“I have a room,” I tell the front desk when I find my way to the hotel at last. I smile at them with sharp little teeth and they smile back, empty.

“Welcome,” they say, not meaning any of it.

I leave pawprints on the stairs, even though I am wearing shoes. It amuses me to do so. The front desk says nothing. Someone in the lounge, a woman with a voice like a broken heart, begins to sing, and it sounds like a story of you and I.

An animal wife is an accessory.

She must be.

A spouse is permitted liberties, the libations of agency. Small things like the right to choose the hue of her hair, to drink the stories decocted by strangers, to sleep on a roof under a damask of stars. A spouse, according to fiction, is equal. They are a partner.

An animal wife is not. She is instead ornamental, constrained by coercion, not choice. She is leashed to a length of flayed skin, tidily folded into a cedar chest. She is pliable, pure, convincingly demure.

And most of all, she is angry.

An animal wife always is.

“You’re too kind.” I accent the smile with a stooping of the head, a crooking of the upper lip. The expression must communicate two things: humility and a sweet bewilderment, as though I couldn’t possibly believe what I’d authored but delight in it all the same. It must look like I’d meant it only for him.

He takes the bait. He flushes prettily and we talk, his eyes unfocused the entire while, reverent. I somnambulate through the motions, the minuet familiar. I’ve rehearsed its choreography so many times before. When we reach the finale, I disengage gracefully and he reluctantly, pressing a card into my grip. “Call me.”

My skin sits unevenly on my shoulders. It pulls. It is heavier than it should be, burdened with the years too. I smile at him.

“I will.” We both know I don’t mean any of it.

Obligations discharged, I escape the throng, cross the bridge, the sun warm on the back of my neck. I want to run. The compulsion scratches beneath my skin, push-pulling at my bones until I am halved by conflicting desires. It’d be so easy. To shuck this body, its responsibilities. To feel the cobblestones beneath paws, not feet. Scale the barbicans of the shops, their eaves and trellises. The plunge of the world from the roofs of their gods now domesticated by academics.

But not yet, not yet.

The road takes me to a square. Restaurants swathe its borders, every one of them pleasingly austere. Sweden disdains excess even in their tourist traps. Everywhere, there are tables, colonized by drunks, by devotees of the rare Nordic sun. Men and women conversing softly, bodies pressed together like hands in prayer.