He comes home early to a house full of the scent of cooking. Before he can call out a hello he hears singing. For a moment he thinks it’s the radio, but no station would carry such a reedy, wobbling voice. She’s singing her own words to the music, some piece full of sweeping strings; her diction is so imprecise he can’t tell what she’s saying. He closes the door as quietly as he can, hangs up his coat, and heads to the kitchen.

She stands there, chopping a carrot into neat discs, balanced with one foot hooked behind the opposite calf. On another cutting board there are piles of carrot, celery, tumbling blocks of potato. The cast-iron pot on the stove trails lines of steam from its edges. This close, the sound of simmering broth is nearly as loud as the radio.

“You’re early!” She wraps around him and leans so that he can feel her body move against his chest as she laughs. Behind his neck her wrists cross; she’s still holding the carrot and the knife. He puts his arms around her, then, tilts his head to feel the skin of her neck against his cheek, breathe in the smell of her hair: trees and apple cider and a hint of her tea-scented shampoo.

She pulls away, takes a moment to empty her hands, presses against him again. She slips one hand under his shirt and runs her nails across the small of his back. Her other hand is fumbling with the buttons at his collar.

He freezes, and she has two more buttons undone before she realizes. She looks up at him, bites her lip.

“The stew,” he says. She pauses, running two fingers in small circles over his back.

“It’ll keep,” she tells him.

“I wouldn’t want to interrupt.” He disengages, stepping back so that at first she’s overbalanced. She rights herself with poise, as though she hadn’t noticed in the first place. She shakes her head for a moment and her hair sweeps out like a mane. Her teeth against her lower lip are very small and white.

As he heads upstairs he hears the slam of the knife against the wooden chopping board.

the anatomy of disease.

Growing up, this is how you learn your body. When the pain is here, you have a stomachache; here, a sprained ankle. When you feel it sharp as wire, when you feel it burning, when it tugs like tidal pull. When you curl around the throb in your belly and whimper. You've never seen your insides, so you learn to imagine them as they respond to pain. Your bones themselves never hurt--mercifully--and they stand like negative images in the pulse and whirr of pain signals, dark rods around which the discomfort stretches and wraps.

You identify: blood, lymph, pus, mucus, tears. You nurse each ailment with its corresponding cure. You sip watered-down cola and press the cool damp washcloth to your forehead. You learn the words. You can say: migraine; virus; sprain; tear; break. You are your own MD.

You can diagnose and disinfect and treat and mend and fix. You have become an expert in reducing pain, swelling, discomfort, an expert in panaceas and hushed tones and tiny touches that reassure. You know it like respiration, know it in muscle memory.

It's been in you so long. It took you even longer to realize: all this can be reversed. Your past pain will inform your future violence. You know the nerves, the blood vessels. You know, exquisitely, how to wound. Knowledge that came to you on fevered afternoons in unkempt sheets crying out and sweating naked and obscene, you could wield it now like a scalpel or a laser. You could be so precise.

You put the fresh glass on the bedside table, where it begins to sweat. It's mostly ice with some coke in it, slightly flat, to soothe the stomach. You pick up the washcloth--warmer now, drier--and bend to smooth away the hair and kiss the troubled forehead before replacing it with a fresh one. Then you turn and walk back to the kitchen, where there is chicken broth waiting in a pot on the stove. You want to see if it's boiling.

there's no love lost that I can't find again

when you think about it too long you begin to feel wronged and wounded and diseased. the black foam dribbles when you press on your chest, your sutures starting to dissolve. you breathe out once in a huff and speckle the air with black.

you find yourself become a predatory and pugnacious thing. you stalk the undersides of bridges and empty highways until you find something to ruin. you seek out lovers and loners and children, runaways and people gravely ill. you weigh them all and find them wanting, leave their bodies in your dust.

the Y on your torso is starting to rot and the black stain spreads. you can watch it easily because you find yourself immune to cold these days, immune to heat or shame, and so you forgo clothes. you stumble naked into towns and terrorize until your throat is raw. you cough up chunks of lung on their flat lawns and wander on.

stray dogs track you in the road because there's always fresh meat when you're around. vultures and crows and flies swarm after you, black as your spit. your entourage bores you and when their presence rankles a bit too much you fling yourself among them and break necks and wings and crack skulls and leave the bodies for their brothers. they follow you anyway.

you break into libraries after dark and rummage through their books. sometimes you can read as clear as any time before and you leave black fingerprints and dirt between the pages--any pages, you've forgotten what you were looking for, only know that it should be here somewhere. other times the letters are just more muck and you rage, tear pages and push shelves over, throw things and shatter glass and when you're lucky set it all on fire.

you leave things burning in your wake. you leave broken glass and flyblown mounds formerly living. you discard everything, including your guts, which you hack up from time to time until your throat is clear.

one day on a flat road ringed with dust and striped with heat waves, you'll break down. it's been years, though, and that day means little now. you drool a little more tarry saliva, push a clot of something out of your decaying mouth, and you stalk on.

you can train rats to always choose a particular fork in a path

if you are diligent and patient the rat will be trained so thoroughly it won't even recognize that there is a choice

and the rat will continue to run whatever arbitrary path you've set

even after you've flipped the switch that turns on the electric shock

Sometimes I stumble; I figure, my chains must have tripped me up. I keep walking.

Midnight she gets up, furiously paces in the hallway, chewing her lips to shreds. She hunches her shoulders progressively further and further, realizes what she's doing, stands up straight for a self-conscious moment, eventually lowers her neck back down, bit by bit. The boards creak anxiously, she imagines they're aware it's the time of night reserved for silence, lowered voices, sighs, sometimes the hush of cars rushing past in the rain.

Downpour, whatever. She bares her teeth and discards her clothes in the kitchen, unbuttoning his borrowed shirt too fast. The button skitters over the floor and winds up in that awkward no-man's-land under the jutting lip of the cupboards. It won't be retrieved. She's down on all fours already and paws the screen door open, slips out with her tongue already lolling.

Wet already except that's the brilliance of it, the guard hairs slicking the water down and over, the undercoat still warm and dry and her tail lashing with pleasure. March this year came in like a lamb and is roaring out with its claws extended and its mane a stormcloud. Her breath puffs up.

If she thinks about it she knows that he's awake and probably watching her slip away, watching out the window with his knuckles white on the sill, watching with his slim figure all screaming out tension and stress. So she doesn't think about it and she's past the lawn and into the tall grass fast as she can be.

Quickly she's just another low muddled shape in the rain. The bushes and the brush take her in and she laughs, or laughs as she can. Everything wants her right now, or so her senses indicate. Everything is more and very much. The nosy wet rain that sprinkles down at her on her bare nose whispering all sorts of things, small water so different from large water, more personality, more awake, very much. She hasn't been out in too long and she knows she'll be stiff when she gets back, probably sleep downstairs on the uncomfortable couch, groan in the mornings, cook him breakfast too cheerfully to hide it. But the rain is all over and in front of her there is so much, it is wide and waiting, much better, very much.

She goes down to the edge of the shore, big water and small water both, the tide is going out and underfoot the beach is gravel and silt and seaweed sometimes, small things scuttling. Driftwood like bones. Everything all blurry because of the rain, her breath, everything paler and through all that still sometimes the tiny buds of flowers waiting for the right moment to open.

What do you do here. Running is all that's left so away from the shore, through the fields where if he's watching he'll see sometimes just a rustle or a path cut, or sometimes a flick of tail or swish of leaping back. Oh yes, sore tomorrow, and he won't like it at all.

But this is such a stupid thing to put away. She's muddier and muddier, has it been hours? Starting to get lighter. The rain doesn't seem so much fun anymore.

She slicks down before she goes to find the spare key they keep under the mat, brushes the worst of the mud off with the flats of her hands. Lord, it's cold out here; she didn't notice until she was really naked, properly naked. Unlocks the door and darts through the kitchen, muddy tip-toe prints on the clean bare floor, quick into the shower.

She's got her fingers twisted in her shampooed hair when she remembers dropping her clothes on the kitchen floor, where they weren't a moment before. She stretches the shower out as long as she can, but when she wraps herself in a towel and steps out, hoping to sneak upstairs and slip into bed, he's right there.

He hands her a bundle, the things she wore to bed, and it's only moments like this when she remembers he's taller than she is. He has this manner, something she normally admires in him, of transforming from simply sprawling and lanky into a very stiff and lean man. He doesn't say anything for a long time.

She finally just turns and walks upstairs, already starting to ache. An hour later she goes back down to make them breakfast but he's already got a plate in front of him, toast and eggs and the frying pan already washed and in the drying rack. She takes an apple and goes back upstairs without ever looking at his face.

If I'm going to talk to you about want, I'm going to do it in metaphors. Old metaphors, too, like wrists and exposed skin and my teeth itching. A flexing tongue and a sudden flood of saliva, dilating pupils, noticing the sky, momentary breathlessness, a spike in blood pressure. Or the dancing bird, the wide-eyed wildcat, the hound with its gaunt belly. Or a blank paper whispering. Or the stretch of an ancient library, tall ceilings, dusty yellow light coming down and the scent of privacy. Zippers and spit and black wolves grinning with their tongues out flat. These are all things that happen at midnight. These are all things to drool over and croon and mutter, to store in flat pockets for later days when the pillows are empty.

"Isaac!" The man clutched at his throat. "Boy, why didn't you tell me?"

Isaac shrugged and turned to look back out the window. "Girl's been a wolf as long as I've known her."

In the end they just brushed most of the ash off each other with their hands. It puffed off in clouds, streamed away in the wind, over the coming tide. It was almost dawn and the embers of the house burned fitfully, glowing bright as the wind struck them and then retreating again, shy.

Eventually they just shook themselves as clean as possible, started walking down the road, hand-in-hand, putting it behind them.

When Isaac comes into the bedroom she wakes up and uncurls just a little, moving to make space for him on the bed. He pulls off his clothes piece by piece and grows a little more distinct, a pale shape against the dark.

She pulls the covers back and he slips under them, wrapping his feet around her ankles and putting one hand on her side.

"Hey," she murmurs. He kisses her forehead. She shuts her eyes.

"Your feet are cold." She puts her hand over his. "Fingertips too. You out there again?"

He nods and moves closer to her. "Time is it?"

"Too late." She worms her fingers into his hair; here, too, there's cold air, trapped and brought inside, further evidence of where he's been. "Go to sleep."

He does, quickly--she's up a little longer, stroking his hair, his shoulders, his back, her eyes elsewhere. Against her body his feet and hands warm and thaw. Outside it's almost getting light. A bat whirrs by on its way home. He makes a soft sound in his sleep and presses against her, and she kisses his cheekbone and closes her eyes. The light on their blankets is a pale blue grey as she finally drifts to sleep.