Rebecca’s nose (a perfect match for my father’s) had been slipped easily from its dock; Richard’s eyes, sucked (I can only imagine) from their sockets; Noah, whose shaggy head of tight curls not only matched Father’s in color and texture but covered as well a perfectly matching mind, both of which were removed, taken in — Noah looked as if he had been scalped.
From Josephine, Father took her cheeks; Ruth was missing her chin and her left ear; and Sarah, who bore no resemblance to Father at all, who was, in fact, the spitting image of our mother, Sarah’s face was untouched, completely smooth and untouched, and when we found her, she appeared to be sleeping, to be sleeping peacefully, if awkwardly, her neck bruised and broken.
The rest, of course, was a matter of the strength of Father’s hunger.
Father became, so it seemed, quickly bored with meat not freshly killed, and for Sarah he had had no appetite at all.
It was Mother’s idea that we should hide ourselves beneath the scent of my brothers and sisters. By her thinking, if we smelled like those bits of flesh that he had already finished with, nudged at and gnawed away but ultimately ignored, then he would pass us by, disinterested.
I did not build a cage for my father.
Nor did I knock him unconscious, secure him, with rope and tape, to the kitchen table in order to slice him open, figure him out.
I did not drag him by chains from town to town, calling out, “Come, see the eighth natural wonder! Come, look upon the horror that is my father, the Wolfman!”
I did not charge for admission, did not benefit by his capture in any way whatsoever.
What I mean to say is: I was not cruel. Not at first.
I heard Mother in the basement below, thrashing and growling, and at night, for the first two or three nights, I heard her howling as well, her throaty expulsions growing weaker with each successive night.
It was she who dug up my brothers’ and sisters’ bodies, to finish off in her desperate hunger what my father had left untouched.
Don’t think that I did not consider, at least once every night, opening the door just enough to fit through the crack raw meats, bloody strips, or even small birds or mice, fresh kills to ease Mother’s hunger, quiet her down, and toward the end, I dreamt of lacing slabs of beef with rat poison, in hopes that I might quickly end her pain and my suffering. But I have to admit that I let her die a slow and empty death, and I did so for selfish reasons, did so because I did not want it to be me who finished her off.
I only lost my temper, truly lost my temper, once. Displayed concerted cruelty only the one time. When he refused to eat. When I tried to feed him a starling that I had found, that I had caught for him, and he refused it. I held it by its feet with tongs and dangled it so close to his craw that as I tried to tempt him with it, it would bump into his snout, a feather would catch on one of his teeth. But he ignored it, or tried to, couldn’t prevent his nostrils from flaring at the smell of it, the small bird full of fear and unable to fly away no matter how furiously it shook.
He wouldn’t eat it, and so I threw it at him, broke its neck, I believe, on his chest, and then I gathered it up, took it away, roasted it in the oven, and showed it to Father once more, showed him that I would eat it if he would not, but I couldn’t suffer the smell of it, began to retch even as I drew it to my face, and so I threw it away.
His claws fell away almost immediately upon his death, his snout shrank back to a reasonable size, his body returned to its previous near-bald state, and the madness leaked from his eyes, leaving small orange tracks, like painted tears, down his cheek, his innocent brown pupils surrounded once more by a pure white sclera. The lycanthropic demon had, of course, left its vessel once the vessel could no longer sustain life. His teeth, the canines, are not missing, no, but are in my possession. I removed them shortly before he died, and when removed, they were three inches long, could have been, perhaps, longer as I was unable to remove them from the root, broke them, by accident, at the gums.
Would you or anyone else deny me the symbol of my mother’s ruination?
I do not claim to understand the physics, or, rather, the biology behind the process of my father’s transformation, first into a wolf and then, once dead, back into himself, and while it defies explanation that his teeth have also reverted back to the shape and size they were before he changed, this change, in light of all of the other changes performed after his death, seems only fitting, does it not?
When I finally unlocked the basement door, almost two weeks after she had walked herself down there, I had covered my face in a thick, wet towel. I carried with me two large boxes of baking soda and the shovel.
No weapon of any kind? you might ask. No form of protection?
Discounting the shovel, no, no weapon. She was dead, I was sure of it, and if not dead, so close to death that she would have posed no threat. As for protection, my best protection would have been earplugs. I had prepared myself for the sight of my brothers and sisters, exhumed, eviscerated, had even prepared myself for the sight of Mother, wasted and ruined, the sight of her splayed out across the floor, facedown, her back rising in quick, shallow breaths, had prepared for all of that, but could not suffer the bald and angry mewling noises escaping with each exhalation.
Mother’s hair I collected in bags, swept up piles of her fur, bagged the bunch of it, and set the bags in my closet. She was, I’m certain, once as covered in fur as my father, but her hair grew coarse and then fell out in clumps as her food supply dwindled, as her body lost the strength to maintain even the simplest functions. The bags are still there, I’m sure, in the closet, as innocuous as those bags ready to be delivered to Goodwill, but I am not sure what use I or anyone else might find for them.
I secured him to the ceiling with strong bolts and thick chains that made him hang, uncomfortably, I hoped, so that his feet could touch the ground, but only if his long arms were stretched to their limit.
Then I went into the woods. I had to drive there, as all the woods around our house had been replaced by houses and stores and roads. I went into the woods and I found a good, clean perch next to a small but loud enough waterfall, and that’s where I sat. I had my father’s notebooks with me to use as a guide, and I had my rifle, and I waited for my father’s favorites to fly into view, to stop at a nearby tree, or even glide lazily overhead, and I shot them, as many as I could, which were very few considering how long I sat, how many shots I fired, but enough for me to bring back to the house a box heavy with them. He had not eaten for four or five days, and I knew that despite their now cooling bodies, despite his love for their blank and uncomprehending eyes, Father would have made short work of them. I laid them out in a wide circle just out of his reach, and then I hung from the ceiling with a bit of fishing wire one of Henslow’s sparrows, hung it just in front of his snout. I laid them out and sat against the opposite wall and watched him squirm, lick his chops, stretch his neck out to the sparrow, almost, almost, as far as he could stretch, and then, exhausted, his head would fall back. He would whimper and whine.
It wasn’t until after the end, once starvation, not me but starvation, had finished him off that I pulled him down from the ceiling, laid him out, lifeless, across the kitchen table, and, using the bread knife, opened him up and went digging for my father.