, slipped inside her, as she cried out in both pleasure and pain, as he slowly entered her inch by inch and she, despite the pain, urged him on for she wanted only for him to be inside her as deep as he could go. She was amazed by how it felt to be filled by him, to move with him, their two bodies joined together. They moved slowly at first, enjoying each other before desire and pleasure overtook them and they moved faster and faster giving themselves to it until they both came, he shouting, she crying out, and then falling back on to the straw, sated and spent. He stayed inside her a few moments longer before gently slipping out. They fell asleep together, but when she awoke she was alone, knowing what she had done but not with whom.

He was a mystery to her. He was a wolf and a man and at the same time neither. She had no recollection of what he looked like. She had no name, no face for him, though she was sure that if they ever touched she’d know him. She could not recall her own name either. She looked at her body and did not recognize it, at her red riding cloak that lay like a wound in the snow. She didn’t even know why she had thrown it aside and wrapped herself instead in the blanket of a stranger, nor did she know why her clothes were strewn on the floor of this hut. She knew that as the moon deepened into fullness she changed into a wolf, a change that began five years ago at the onset of her menstruation, though her memory of the change itself was blurred. Was this where she came to change? And what of him? He was new. In the past few months they had found each other and played together but last night was the first time their play had turned sexual, bringing them back to human form. So he was a shapeshifter, too, a “skin turner” as her grandmother called it, and last night they had experienced skin turning together, from wolf to woman, from wolf to man, as if their months of playing had been in preparation for this moment of fierce and almost agonized intimacy.

She shivered and walked back into the hut, closing the door behind her. She stared at the clothes on the floor. She did not recognize her own body but she recognized her clothes, a pair of her grandfather’s woolen trousers and one of his shirts, and her wool socks and leather boots. She discarded the blanket that smelled of someone who was both stranger and lover and put her clothes on. She also knew that her horse was nearby in a small stable that had three stalls, a tack room, and a feed room filled with hay and oats. She sighed as she ran her hands through her hair and opened the door again, her eyes immediately falling on her red riding cloak that still lay in the snow. The cloak had been her mother’s and before her mother, her grandmother’s, and before her grandmother, her great grandmother’s. In truth, she didn’t know how old the cloak was, how many generations it went back. She knelt down and picked it up, wrapping herself in it as she walked to the barn. Her horse, a beautiful part Clydesdale stallion she had raised from birth, nickered a greeting as she entered and pushed his muzzle into her hand when she reached him. She murmured to him and ran her hand along his neck, feeling his winter coat soft and thick beneath her fingers. He nudged her and let out another nicker and she laughed and said, “Alright boy, I’ll get you some food.” She went to the feed room and picked up a small bale of hay, then returned to him and tossed it into his stall. He tore at it and she leaned against the stall door, watching him idly while wondering who the hut and the barn belonged to. Whoever it was took good care of it and was obligingly absent every full moon. Perhaps the hut and the small barn attached to it belonged to the man she had spent the night with. A chill ran through her at the thought. He was a stranger yet she could still feel him inside her, a pulsing deep in her core, and with it desire. She bit her lip and shifted her feet, taking in a deep breath and letting it out in a sigh. She wasn’t afraid of conceiving though she supposed she should be. She knew somehow that the same power that gave her the gift of skin turning would prevent it from happening unless she wanted it to and she emphatically did not. She did not want a child, not now, and not, she imagined, for a long time. But she wanted him. She could feel it in the heart of her womb, that ache, that absence where he should be, where she wanted him to be. She had heard tales around the village hearth fire of this kind of desire, late at night when she was supposed to be asleep, when only those who were married or had been married were supposed to be listening. But she had not experienced desire like that until now. She had heard that the king burned women for far less. She was eighteen and unmarried, her virginity priceless, and her loss of it to a stranger reason enough to rot in the king’s dungeon or burn at his witch’s stake. Shuddering, she took a deep breath and turned her attention to Barnes, who lifted his head, ears pricked forward. “Are you done there boy?” she asked, smiling at him, “I think it’s about time we went home.”

Her memory slowly returned to her, and with it, the names of those she loved. Her horse’s name was Barnes, and her grandmother’s name was Rhiannon. Her own name was Esme. Her name was the last thing her mother gave her before dying eighteen years ago, leaving Esme alone with her grandmother. She did not know her father. Her grandmother said he disappeared soon after her mother’s death, and had not been seen or heard from since. Esme pondered this as she saddled and bridled Barnes, before leading him outside and fluidly mounting him. She’d been riding almost as long as she’d been walking and it was second nature to her. The bond she had with Barnes was powerful, almost instinctive. She needed neither saddle nor bridle to ride him, but used both, knowing the strange looks she’d receive if she did not. The king was suspicious of anything outside of the ordinary, and he infected his subjects with that same suspicion. He believed in witches and warlocks, in werewolves and shape shifters, and wanted every last one hunted down and destroyed. 

Esme shuddered as she rode home. No one frightened her more than the king. If he knew of her powers she’d be dead, though more likely she’d be in his bed first. His sexual appetite was rumored to be as voracious as his desire to hunt and kill. He’d rape her and then he’d kill her, and by the time he did, she’d beg for it. She was sharply aware of that as she rode, for she was sore and tender in the most intimate of places making it almost painful to ride. She whimpered, then bit her lip to stifle the sound, glad for the early morning quiet and lack of witnesses. The forest was mostly silent as she rode home except for the songs of birds just beginning to wake and the creaking of snow-heavy tree limbs. Even Barnes’s hooves were muffled by the snow-covered ground. She and her grandmother lived in the smallest and most isolated village. It was the furthest from the king’s castle and closest to the forest. She knew every one in her village by name, and she was as fiercely protective of them as they were of her. They were like family. She and her grandmother had healed, brought into the world and eased into death many of the inhabitants of the village of Crouchend. It was unthinkable that anyone would turn them in to the king. Still, she and her grandmother told no one of their shape shifting abilities. Indeed, at the time she began turning into a wolf, her grandmother lost her power to do so. Esme was grateful there was one less secret to keep.

Distance. Safety. You might as well wear them like signs, they adorn your body so well, cover you almost like an invisible shield. You’re a fine one for masks, aren’t you? You, and your little boy smile, your innocent boy ways. Your defense lies in your openness, your naivete, your surprising purity.

Anger courses through me like another form of blood. Ever since I was a child I have fought, I have desired desperately for something to fight against. A car battery pressing painfully into my chest. I wanted pain. I formed it in my hands, pressed it against my palms. There is still an indentation in my body from that battery.

He died. He was flung from a sulky. In the chaotic midst of life he was thrown into a coma. He was wearing the wrong helmet, the beautiful one, not the practical one. He destroyed me with his death, fulfilled my need for pain for the rest of my life. Overwhelmed me with it.

My small body leaning against the door frame, I prayed for my grandmother’s life, though I never knew her, though she had beat my mom. My naked back pressed against the carpet, I closed my eyes, whispered words, hot breath against my hands. I hated clothes. Flipping through photo albums now, I see dozens of pictures of me half nude; stepping from a suit case, my mouth pouting, angry at my mom who always photographed me. My father sitting in the egg chair, haggard from work, holding me in his arms, wearing only a faded blue pair of underwear. It was like half of an enormous egg, with black felt inside.

I was twelve when I lost him.

I was twelve when I no longer knew how to hold pain in my hands.

The car battery was no preparation, the fervent prayers for my grandmother, not God, nor guilt.

I direct my anger towards you and your distance, but you could be anyone, and it always comes back to me. Am I angry at my impotence, at my inability to turn this rage into life? (Screaming his name in my mother’s arms in the middle of the night.)

Is it his beauty that makes it hard?

Is it his eyes that I see every time I look into a mirror, his body that I carry around with me, his hands that held those reigns the night he died, that move against this page as I write? Maybe it’s the love he felt for me, a crippled emotion in my body.

And so it is you I blame, you who have done nothing, you in your youth and your beauty, in your health and your joy of life, in your tentative expressions of attraction towards me I accept like live coals, holding only long enough for them to burn into my hands, before throwing them away.