(children are born)

The dew was frosting on the chilly grass, the morning light still pale.

The wolf was waiting by the garden gate. His teeth were long and bright, his tail swishing silent in the unmown grass. His unblinking eyes shone like twin moons, luminous.

The child was four years old.

The mother tore her housedress, weeping, to try and wrap the bleeding unknown wound. Her voice quavered, saying, "Hush, hush now."

The child made no sound.

The father, superstitious, saw the swollen moon there in the dawning sky. His aim did not waver, his arm true with his trusted gun.

The wolf, his hunger sated, his fine-toothed smile stained red with sweet new blood, bowed his canine head and did not try to run.

The child did not look away.

The wolf died there by the garden gate, and died a wolf, two hours too soon, before the moon had set.

Elsewhere in that sleepy town, not long after, a little girl cried for her father to come home.

In the circle of his mother's shaking arms, the four year old child slept.

(nightmares most palpable)

The thirteen year old was no longer a child, his boylegs longer and his wolf-face leaner. He paced in his self-inflicted prison and yearned to break through wooden walls and run beneath the moon, one last time.

He knew he had been caught, he would be found. He had lost his head, hadn't told the familiar lie, had left without an explanation.

They would make him leave school-- his studies, and his friends.

His mother would weep.

And then where would he go?

He wanted to bite something, wanted the satisfying tang of fresh blood on his jowls.

Nighttime was still heavy over the landscape, cold and dark against the windowpanes. He caught sight of his reflection there, layered against the night. A surge of primal anger, fear, and that everlasting hunger--

The window succumbed to a swing of his paw, and shattered. The image did not: touched by the moon, the falling shards glinted bright with a hundred tiny likenesses of himself.

He could feel the warm wetness trickling down his forelegs but did not care, bleeding was nothing new. Once a month he would rage and he would bleed, and then he would sleep peacefully again until the next time.

He licked at his wounds, his own blood sour to his tongue.

What else could he do?

So he counted the hours till dawn; waiting for the morning, waiting for the end.