It’s Saturday night, and the beast has swallowed my husband. One minute he was there, the next, gone—just a shout, half smothered, as the creature engulfed him. I didn’t see the actual swallowing. I arrived seconds later, in time to see the wolfish thing licking its jowls. It’s not like anything you’ve ever seen: Eyes small and black like papaya seeds. Hispid hair covering its limbs. Claws like small sickles. Tongue: long and leathery. I would have attacked it, grabbed a fire iron or my husband’s reenactment sword if I had been feeling heroic, but there was something about the way the creature sighed, tired after its work consuming him, that made me pause and watch. It sank onto the bed, where my husband had been lying only moments before, whimpered like something lost, and seemed to take no notice of me.
When I whisper to my friends over the phone of what has happened, they reiterate the stories we’ve all heard of women in our neighborhood whose men have disappeared: the retired teacher whose husband vanished ostensibly nearby, so close that she sometimes catches glimpses of him in their driveway, at the corner store, on their street; the three young mothers whose men stay out later, later until one night they don’t return at all; the wife who claims hers was spirited away by a herd of deer. At least you know what happened, my friends say. And of course, this is true: I knew this was coming. I’d seen the creature skulking in the yard all month yet did nothing, refusing to believe it could harm us. Last week it was outside our door, and yesterday, I found its dark hairs all along the bedside. What does it mean that I saw the warning signs and did nothing but pray they’d go away, that I was somehow mistaken?
Later that day, I hear what sounds like crying, loud and guttural, and I think, if anything, the creature must be thirsty. So I creep near it with a coffee tin full of water, leave it on my husband’s nightstand, and sleep on the couch that night, one eye open, wide awake at the slightest sound. The next day, the beast still seems sleepy, so I let him stay undisturbed. I’m not surprised to find that he understands speech quite well and can answer back: mostly barely intelligible words in the deepest growl, but sometimes so like my husband that it stops my breath, sets every molecule in me spinning. Perhaps he’s stolen my husband’s voice, I think, breathed it in, preserved it, and I don’t know if this is more comfort or horror. Still, I bring him water and soup, ask if there’s anything else he needs. Is he sick? Sleep deprived? Depressed? No, he shakes his bestial head, he isn’t any of those things.
—
After a week, a strange thing happens: I’m creeping around the creature where he’s standing by the bedroom windows, when I glimpse my husband’s face behind the whorls of dark fur. It shocks me to see it because, for days now, I’ve contended with the creature alone. It’s almost as if a light is shining from somewhere inside the beast itself. The thick tangles of hair that cover the creature are illuminated, and my husband’s face flashes, barely perceptible, as if just behind a layer of skin and fur. I cry when I see it and sink down on the bed, much to the bewilderment of the beast, who prowls into the next room, growling, no patience for such emotion.
Later, I tell myself it was a trick of the light. The westerly sun often stabs through our ground-level windows, brightening all in its path. But the next day, I’m sitting on the foot of the bed while the beast—propped up on pillow—guzzles a salad I made, and I see my husband’s fingers moving inside the creature’s mouth, as though he has simply fallen into some large, black costume, a well of fur and teeth and claws.
“John?” I whisper. Then louder, shouting as if he is across some mile-wide chasm, not just an arm’s length from me. My husband’s hand stretches out like a second tongue emerging from the maw of the beast, and without thinking, I grasp for his fingers, clench and hold his hand that is warm and wet and solid and still alive.
“John!” I shout. And then the snap of jaws, the quick flight of both our hands.
—
One friend, a woman whose own husband was taken by wolves, brings me a long spear. It’s not the kind of thing you’d see someone carrying around, and even now, I wonder how she came upon it.
She lives two doors down, in a house set back from the road. When her husband was around, they had been into outdoor activities: fishing, hiking, camping, survival. I remember her laughing as she told us about her husband’s skill with a bow drill, the fire he’d made for her on their first camping excursion. Now, her eyes are filled with a wordless ferocity as she hands me the spear. She doesn’t want to say it, but I know what she’s offering.
“Sometimes there are no good choices,” she says.
I hold the spear in both hands. It’s smooth, heavy, perfectly sanded hardwood with a black metal tang and a serrated tip, like a modern arrowhead.
“Thank you,” I say, knowing she’s trying to help.
I leave the spear in the hallway and invite her in for tea. We talk about other things: about the end of summer, the failure of trash collection on our street, fall festivals we will both attend.
That night, I slip the beast the strongest sleeping pill I have, and I enter the bedroom and stand in the doorway, spear in hand. The silence is heavy, deep, and I can almost feel the texture of his dreams through his breathing. I wonder if they are fused with my husband’s, if my husband is somehow still there, in the belly, fighting to survive. I wait minutes, then I crumple with guilt and tiptoe outside, into the yard, where I hack the spear to pieces.
Inside, I begin to weave a rope. I braid it out of our bed sheets (I’ve shredded them); my husband’s childhood blanket; the quilt I made seven years ago; my own hair that I snip in long strands and bind to the rope like thread. I’ve googled “how to make a four-strand rope that won’t break,” and I work late into the night. When I finally finish, I return to the sleeping beast, use all my strength to heave his bulk up on the pillows, wondering if he’ll wake in a rage, the pills I gave him hardly enough. I sing as I work, the same song my mother used to sing to me as a child, when she would sit by me at night to say prayers, to rub my back as I fell asleep. “There’s nothing to fear,” she’d say. “All those monsters, you know, they’re just sad, afraid.” I think of this as I sing – the little melody pushing through all that is dark and terrifying – think of it as my hand hovers over the sleeping jaws, as I lower the rope down the beast’s throat and pray that my husband has the strength to grab on.
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Joy Bagliois a fiction writer currently living in Northampton MA. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, PANK, F(r)iction, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, The Vermont Studio Center, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Speculative Literature Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and her writing has been recognized by numerous contests and awards, including The Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest (Honorable Mention) and the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions. She holds an MFA from The New School and currently serves as Associate Fiction Editor at Bucknell University’s literary magazine, West Branch. She teaches at Grub Street in Boston and at Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop in Western MA, which she founded in 2016. She’s at work on a novel about identity, origins, marine scientists, and the ocean as well as a collection of speculative short stories. Find her online at www.JoyBaglio.com