Hiding. Always hiding. He keeps to dark corners of woodland, ghosting trees, with sharpened blades for claws. Often fractious, taking to gouging lines of discontent within woody bark, leaving imprints of dissatisfaction in his wake: macabre tattoos that speak of moroseness and an unspoken curfew.
His having, and then, not having her.
Due to this, his pain spins around all else, red and ragged, as raw, chewed meat.
Whispery willows bend into rivers, secreting truths of his heart: its fractured, jagged beat, discordant with other wolves. A loner. A lost soul. Wallowing near the water’s surface, he recalls her scent; the rhythm of her speech; the coded language of her eyes. She. Forever she.
Driven to distraction from painted images of past moments, he clutches his wolfish mane, pulling tendrils of charcoal fur from his skin, spilling over with emotion. A broken male. A disparate wolf. A wolf-pained lover stretched by the wrack of time. A lugubrious malcontent, prohibited from catching her delicate scent ever again. She could be dead for all that he can garner of her. A ghost-like him, silhouetting heathen lands, as befits her spirit. A deadened soul.
Howling, he echoes his melancholy mantra: his unshed tears welling to the brim of his bestially feral eyes. Scanning the trickling surface of the river flow, he envisages her pivotal red cloak: a living handmaiden caught within societal doctrines of whom is right and wrong to marry. The silken folds magically caress his spiking fur, aroused by the nearness of her touch: the breeze mimicking the sensuous, claret strokes of her cloak against his thighs and chest. Pretence is key. All he has.
Coursing unquenched claws through his mane, he visualises her ebony fingers channeling him awake. Tugging at knotty, matted fur, he relishes the resistance. The blood-stained twinge. The push and pull. A fight for her. A perpetual howl of despair that vibrates within his tortured soul.
Clumps of his mane fall away to the building breeze as dusk thickens, spreading her nocturnal shroud, sheltering his dilated vision. Eyeing parts of him departing, he gazes with disdain, not precious or at all in love with who he is and what he has become. Fluffy lumps sit atop the river as macabre sheep’s wool, sheared in summer. Happily, he allows his sacred spirit to transplant itself away from him, losing the ethers of his wolfish pride.
Oh, how he hates warmth, light, and the mundanity of the day now. The optimistic speckles of the diamond surface that glitter. All chant lies into his crestfallen ears.
He prays for night. The closeness of her in darkened patterns, imagining the taste of cherry lips, pouted and full, panting heavily in expectation. Only obscurity can deliver such delicacies. Licking his canines, he weaves a wolfish paw along a figment hourglass, painting her shape in dusky twilight.
Maddening love has overtaken him, pulling him down to closely stifling rooms and snapshots of blinkered beauty. Life echoing discordance: tin-hollow sounds – without her.
Without Red. All is rancour, confusion. Tumbleweed. A clutched barbed wire latched to exposed flesh as metallic fangs.
Moonlight reflects his downcast face as he loses himself in onyx wings lined fast with lead, offering no takeoff.
Howling, he takes to stand, protesting to the silver orb of his heartache, allowing parts of him to finally tell of his perpetual love.
Framed.
Suddenly, he senses a presence behind him as he pitches forth the loudest growl, a tooth and claw siren.
Tentatively, a much-missed sylvan aroma spreads to his flailing nostrils, keen to feast upon remnants of her. Satin fingers of her cloak wrap around him as scarlet vines as she grabs, with extended longing, his wolfish torso, entwining herself to him. Reforming their bond.
Red.
Returned.
Rekindled to him.
No words are needed as he turns to face her. She mirrors him exactingly with her red regality, jig-sawing his disparate pieces back together to a more coherent whole.
His soul, his future, his reason for living: all rest on a knife’s edge and the turn of her lascivious lip, chiselled to exacting perfection. As with the river, he willingly sacrifices himself in drowning wells of lust, buoyed upon the blood-stained tides of her fairytale cloak.
He senses not the steel tip of her blade.
“I must have your fur,” she purrs, into his desperate ear. “It’ll make for the most wondrous winter coat.”
Emma Wells
Emma is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry and prose published with various literary journals and magazines. She is currently writing her fifth novel. Emma won Wingless Dreamer’s Bird Poetry Contest of 2022 and her short story, ‘Virginia Creeper’, was selected as a winning title by WriteFluence Singles Contest in 2021. Recently, Emma won Dipity Literary Magazine’s 2024 Best of the Net Nominations for Fiction with a short story entitled ‘The Voice of a Wildling’. Her poem ‘Rose-Tainted is the winner of the poetry category, Discourse Literary Journal, February 2024 Issue.
