Story 012: "And the Moon Outside" by cubetriangle

Many thanks to cubetriangle for the story and to Sparf for the reading!

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She dropped the whiskey in and slurped the ghastly mixture.  The shot glass slid through the bourbon-sweet beer and clicked gently against her teeth.  All gone and the moon outside, waiting.  He at the other end of the bar.  Waiting.

He, who didn't belong here.  In her bar.  In her field of vision.  Out of politeness he pretended not to see her.  She ordered another beer.  Her head was aching.  Tin music from the disused jukebox fluttered to life on its own, a pitiful cry when no quarters or unrolled-and hard corner-flattened dollar bills came forward.  Country and Western.  It was five o'clock, time central.

She sucked her bottom lip.  This was only her third moon-meet and inadvertently she had broken a rule.  A big one.  He had found her here and he was not one of them.  She could smell it on him even though she did not need to and she knew that the others could smell him as well.  The wolves of Chicago were no pack, but they made their sacred spaces to gather and sniff and commune in the presence of their mistress, the pale white lady outside in the sticky black night.  It was no blind happenstance  that found them together and she cursed herself for ever teaching him the secret rhythm of her blood.  He, twenty-four, who had to be taught the phases of the moon.  He, gin and tonic and stuffing quarters into the jukebox with his back to her.  Loretta Lynn wailing.

The barman slid a frosted glass toward her.  Heilman's Old Style lager.  Like the back-lit plastic square sign above the door.  He was an old dog, keeping his head down west of Kedzie since before the Wolfman purges of '86.  She spoke a few faltering lines of Spanish to him on her first visit and he  thought that was cute.  Gringuita loba.  He started to pour an ounce of Bourbon but she waved it away politely.

“Para luego,” she fumbled.

The barman drank her whiskey.

“Hey Casey,” She caught the stink of his human blood as he sat on the stool beside her.  “I tried calling you, did you-”

“I ignored you, obviously.  Why are you following me?”

“I want to talk to you.  Damn.  Can I buy you a drink?”

“I have a drink, Pat, thank you.”  She slurped from her beer.

At the request of one of the men at the far end of the false zinc counter-top, the bartender switched on the big-screen television on the counter behind him.  It was tuned to the local news, the on-screen anchors unburdening themselves of the national beat.  Tonight was the anniversary of the corpse-king's ascension and the ruling party filled a cavernous convention hall with crepe paper and the beaming faces of a thousand young acolytes.  They all wore gray suits and blue ties two sizes too large and black paint in a strip over their eyes.  At the tone of a gong, red and white and blue confetti billowed from the ceiling and a clear plate-glass coffin emerged from a hole in the floor behind the dais in the center of the hall in a cloud of pale white smoke.  Inside was the perfectly preserved body of their king, his cheeks massaged into a way that they pulled his white lips into a smile.  A forty-year old speech played on hidden loudspeakers.  All in the room was quiet with awe.

“You don't have to be nasty,” Pat said.  “I missed you.”

The words almost caught in his throat.

Two-by-two, men and sometimes women entered the bar.  They all turned their heads to notice him, and her with him.  Casey drained her glass.

“I bet you think you know what you're doing, but you really shouldn't be here.”

“So we should have a drink and then go someplace else.  Do you still go to the Burlington?”

“No,” Casey snorted.  “You should leave.  You.”

Patrick ordered another gin+tonic and  put his money on the counter.  Cash only.

“I'm not going out alone.”

As she felt the coming darkness outside and the yellowing eyes of the men and women in the bar upon her, Casey seethed. Not alone meant not without her.  He felt comfortable pushing her buttons, but when the sun set the moon-meet could not be disrupted.  She saw in his eyes that he would not budge and she would indeed leave with him, either on his arm or in the bellies of half a dozen West-siders before the first howling.

“You're buying, asshole.”

An hour passed and Casey dropped another shot in and felt the warmth of the universe pressing upon her.  He was funny; she hadn't forotten.  She raised the volume of her voice without thinking of it and she laughed and her fingers tingled.  Alcohol is a friend to the wolf's blood, exciting and suppressing its heat as needed.  Patrick was only half-sure which he wanted it to do to hers.

Wolves filled every seat at the bar now, working-class Puerto Rican lobos and third generation Polish, their mother tongues not yet merged into the one great howl.  At the rim of her pleasure was the fear.  If she were alone with her moon brothers and sisters, she would have been in ecstasy.  But soon there would be only fear.

“Algo más, muchacha?” The barkeep asked as he lined up a row of thimble-sized clear plastic shot glasses and deliberately filled them to the rim with Malört; the rusty spirit that did not betray  its otherwordly bitter cologne on the nose.  An unspeakable spirit, allegedly sanctified with water from the notoriously-polluted Chicago river.

“No,” she declined.  “I've gotta go.”

“Otra vez, pendeja,” one of the wolves called to her as she crossed the threshold, hanging from Pat's drooping elbow.
The air outside was wet and warm  with the promised rain.  Everywhere the light over the red and yellow brick buildings dimmed.  They stumbled.  At intervals Pat snuck a peek into her eyes shining golden in the moonlight.  They lit their path, casting a urine-colored amber glow at their feet under the street lamps.  She clutched his arm tightly but did not say anything.

As they stumbled down Fullerton, they passed one of the city's several Corpse-king parades.  This was a home-spun affair; charcoal-smeared locals shambling in an unsteady procession around a papier mache effigy of their king waving his empty suit-arms in the wind.   Black-eyed acolytes on the outer-edges of the parade beat out doleful drumbeats on tight-skinned timbals strapped around their waists while others reached into itchy canvass sacks for newspaper-cut confetti to lob into the air with drunken abandon.  Pat and Casey stopped at a corner and watched them whup and holler and smash their drums in the same moon's embrace that ensnared the wolf girl.

“Do you still smoke?”

He nodded his head yes and produced a tin cigarette-case from his back-left pocket and removed a sloppy hand-rolled one from inside.  He let her start it and she greedily sucked the first shallow stink of smoke. She thrilled at the rush of nicotine.  The smoke crashed forward between her lips into the night air, straddled bareback on a coughing fit.

“Take it easy,” he soothed.

They sheltered under one of the austere castles, one of those built for doctors in the neighborhood's centennial heyday now subdivided into two or three small apartments.  His new place?  She pressed a palm against the gray stone support column below the shallow balcony above.  It was cool to the touch and sticky with humidity.  A cloud of leaves chased up the steps as he leaned in for his kiss, which she granted him.  The first dizzying pulse of the call rocked her in her hips and her thighs. He offered his tongue and her true teeth grew to meet it.  Breath like drying blood and baking bread.  She looked unblinking at his face and he had to squint against the bright yellow glow.  Sweat and thumbs clamped around his neck.

Surveying her body, an errant thumb ghosted past her breast and she vaulted him to arm's length, both palms on his thin shoulders.  His heartbeat punctuating.  In this sense, little had changed from their six weekends in the hay.  He used to hover over her sensitive skin like a phantom and send her nerve endings alight.  Her ticklishness repelled his attentive lover's touch like an allergy; her defenses overzealous, impenetrable.  With no small sense of guilt she remembered his earnestness to please her and her giggling fits.

“Let me use your bathroom,” and he pointed her down a hallway within the ground level unit.  His furniture in this new place with the same old scents.  Tobacco and mildew and foot sweat.  He in his living room, waiting while she closed the bathroom door behind her and perched on the commode, facing the mirror.  The moon in the window, watching.

How easy was she?  After declining his clammy academic fingers, his too-eager-to-please bookshelf, that silver-spoonfed, tumescent ego, he had led her to his den as if on a leash.  Lights out and only the dim golden haze emiting from her deep-set eye sockets.  She shook off her jeans and after a moment's discomfort, removed the small pewter charm in the shape of a diminitive, potato-headed man from its hiding place.  The shofar-sound of her brothers' howling all in one enormous rush jolted her onto the bathroom floor.  Ragged breath.  Foam flecking salivary glands discharging sticky volleys against gnashing fangs.  Fingers gently ensnaring vulva with impatient friction.  Her body growing into itself.  Huff huff and howling howling howing.  The floor becoming slick and sweet-smelling.

Knock knock.

“Are you okay in there?”

There was only a heavy, ragged panting as he cracked the door.  She met him with her bone-hollow eyes at the back end of her cold snout, jaws dripping viscous fluid onto his tennis shoes.  Standing upright with the help of her tremendous fists, her ears bent under the door frame.  Pat couldn't help himself.  His whole body shaking, he reached up and ran a palm through the coarse fur of her cheek.  Her drooping black lip peeled back and slick yellow teeth emerged in a malicious smile.

“You never let me see you like this when we were seeing eachother.”

“You were too eager for the privilege,” her voice from the depths bellowed like a piano's neglected low C.  “But this is what you brought me here for, isn't it?”

“I want to be one of you,” he choked.

Her eyes betrayed no emotion, and the moon outside, radiating.  Abruptly she curled her fingers around the small of his back and brought the trembling man toward her and gently sank her jaws over his head.  She rested her teeth against his torso.
“Is it alright?” he heard his voice echo back at him.

Shoulders slumping like an emperor's, she gripped his body with leathery palms and pressed her tongue against his face.  Heartbeats drumming out percussively.  He tore at his belt and pressed his unburdened erection against the moist teats on her belly.  He, in her grip with gin in his bloodstream and fingers combing the resolute flesh beneath her furry hide.  Greedily sucking fermenting breath through his nostrils, he moaned and pulled his hand along the underside of her tail.  He conquered her dripping vestibule with two impertinent fingers before she shuddered and snapped tight her jaws and gobbled him up, bones blood books balls brains belly and all.  Outside and in there was howling howling howling and the moon throughout.

She, drinking his beer in the morning.  Oppressive heat and the miserable sun.  Chicago's neglected western half sprawling in brown brick and the wolves inside, sleeping.  She walked to her apartment, hung over.  Confetti and broken glass, everywhere.  She passed the overturned effigy of the corpse-king slumped unceremoniously under the tomato-red awning of a Mexican restaurant.  She tought of him, brought back to life as real as he ever was year after year and spat, yellow and phlegmy, onto the curb.  Her hair was matted and dirty and her teeth were still brown.  She shielded her eyes with an upturned palm.