She peered into a dim mirror most days, pre-dawn, when the milky film outside her window crept over the horizon.

            She kept the light off to avoid waking her parents. In its stead, a glow from the candle her sister Laura had given her before she passed. The doctor said influenza. Helen was certain it was typhoid. Laura made a living fake drinking from cups, saucers, buckets, any vessel for liquid.

            Hrm, I’m so thirsty. I simply can’t get enough to drink.

            Only didn’t she accidentally get a mouthful of stagnant water from that silver flowerpot at Reynolds farm? With the tractors churning through the fields, the shingles on the silo silting off like dead skin.

            Who am I, sister? Yum yum yum. It smells like black licorice and tastes the same. Please, will you ready the antidote for me? Should I turn into the beast, the wolf, this evening?

            The days of typhoid had passed.

            It wasn’t the flu. It was something else.

            She examined the red bump on her face, halfway up her left cheek, flush with the ridge of her cheek bone. It had been a mole, she was convinced, before she took notice. Soft and pink like an eraser head with a sprig of hair. Her mother had the same mark on her hand, just above the fleshy spot between the thumb and forefinger, where the dog had bit her when she was younger. If her father had a mark, she didn’t know. She rarely saw him with his shirt off or in shorts. Supposedly he was ashamed of the brown hair blanketing his body.

Her mark was speckled brown and had grown into the raised ridge of the scar. A distant cousin of Helen’s beauty mark, what her mother called it, to dissuade her from picking at it.

“Not yet at least. It’s like a tooth. When it’s ready, you’ll know.”

            What had been a mole upon birth was something different.

            Each evening, she woke from a dreamless sleep, padded over the cold wood to the bathroom, careful to avoid the three spots that creaked, lit a candle with a matchstick, and went about picking at it until it ached.

—

            You spend enough time messing with the bull, you’re apt to get the horns, her dad told her when she came home from school with a bruised cheek. She’d gotten into a fight with Missy Sinclair, little Miss Priss, powder blue dress with white and gold bow in her blonde hair. So what about the dress? It wasn’t about the dress. Missy looked pretty in the dress; everyone knew that. It was the way she lorded the dress over the rest of the class, preening as she spun until the bottom lifted like a parasol, giving the boys, and girls, a glimpse of her white stockings.

            When Missy asked Helen if she’d gotten a good enough look, the class had laughed in unison, like Missy had choreographed a skit to belittle the new girl.

            Not that Helen was that new. She’d lived there a year, after relocating to Michigan from Indiana.

            To the likes of Missy, who welcomed outsiders the way scrapyard owners did, with their rifles, hounds, and “Trespassers Will Be Shot” signs, Helen would always be the new girl.

            When she asked Helen if she’d gotten a good enough look, when the class laughed in unison, Helen swung the math textbook from her waist in an arc that grazed Missy’s chin. The problem with Missy Sinclair was her beauty was matched with a wicked streak. Her right hand swung at where Helen’s face would be when her textbook missed, connecting with a dry thwap like a towel snapping in the wind.

            Missy could have turned off the lights.

            She flickered them instead the way Helen’s mom did when it was bedtime.

            That laughter was worse.

            Helen readied her textbook, calculating her parents’ reaction when they heard about the fight, how much it’d fluctuate based on how blackened Missy’s eyes were, and unclenched. Can’t keep a low profile when you knock out the 4th of July Pageant Queen.

            “Na,” she said. “Ain’t worth it.”

            She expected a second slap across the other cheek. That would’ve leveled her out. She tottered to the right, her cheek aflame. She was okay with another one. Could sell it as being rosy faced from rushing home to do her chores, so she had time to continue writing her story.

            “What’s that?” Missy asked. Where she pointed, her classmates followed.

            It was over Helen’s shoulder, maybe at a visitor churning up dust on the school’s driveway. Mr. Gimbal surprised them with weekly visitors on Fridays. It was lunchtime on Friday and no guests had arrived yet.

            Helen turned and gazed out the window. The road was empty. Two black birds flew in a circle over the school’s mailbox. The sun seethed like a heated stovetop coils in the sky.

            “No, there,” Missy said. Helen turned back. She’d made a habit of not allowing her heart to sink when others mocked her. Missy’s insistent finger guided her classmates to the same spot Helen inspected nightly.

            Try all she wanted to let the sweat roll off her back, her peers cackling at the weird spot on her face – her spot; on her face – was too much. Their rambunctious eyes pierced her heart like a porcupine. No sense in trying to remove that barb. She saw how that worked out for their first dog, Winston, when her dad pulled thirteen quills out of his bloodied muzzle.

            She felt the warmth from her slapped cheek spread to the other, both reddened with regret. Why hadn’t she simply let the spot be like her mother had told her? If she’d treated it with ointment a week ago when she was instructed the middling spot would have healed, been ready sooner.

            It didn’t matter.

            The kids were cruel. Little bitches was what she thought, but never said out loud. Her mom would be the one slapping then. But Helen’d been around long enough to know what pain children were capable of inflicting.

            All for a laugh.

            To follow a cruel individual.

            If it wasn’t her infected mole, it’d be her ratty brown braid, which she did herself by touch. “Helen, why’d you bring a garden snake with you to class? Is that Mr. Gimbal’s special guest?”

            If it wasn’t the ratty brown braid, it’d be her third-hand clothes, patched and faded, dreary next to the fancy dresses and slacks they wore. “Rumor has it Farmer Reynold’s sheep used to sleep in Helen’s blouse. Shit it in, too. Go ahead, smell it. I dare you.”

            Joke was on them. Patched and faded clothes were more comfortable than the starched garments they wore like medieval knights in plate armor iron suits.

            Mr. Gimbal had indeed been away from the classroom procuring their special guest – Ms. Joshua, owner and operator of the new coffee roaster; a first for the small village. When the two entered the room, the laughter settled into quiet snickers.

            “Na,” Helen said, scooping her books into her book bag.

            She nodded to Ms. Joshua on her way out the door. She’d purchased a cup of coffee when the shop opened during July. The black liquid made her heart thrum like electricity through her veins. She imagined that’s what a caterpillar sensed in a cocoon. How much energy did it take to transform one being into an entirely different one?

            And why hadn’t they done that science experiment yet? There were enough fields and trees, shrubs and flowers, for every kid to make a hundred butterflies. If she lived long enough, she’d birth her own habitat of Monarch butterflies. They’d read about them in class but done nothing about the threatened extinction.

            “There’s only so much of each creature,” was something she could say out loud in front of her parents. “And I’m going to do something about it.”

            “You do that,” was what her dad said before embarking on a trip to the bait shop. His weekly fishing trip yielded two meals minimum. Helen ate fish, but preferred burgers.

            “Why don’t you do something about your hair,” was her mom’s response to reversing the path of extinction for the Monarch butterfly. “Like a damn rat’s nest. Grab me a bottle of wine, Clark. I know you’re stopping there anyway. The one with the confused crab on the label.”

—

When she left class, she didn’t plan on going home right away. It was a five-mile walk, and one she’d done plenty, shine or rain, that’s how they did it back then. Before her legs grew, it took her over two hours at full pace, long strides to keep up with Laura. Healthy Laura. When she got sick, dad drove her in his pick-up. Until she kept coughing up blood in class and parents complained about contamination.

            Not that it could spread.

            That’s not how it worked.

            When Helen sprouted overnight like the shrubs in their backyard grew after a downpour, Laura was long gone. Helen strode how she remembered Laura striding, in long bounds like a cheetah or some other animal they said humans released in a jungle had no hope of running from. Her steps matched Laura’s steps. She’d look for them under the tire tracks in the dirt. Every journey Laura took stamped into the path she’d made hers.

            Laura’d had a spot like Helen’s, only on her hip. She said Helen could touch it just once. It throbbed under her finger like something breathing faintly under her skin.

            “Probably ate too much,” Helen’d say.

            “Na,” was all Laura would say, and then she’d rub lotion into the spot.

            Helen’s long legs the day she left class would have returned her home in an hour and twenty minutes. She’d be sweating for sure, but no one, not the least her mother, could accuse her of dilly dallying.

            They lived a straight five miles north of the school. As it stood, her legs took her an hour and twenty minutes east, out by the dam and power plant that fed electricity to the village and the greater southwest corner of the state. She took the left fork at Main, ate a handful of granola, chased it with warm tap water from her bottle, and hustled towards the gravel pits.

            Her and Laura played in the pits during summer break and on most weekends. Anything to get outside the house. The night before, they’d fill a milk jug half full of water and toss it in the ice box. Then they’d take turns carrying it seven miles walk from their house. Mr. Reynolds waved his gloved hand as they passed through his yard. The cows mooed. The sheep baad. The pigs snorted. She remembered thinking if she ever had a child, she’d bring it to Mr. Reynolds’ farm to teach it the noises animals made.

            A group of local kids constructed a dirt bike course around the upper exterior of the pit. Natural mounds had formed when the excavator dug sand and gravel from the earth. Enough spilled from the excavator’s bucket to create what any teenager could turn into a launch ramp. When the excavators leeched enough aggregate to yield materials for nearby towns with stronger infrastructure than their village, they pulled out and forgot about the hole they’d carved.

            Doesn’t take kids long to make a playground.

            Laura and Helen made sure to get to the pits early enough to enjoy silence around the pond that had filled in the north corner. Someone had stocked the pond with fathead minnows and goldfish. One time they rode to the pits with their dad to bring a bucket of sunfish. He left them to their wits and wishes, reminding them to be home by dusk.

            Toads and tadpoles lived there, too, because nature did as nature does. She and Laura sat on logs and proposed solutions to complicated problems.

            Laura poked a stick into the center of an algae patch that floated on the clear water like a green eye. The algae crept up the bark and clung to it like a disease. “Suppose you have a hole in your ceiling. The neighbor ran the water in their bath and went to see about something else. Fell asleep. The tub overflowed and soaked through the floor, wetting the wood. By the time you hear the crack of splitting wood, it’s too late. The tub’s crashed down into your bathroom. On top of your tub. What do you do?”

Helen tapped her bottom lip and hummed when she thought. No one in class had seen her do that because Mr. Gimbal’s curriculum never made her ponder. “Is it one of them fancy co-ops from the cities?”

“You mean the condos?”

“Whatever you call it.”

“Yeah, one of them. The lady who forgot about her tub is all the way at the top. And you know what water does.”

Helen grabbed a smaller stick and poked at a group of minnows swimming above the slick mud. “Finds a way. I suppose I’d check on the lady first, see if she’s confused you know? Those places have lords who run them. I’d let them know.”

Laura was kind. She didn’t make faces when Helen showed her ignorance. “Landlords, sis. And I think that’s what I’d do, too. Damn sure wouldn’t call dad. He’d somehow blame it on me and drive all night and day with his toolbox in tow. Just to give it one look and say, ‘Well, dammit, if I’d known it was this big, I would’ve just called maintenance.’ And I’d say, ‘Shit, dad, I told you it was as big as a fucking bathtub.’”

The girls rolled in laughter at the cussing. Their dad was a good man, but helpless with at times. Couldn’t take a joke. Mean as a cornered Wolverine at night. Teetering on terrible when he drank, but alive, and providing. Sliding scale for parenting kids like them had to accept.

Laura’s laughter turned to coughing. She clasped a hand over her mouth, trying to keep it in. It sounded like wet Velcro.

            “Say, that’s a nice stick you’ve got there” came a reedy voice from behind them.

Laura didn’t react. Her thoughts were on the specks of red on her palm. Helen, however, sat up quickly. The voice was high and prickled the skin around her elbows.

            It got louder as a hunched man waded barefoot into the pond. The minnows scattered. He walked until the water was up to his pasty calves. The left one was pockmarked with pebbled indentations over a web of purple veins. The leg of his overalls had fallen down his right leg, so water soaked into the jeans, dyeing it the color of a scab.

It wasn’t a big town. The sisters knew of most living things, people and their animals. This stranger was new.

            Helen half-thought it was Laura’s idea to bring him. To get it over with so they could go about living. Only it was daytime, and the man smelled off, like bad lettuce. He was shirtless under his overalls. At the right angle in the light, they made out blonde tufts of hair growing off pale skin. Splotches of sunburn colored his skin like birthmarks.

            No, this man was just odd enough to be noticed if gone missing.

            He poked at tadpoles with a walking stick skinned of the bark, smoothed shiny and pulled from a hickory tree. A copse of them marked the entry to the gravel pit to the east, where the dirt bikes came blazing over dry earth.

            Helen laid her stick against the log and picked at her nails. She’d been placed on probation from chewing them. Nail files only. Or clippers. Or let the darn things grow out, was her mom’s advice. She fit the left row of nail beds into the right, top over bottom, like she was standing at an altar to pray. It was an unconscious act, done to help her focus.

            “Thank you,” she told the man, patting her stick. “Helps keep the dogs away, you know.”

            “Reckon so, not that we see them around these parts much anymore. The cities and all, sprouting up like crabgrass and clover. Good luck, lasses, perhaps.”

            The man’s face was cast in shadow. Gray hair covered his head. Helen thought he should be bald. He sounded like a man with no hair.

            Laura tried her throat. It coalesced into a scratchy caw of, “We get purslane up our way. Loads of it. Mixed in with the violets. Doesn’t smell like much. Tastes like lemons. What about where you’re from?”

            Helen waited for him to turn his face. How many teeth did he have? The way he whistled between every few words sounded like not many. He didn’t turn. He stayed poking the tip of his hickory stick into the mud. It squelched each time he removed it from the suck.

            “Over that way yonder, give or a take a mile.” He neither nodded in any direction nor directed his wet-tipped stick. “Some days I move faster than others.”

            “Helps to wear boots,” Helen said to his bare feet.

            “Reckon, reckon. But how do I not fall into space then? Not much else keeping me grounded but my toes. Old man where I grew up a long ways from here used to say, ‘Only way to remind ourselves what being wild is like is by sinking our toes into the dirt.’”

            Laura dipped her palms into the pond. They came away clean. “And you’ve gone shoeless ever since.”

            “I ain’t Shoeless Joe, but my reputation ain’t much better.” A smile lifted the corner of one side of his face. Helen couldn’t see the other, but knew it matched the way he said, “Stories for another day. Another life, heck, reckoning and what not. Too young ladies on a log.” His laugh was sharp and loud. It startled a blackbird out of a shrub across the pond.

            Too young ladies on a log, Helen thought. One day I’ll write about this. Make him a spirit. A roving specter. A figment, perhaps, but that would be too hokey.

            Aim for the truth but exaggerate it.

            If there was an old man, he was a bald old man with three teeth and a walking stick only Paul Bunyan could carry. Paul Bunyan and this man, with a lifetime of accumulated strength. And stories.

            “Tell us one?” Helen asked.

            He buried the hickory stick in the mud until it stuck. Then he leaned on it, pondering. Laura started to interrupt him. Helen grabbed her wrist. A wind blew up as if from cracks in the dirt, throwing scents of soggy eggs. It rippled the algae filming the pond water. Helen hadn’t realized she was sweating until it chilled her arms and neck.

            The reedy voice deepened into an oboe when he spoke slowly, like he did then. “There’s the time I battled a wild boar in Mr. Thomas’ barn. You’d recognize the barn if you saw it. Farmhouse too. Similar to your Mr. Reynolds. Although he grew asparagus. Hired out to pick it. Terrible boar problem. I was passing through needing shelter. Offered any service for a roof and meals. Have some war experience. Plenty of hunting, with my dad how he was and all. It was Mrs. Thomas, have you, who enlisted me to solve their boar problem. Only she didn’t trust me with a firearm. Use what tools they had in the shed or don’t use nothing. Thus, young ladies, became the story of how I defeated a horde of them with nothing more than a shovel and a scythe.”

            The wind stilled, then breathed for the sisters.

            Appearances, thought Helen, are misleading. She thought of Missy, wondering what was under her skin.

            “I’ll tell it to ya quick,” the man said. “Day has a way of moving fast on us.”

—

            The man retreated past the pond like a dream, infecting the girls with curiosity. But hadn’t Helen dreamt of him later in life – how much later she couldn’t say, a day or a decade – and woken with a bruise on her forearm? From squeezing herself while sleeping. Had she visited the pond after Laura had passed and dozed on the same log Laura deemed her spot? Daydreaming about being somewhere away from there, where she’d store the decayed funk smell in a glass jar, pack it up with her collection of monarch caterpillars, and move somewhere with kinder people. Someplace people didn’t die too young for no reason other than that’s how life worked.

__

            Perhaps it was that day after her altercation with Missy Sinclair that she dreamt of him. Legs stretched and loose from the walk. A sheen of sweat on her body like a second layer of skin. Days blended the way memories did: like blood through water. It left a pink tint around the edges of her vision, a product of sun rays cutting her eyes.

She set her backpack at the end of the log and used it as a pillow. She closed her eyes to the bloody sky. Dark would come soon, but she’d run home if she had to. She needed a moment to capture a thousand moments in a few peaceful breaths.

The pregnant air bulged with overdue rain. She sniffed the dank humidity and drank it in. Water beetles rubbed their shells together, trilling like when she accidentally ground her teeth together. A fish splashed out and into the water. Something rumbled in the sky, thunder or an airplane. She picked at the scabbed edges of the mole on her face. Her chest heaved up into her trembling eyelids and through her ears.

            She slept and dreamt of a banjo strummed to the pace of lightning bugs flitting on lily pads.

A light mist woke her. Her shoulder ached from having lodged under her neck. Her other arm hung off the log, strands of pond grass failing to tickle her numb fingers.

“Mayhap it’s time, now or soon after.”

Laura calling from the abyss.

—

On the way home, the mist turned to fat droplets.

            She wrapped her backpack around her chest and hunkered over it. Damp textbooks might dry out. Soaked ones would cost money to replace.

            She bypassed Reynold’s fields for the dirt road around it. It’d take longer, but she only had one good pair of shoes. Otherwise, she’d go to school in a pair of hand me down work boots that would take Missy’s mockery up a notch. Another go at that and Helen might take her head. Best to stay clean – or as clean as possible; safe, really – by skirting the grassy sides of the road.

            She didn’t hear the tanker truck topple like a gut shot pig.

            One moment she was hopping over puddles, humming a song that sounded like rain, and the next she looked up to see a gas tanker truck crashed onto its side in the ditch fifty yards down the way.

            She had smelled it, but was too preoccupied wondering how long it would take her to walk to the next town over, the one with a bus depot. Seven hours? A day?

            Upon seeing the truck with its cylindrical body like a giant metal caterpillar, the gas fumes hitting her nose made her woozy. She’d been huffing them in big gulps without knowing it, la la la-ing her song like a child, and had to halt for a moment to catch her senses.

            “Golly,” was all she could say when she arrived at the scene. She swayed, bracing her hand at her hip to keep from tottering into the wreckage.

            Licks of flame flickered from under the hood, red curls like scorched hair. She’d met a woman with hair like that once, a journalist from the city, on a road trip to soak in all things rural. How she said the word rural made it sound like a bad word, like something foreign and exciting, like discovering an authentic ceramic bowl in a thrift shop, the kind Chinese dynasties used to serve bone broth noodles to emperors.

You’re out of your mind, she thought, and then the passenger side door burst open like an emergency hatch. A man on fire climbed out. His smoldering fingertips sizzled when he gripped the door frame. The fat raindrops hit everywhere the fire wasn’t.

Nature’s firehose manned by an untrained firefighter.

She didn’t want the driver to see her laughing at a dumb thought and misunderstand so she stepped forward and held her hand out.

The fire billowed from his boots to bare neck, an orange and red crescendoing heat that looked like liquid and stopped before his eyeballs. The eyes turned to black in the approaching dusk. They pled with Helen to do anything other than stand there with her hand held out in the rain.

His lips moved. He grunted. They didn’t part, couldn’t part, were fused together, melted like red wax on an envelope seal.

She dropped her backpack to the ground, unzipped it, textbooks be damned, and searched for a pair of scissors. The man had to breathe. Burning to death or not, he couldn’t suffocate.

She came up with a small pair of plastic scissors, best for cutting figures out of construction paper, suitable for opening the airway of a dying man.

The man collapsed onto his back in the wet dirt next to her backpack. The impact forced a strangled grunt beneath his sealed lips, like the sound of someone buried alive.

She made it a point to zip her backpack up before helping. She thought about how fractions of seconds added up.

“Sir,” she said, happy her voice didn’t tremble. “Let me help.”

His body was still. His eyes were the only thing moving besides the flames that were being snuffed out by rain. Blue black eyes sunk into a charred face. Marbles set in a mound of gunpowder.

Helen smelled roasting meat. Not unlike the sweet fat sizzle of a pig on a spit, but slightly putrid. She thought of the leatherwork her father did, tanning hides and branding them with the family logo.

She reached to cut his lips open. If he had last words, he should be given the chance to speak them. His hand, still ablaze with soft flames like candlelight, grabbed her forearm. She heard, felt, and smelled the burn. A dry, crackling sizzle like the first sear on a fatty steak. It hurt worse than anything she’d experienced. Missy Sinclair would vomit at the thought of it. She’d be sure to pay a final visit to her class just to see that.

She let him hold her. His last human contact. Finally, he released her, and his hand flopped to the ground. Parts of his skin had sloughed off like snakeskin and remained in the fingered indents wrapped around her arm. No matter how many transformations over the years, those scars always came back.

She opened the scissors and fit one tip into the blackened crack of his mouth. His eyes tilted to her hand as it closed the scissors and snipped through the melted tissue. Deep groans turned to wet gurgles as blood dripped into his open mouth.

“Sorry, here.” She went to roll him on his side, and he spewed ropes of red that spattered his blackened face. Some landed on his right eye. He blinked and blinked until he could get it half open. Red colored his eye like a cracked robin’s egg.

            When he spoke, no words came, only wheezing. The skin around his throat had burned the shape of his esophagus. She saw it in detail the way you place a piece of paper over an item to draw it in relief. It gyrated — undulated was another word — but produced no words, only sounds of finality and the smell of death.

His good eye closed and his right, bloodied eye remained open to the dry night sky.

After replacing her backpack on her back, she noticed a strip of hanging flesh on the back of the man’s arm. It was an oasis in a scorched forest. Unburned, red, and still hot to the touch. She pulled the 4-inch strip away from the muscle and used the scissors to set it free.

On the walk home, she sampled the skin by licking the underside. Sweet, like she imagined, but also tangy, and if she was being honest, more gamey than she preferred.

—

After describing the burned man to her parents, she told them she was going to write, then go hunting. The full moon had been covered by the rainstorm. The skies had cleared, and white light glowed outside the living room window.

            “‘S’pose it’s about that time,” said her dad, drying a chef’s knife with a dish towel. “Be careful. Watch for ticks.”

            Her mom gave him a look.

            “What? They’re already a problem in those woods. Sleep in the brush for a night and see what’s latched to you come morning.”

            Her mom handed her the last piece of cornbread. “Eat. Helps to have a base. And remember.”

            Helen bound upstairs and called back, “I still have school tomorrow. Yeah, yeah.”

            She wrote the first three pages of a story about a young woman who cuts her armpit shaving and messes with the gash until she removes the flesh from the entire arm, from shoulder to fingertips, striped sinew like a skinned deer. She didn’t know the plot yet but liked the visual.

            She changed into Laura’s hand me down changing clothes, a pair of gray sweatpants and sweatshirt. Anyone finds those shredded in the woods assumes a vagrant soiled and abandoned them.

            “Heading out!” she hollered, screen door slapping behind her.

            The woods were familiar, her and Laura’s wooded wonderland. Helen preferred them at night. It allowed her eyes to practice sighting in low light. The deer drank at a creek half a mile into the forest. Her family’s land extended ten miles past that, not that she cared that evening. In time, she’d grow mindful of boundaries, navigating them cautiously, aware guns existed, with owners who knew how to use them.

            When she smelled a bleachy musk, she stopped. The moonlight threw spears of silver through the trees. The edges of her mole had begun to ooze blood. She took a three finger hold of the mole with her thumb, pointer, and middle finger and pulled gently. The skin needed to come with it.

            It did.

            Years later she’d describe the sensation to a stranger in a bar like a searing pain, a widened stretching, a bursting followed ripped of flesh, thick hair emerging faster than she’d ever understand, her coat of armor.

            The deer smelled her, but it didn’t matter. She moved fast with her long legs as a human. Her wolf darted through the forest like a rumor, a silent threat that smashed the deer’s skull into a flat stone at the edge of the creek.

The splatter resembled the fruit drawings she and Laura did when they were bored. Nibbling the top off blackberries from the wicker basket and using the moist end to dimple dots on sheets of paper. It made every sailboat float in a sea of blood, every tree weep jammy sap.

She remembered being hungrier only one other time, the day she got her first period. She ate like she ate that day, a different meal with longer and sharper teeth, but with the same voracity.

When she slept, she dreamed of sheep.

—

            She thought better of visiting Missy Sinclair, dropping out of school and bidding farewell to her parents instead some few weeks later. They hadn’t left so young, but she was different. “Trust me,” would have to suffice.

She ate like a gluttonous queen across the country.

            It’d take years to control it, learned through personal and professional maturity, considering her work in the self-help public speaking circuit, but when she did, she reflected that the tightening despair she felt as a teenager was nothing more than panic from a lack of experience.

            She gave lectures on that experience, lengthy and well-attended from college campuses to hotel conference centers, veiled in the story of a young girl growing into her body. She touched her mole, maintained with lotion and trimming, at intervals queued when she mentioned it in her story. Even if she spun her tale as a cub growing into a wolf–a hacky metaphor only she could get away with, given her penchant for utilizing exaggerated references–her audience would hear it as they wanted, as it applied to them, and laugh in a kind of agreed humor pact.

            Such was the animal itching behind everyone’s skin.

            Every now and then during the autograph and photograph session following her speaking (or reading; she was on her third book tour, for the upcoming release of “The Beast Inside Us”), someone would stand next to her for a photograph. Rather than lean in to smell her – too many people did that; it was one of the few things that made her skin prickle those days; people were fucking weird – they would whisper out the side of their mouth, “You and me both, Helen. I remember when I finally felt satisfied with a meal.” They’d shake her hand and thank her, wink a smile, and trot out of the bookstore.

            Helen would continue signing autographs and taking photographs and watch the line waiting to greet lengthen, like fingernails under moonlight, wondering how Laura would have reacted to the whole damn shindig.