Language

In the city of wolfmen all speech requires response. Howl from field is answered by howl from forest, which is answered by howl from lakebed, such that howl necessarily begets howl and dialogues are like great stretches of echoes. The law of communication is that to hear is to speak, and to speak is to pass the burden of speaking to whoever has heard you, as in a room of men who have been given the word hello. Some nights it even seems as though there are not multiple howls but only one howl, which passes from throat to throat, leaving one and burrowing in another, like a locust.

Dining

The morning after, a man will wake up with blood and its iron taste in his mouth. He will gargle with water until it is gone. When he goes to pick up the newspaper, he will find a neighborhood dog, perhaps a golden retriever, laid out and gutted in his front yard. There will be nothing peaceful about the death: the dog’s whiskers will not move in the morning breeze, neither will its hair, and this will unsettle the man; the only part of its body that will look asleep will be its feet, paws curled in at the ankle, except for one foot, crushed and bloody, which won’t look asleep at all. He and the dog’s owner will bury it. When the man becomes hungry later that day, he will be reminded of the dog—of the way that it leapt and yapped at streams of gardenhose water—without knowing why.

Buildings

What are buildings for in the city of wolfmen? It is an everted city. Outdoors—joy of unrestrained movement and howling—the wolfmen cannot conceive of an inside: their houses seem to them like boxes of silence, as though four walls were erected around nothing, around nowhere, to contain it. The sight of their own houses makes them restless. When the wolfmen see the city from its outskirts, glowing through distance and dark like ghostliness, nothing seems more improbable to them than that they should ever return to it. But then dawn tires and weakens them, and they gather on hilltops, panting, to admire the city’s glistening buildings. Their same neighborhoods, built around nothing, around nowhere, seem finer now than forests or fields, and they trot home in exhausted packs. Under a sky pale as milk, thousands of wolfmen crouch outside front doors, whimpering to be let in.

Firearms

Few living wolfmen remember the village mobs that once hunted them. Only that the gunpowder of the rifle that fires the silver bullet is like grinds of nightmare, and the barrel smoke like a curl of nightmare, and the echoing report like the voice of nightmare, terrifying the very air.

Death

When a citizen dies in the city of wolfmen, his death bifurcates into two funerals. If a pack of wolfmen, prowling, finds a wolf’s corpse prone in the forest one night, they will circle it twice before dispersing. And if a group of men, jogging the next morning, finds that same body—a man’s now, nude and pale among the forest leaves—they will proceed to bury it. Even as a corpse the wolf metamorphoses: at dawn it reverts back to the man. Daylight depilates the body, shrinks its teeth. Coaxes the claws back into the hand. By the time the men find it, it is a man again and must be mourned anew. In this way the same death comes to inhabit two bodies. It moves, like a hermit crab, soft and white between its shells.