White Wolf
by Emily Lowe
My first girlfriend was a wolf in a past life. She told me this in bed after the first time she made me come. “I never knew it could feel like that,” I said into her chest, my head heavy against her heartbeat. The AC in her Brooklyn pre-war apartment shook with effort. Still our sweat slicked together. She put her arm around me and stroked my hair.
“I was a white wolf,” she said. “A hundred lives ago, I padded through the forest floor and ate my fill of rabbits.” She told me, once, how she could still taste the earth in a fresh kill as we slurped ramen with tofu in bed from the shop below her apartment. She was vegan now. She told me how the forest was so dense that even in the peak of day, she roamed in a blanket of darkness. “Sunlight trickled in like dew drops,” she said as she fed me an avocado spring roll, crumbs dusting the sheets. In her stories, I wandered through the forest of her past life: the achingly solid trees, tall and untouched, the silvering river, fresh and clean as a cut. When I kissed her, my eyelids became the shelter of her canopy.
I met my first girlfriend when I was still with my last boyfriend. She was a forward on the pickup soccer team my last boyfriend joined the month before we severed. Her almond eyes sharpened at each corner and her stark dark haircut evoked Mia Wallace. I didn’t say a word to her that first day, only watched her movements–sharp and animal–across the field. I came to every pickup match to watch her. She never touched the ground. Even after my last boyfriend and I broke up, I still watched for her outside the chain link fence, daring her to notice me.
I had kissed girls in college and as dares. I pecked my friends on the lips when I was drunk and then worried they would wonder. I once kissed a girl at a gay bar called Ginger’s and touched my fingers to my lips for days after as if to revive the sensation. But I had never really given in to my desire until during one match, my first girlfriend came right up to the chain link fence and said, “Instead of stalking me like prey, why don’t you just take me to dinner? I know a ramen place.”
That night, I sank into her sheets and legs, watched her turn wolf behind her eyes. She taught me my body. She taught me her tongue. Her lips, tits, hips, thighs, toes. I explored the wildwood of her, that secret alive place. She was bite and bruise, soft fur and whimper.
Each time I saw her, I grew bolder. “Tell me about when you were a wolf,” I’d whisper while moving my fingers inside her. How she howled in response.
Slowly, her past unfurled like a fern. “I first loved a woman as a wolf,” she said. “I found her picking flowers in the forest, laying them in a basket. She was the first woman I’d ever seen. Before her I’d only known hunters with rifles and beards. But her face was soft like the belly of a leaf. Every day she returned to me, curled up in my fur.” As she came, I wondered who she was thinking of—the woman or me. I asked what happened to the woman, but she was already on top, kissing my collar bone.
Sometimes she had nightmares about the forest of her past life. I would find her weeping, silent. In those moments we existed in different planes. Pulling her in and massaging her shoulders was all I could do to reach her. This is when I first noticed the silver strands in her hair. They were always gone by morning.
She had once spent her days running through underbrush. “The forest was shrinking, and so were we.” She was part of a pack and then suddenly wasn’t. We took long walks through Crown Heights, past brownstones and steel apartment complexes. We held hands and were mostly ignored, though sometimes men sneered at us. Each time, my first girlfriend bristled. We sometimes walked through Prospect Park instead, but it mostly made her sad. It was not a forest, not wild. The patch of earth she had loved was gone.
I asked her if we should leave Brooklyn, go upstate, and live in a cabin on the side of the mountain. We settled instead for camping. We packed our bags, rented a car, and drove deep into the catskills. We pitched a mesh tent so that we could sleep under the stars. I hoped she would sleep easy here, but I woke to her body reliving a nightmare, her mind trapped in her past life. I shook her until she woke and kissed the top of her head, her cheeks, her chin. Under the moon, her eyes glazed over. Under the stars, her dark hair shined silver.
I held her as she told me about her first death, the terror she relived each night. When the hunters followed the woman she loved, storming through her woods with torches and rifles. The woman screamed when they found them curled in the brush. “You must understand that I still remember the shock of her face. I still remember the heft of their boots against my body. The metal against my neck. The soft final click.”
I kissed her forehead. Kissed her, kissed her. Her hair was more silver than I had ever seen it. “No one is coming,” I said. “It is just you. It is just me.”
She was gone in the morning. Before I opened my eyes, I already knew. I rolled up the sleeping bag and packed up the tent. I did not text her or check her apartment. I already knew she would not be there.
Emily Lowe is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor and educator. She holds an MFA from UNCW where she was the 2019-2020 Philip Gerard writing fellow. She is an editor for The Rejoinder, a magazine of serialized fiction, and her writing can be found in The Chicago Review, The Normal School, and River Teeth Journal among others. She is currently at work on a collection of stories centered around queer fairytales and the ocean. More on Emily at emilylowewriter.com
