SHORT SHORT FICTION FOR THE FULL WOLF MOON
Full Wolf Moon
Winter.
The deep silence of an empty woods, insulated by snow.
Twilight, which by the human clock is merely late afternoon.
My feet crunch along the pathway where a fresh layer of snow has erased my old footsteps. Although it is the end of light, there is still enough that I can see my breath and I stop to watch it escape in wisps. Quiet.
A tree groans in the distance.
I am walking with intention but without direction. I am walking for the woods, and for the trees; for the winter and the sound of nothingness that brings a complete focus of my attention to my own life.
My heart is beating. I am breathing, I am moving. My body is creating miracles without my conscious awareness in the cycles of life and death. I am one with nature, whether I regard it or not, and even though the green of this forest lies dormant, life is still happening in secret, underneath the veneer of immovable cold.
I reach a clearing where on summer days there is a pond, vibrant with frogs and crickets singing, and tall cattails and ferns and the periodic lily pad. Those days, the water is sludgy with algae and I must be careful not to go at dawn without my mosquito netting. Today, though, there is just a broken sheath of ice and-
My attention hones in on a steam rising above the pond. How is that, now? But this pond, and all its creatures, they are all sleeping. I know it, for I have walked these woods come spring, come summer, come autumn, come winter, all my life, and I know how the pond slumbers deeply until beauty awakes it in spring.
Then the steam is gone, and I give pause to my walk to listen, to look. Something washes over me, something that mortal words cannot quite describe, but I am changed, for I watched the pond breathe.
Like listening to someone snore from another room.
The sun is leaving the horizon soon and it is time to turn back toward home. There is a solace in these woods, though, and I miss them as soon as I begin to even think of leaving them, but to freeze out in the night air? There is no pleasure waiting for me in that experience, and so I turn, and even begin to hurry now, my footsteps disappearing into a hush. I think of home, and of the fire I will light, and an evening spent by the fire with poets and storytellers in the yellowed pages of books, and-
I stop, for in front of me, there, in the middle of the path, stands a wolf.
Blue eyes, mirroring mine, and it is too late to look away. I want to run, but I cannot move. I find myself breathing slower now, I feel my lower abdomen pulling tight and the insides of my arms tense as I search my periphery for anything- a branch- a-
The wolf steps toward me, slowly, then another step, and another. Eyes so light I am lost in them. Fear leaves my body, replaced by awe. She is lean, and she is wise. She has stopped me in nature. She plucks me out of reverie and into this moment with her, her, here in the woods. She grows closer, closer, her jaws parting, her saliva dripping. She is tall.
I am cold, but I do not shiver.
"Yes," I whisper, closing my eyes in surrender to the inevitable.
The crunch as her feet walk on. Deliberate.
Slowly, I open my eyes.
She is gone, and the light is descending rapidly now, and I want desperately to see her again, to look into her eyes, to understand something. Was she trying to tell me something? Surely she was, but nothing human, nothing in words, certainly nothing I can quite translate, and when I tell people at home, later tonight, when I call someone on the phone, or the next day at work try to relate the story, will I be true to it? Will it lose something in the words?
But I walk home, and the silent full moon rises, and as I linger at my door, off in the distance I hear a glorious, singular howl.
by Erin