Whole Prey Diet

Bryn eats her meat raw and whole. Broken down, her diet consists of eighty percent lean muscle meat, ten percent bone, five percent liver, and five percent of another secreting organ. Today, I cut it. I plate her food in layers of contrasting colors because children are visual eaters. It must look fun to eat and stimulate her eyes as much as her taste buds. The bruise of the hemoglobin against the ivory mycelium of fat. Cuts of steak. A whip of duck vertebrae. She noses her plate and winces. Looks up at me with wounded puppy-dog eyes, the same shade of amber as mine.

She’s lived with me for six months, and she’s been mistaken for my daughter twice. Same eyes, same widow’s peak that extends too far down the forehead sculpting our faces into hearts. Our middle fingers are the same length as our ring fingers, but I clip my nails into stumps, and she chews hers into claws. There’s a reason for the resemblance. The state put her with me because we were both raised by wolves, and I came out of it mostly human.

It’s a bitter thought, but if she were mine from the beginning, her nails would’ve been trimmed, her palate refined. She would’ve learned how to pull the human from the wolf. I did. I cleave the thought away.

Bryn misses her mother.

“Why is it all cut up?” she says, prodding a slice of lamb kidney.

“This is how people eat.”

It’s not exactly true, but truer than the dinners she was raised on. On full moons, her mom carried roadkill into their RV, quivering on cinderblocks, and they’d pick off carcasses for weeks at a time. Her little baby teeth pried sinew from bone, raw and dehydrated into leather. When CPS came, she stank of blood and rot; her ribs protruded, and her paunch swelled with worms. She bit the cop who carried her to his cruiser, and he had to get stitches and a tetanus shot.

I block another thought of her mother, out of respect. Imagine holding down a job, trying to raise a child, in a world that doesn’t accommodate werewolves. Their strong maternal instincts and prey drive; a spiritual demand to press their noses to everything and test skin with their teeth. It’s impossible to make an earning or stay in one place too long. She did her best. She did it alone. She did it without electricity.

“I don’t like that it's different animals,” Bryn says.

I correct her wording.

“Different meats.”

She echoes meats, tasting the word, hissing the “s” like sizzling fat. It’s foreign because all the flesh she ate wasn’t meat. She ate bodies. Animals. These are pieces.

“Try it,” I say. My voice rises to an encouraging pitch.

On our first night together, I ordered a pizza, but it smelled too yeasty, too cooked. Where was the variety? The pinks and purples spilled from the abdomen; the muscles, bound together in a tight skin. Where was the face? The life? I relented, pulled a quail from the freezer, and warmed it until it was tepid. She sunk her baby teeth in the chest, the cottony feathers glued to the fluids on her face. I gave her a pitiful smile that she traded for a sharp, lupine grin. She ate whole chickens and rabbits. Her little mouth worked through the connective tissue, gnawing through to the marrow.

But I can’t relent this time; I can’t pack carcasses for her school lunch. I’ve cut the meat, and that’s a start.

I parry my fork at the organ cutlets and say, “If you don’t eat it, I will.”

She snarls, flashing her incisors, round and built for slicing through fruit fibers. Her glare never breaks as she fists slices of steak into her mouth.

Later, she’ll twist into my arms while we watch cartoons. I’ll sink my face into the fiddlehead curls of her hair, nuzzle and nibble the fine fuzz of her neck because that’s what her mother did. Bryn’s language was my first: wet breath, gentle bites, and warmth. I love you, I’ll whisper to her, but I feel guilty saying so because she doesn’t know if she’s allowed to say it back. There are times I also mistake her for my daughter. We’ll fall asleep in a heap of limbs and hair. She’ll smell like warm milk and dead leaves, and I’ll think of my mother and the tamarack forest I grew up in.

We lived in a single-wide trailer, with bloodstains running up the steps. My mom came home after her full moon nights, hunt-stained and exhausted. She carved and cooked her kills for me before her shift at work.

***

Nicole Lynn is a New England writer, wife, and legal guardian to two amazing girls. Her fiction has appeared in The Arcanist, and she has a short story forthcoming in Nocturne Magazine. She enjoys haunting the mountains with her dogs and reading Kafka to her pet rats. Connect with her on Instagram @nicole.lynn.writer