When the blood came she should have stopped slinking through midnight air, but fur spread across limbs. She dripped nightly in abandoned strip malls. Her tail swatted mosquitoes past blue-glow gas stations and Andouille shops. Beneath the pier she chewed books. She smeared.
She lay in bed matted with candle-wax until witching hour woke her. She slipped through swamps, licked wounds and feared the moon. Mother wondered at her red eyes. Grandmother left out saucers of milky tea. They painted over the red walls and prayed.
The years mud-caked. Her body softened like a peach and seized.
I shave as she growls behind the mirror. I bury my silver birthstone earrings beneath our future grave, leave them for the number of years they were lost in Grandmother’s yard. Boil the dirt with Mother’s signature. Comb my hair with daggers and sing three generations against the clock.
When our ghost arrives I will remind it about howling. Its translucent bones tucking us in bed. I will save ectoplasm in a mug for the wolf, to feed her plentiful hungers.
The moon infurs—
she will wake again and carve the evening like cypress roots, haunting as a house would.
Listen.
Hear her scratching at the door.
Elizabeth Theriot is a Louisiana-native and University of New Orleans graduate. She has just completed her first year as an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she is an Assistant Poetry Editor for the Black Warrior Review.