Werewolves

"Why do you think we are afraid of unreasonable things?"

The girl’s father disapproved of the boy because he was unshaven. 

It seemed innocuous at the time, a silly prejudice reminiscent of archaic standards of judging appearance. Even at 6, I had enough self-awareness to find a loophole when I could. I personally hated dressing up and it was a good nine years before I’d start shaving at any rate. 

I would later come to recognize the first line of that familiar story as “foreshadowing.”

The tale was, as I remember, an old tool. My grandmother had also spun an essentially similar yarn until the ending (which, in her version, included a rather extreme variation). Thusly, I concluded that it was an old story that had, as far as I could tell, been used as a literary abstinence program, ensuring a terror of sexual contact in small children that would last them well into their early teens across Southern Appalachia for generations.

From a logical standpoint, it made sense. We must rationally conclude that virtually anyone could be a werewolf. It was just a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong time to know for sure. 

In the story, a girl is forbidden by her father from going to some sort of country dance that would require her to walk alone through a small forest. It could have been the dancing, the facial hair, or the chaperone-less walk through a dense collection of trees that set the father off. I wasn’t old enough at the time to understand the full extent of patriarchy or its inner machinations. 

What I did understand is that, defying her father, the girl went to the dance with the boy who, rather carelessly, neglected to mention an unfortunate recurring case of lycanthropy (which could be, I suppose, read allegorically as herpes depending on the reader, as this is the type of story which thrives best through oral tradition). She again makes the conscious choice to avoid using good sense and stands frozen as she sees her date metamorphose from scruffy bad boy to full-fledged virgin-eating machine. Luckily, Daddy is near by and blasts the would-be suitor/consumer to living shit with a silver bullet. It could, alternatively, be seen as an allegory in staunch opposition to gun control. 

My grandparents had a glistening oak cabinet of hunting rifles and these were the Clinton years, if we’re being honest. 

In my grandmother’s variation of the story, it was none other than the girl’s father who was the werewolf, having forbidden his daughter from going to the dance with the foresight that it would be a full moon and he would not know her, presumably, from any other person walking through the forest at night, practically begging to be murdered. Her suitor is the one who shoots the werewolf dead, who immediately transforms into her father. She, in all likelihood, porks the unshaven boy on the spot for saving her ass and her father is given a simple, but dignified, Christian burial. 

It should be noted that it is entirely impossible to read that story without sensing some sort of Electra complex. 

Regardless of variation, both stories left the same impact: anyone could be a werewolf, so be extremely suspicious when people love you. 

As a child, I took my phobia of werewolves to an extreme level. 

I read multiple books at the public library about them and how they could be subdued, cured, or, ideally, destroyed. My research led me to believe that a healthy crop of monkshood in my mother’s flowerbed would be adequate, providing that no one in the immediate family was a werewolf.

However, my mother flatly refused. 

“They’re incredibly poisonous,” she’d said. “And this frankly sounds like another of your strange ideas.” On top of that,  she’d never had any real talent for gardening.

After some basic research, she concluded what she’d already decided: that anything sold locally only by an organization called “The Sorceress’s Garden” qualified immediately as a “strange idea.” Even, she reminded me, if it weren’t one, some child had died not terribly long ago from eating them. 

Well, that’s just great, I’d thought at the time. One stupid kid ruins it for everyone else. 

No monkshood. Nothing to ward off werewolves except for a silver cross that I found at a yard sale for 75 cents, and, after I discovered it was magnetic, I realized that you get what you pay for.

No werewolf was ever warded off with a bargain. 

***

My sister asked me today, “Why do you think we are afraid of unreasonable things?” as we stared at plastic bottles washed up on the banks of a river so polluted that she’d once been put on antibiotics simply for falling in it.

I denied a belief in such things. 

I didn’t mention any of the long list of fears: ghosts, darkness, robots with emotions, commitment, serial killers.,,,

The most infernal fears, I think, are the things we don’t really believe in. 

I’m privately inconsolable. 

I watch the depths of discarded things, innocuous and never missed, tethered to the pitiful shores of a now-grey river whose bottom you cannot see even in the shallowest of parts. 

I wonder what became of the cross, another artifact I abandoned with plush toys and night lights and suddenly wish I had it. 

It won’t clean a river, but, I realize, my thoughts shifting from the pitifully churning beer cans and bottles of Dr. Pepper, how little good fortune a werewolf needs to find you just one time.