looked into the mirror afterward.
I have entered the pelt of an animal.
I have become the beast.
Then he ran away to join Fatima’s Freak Tent outside the city limits. All the comely mutant ladies welcomed him, clucking and tittering with a singsong babble of delight. They touched him with their stumps and flippers, ran their bearded cheeks across his beardless ones, held fast his gasping face between their breasts that were either skeletal or mammoth mounds of perfumed fat. They cooed over Milo’s ruined flesh and counterfeit hide, crawling around him on all fours, proclaiming,
“You are the king of the wolves!”
Then his mother came to drive him home before her with a stick, haranguing him every mile of the way.
If only she’d beaten him with her own hands, scratched at him until he bled. But she never touched him.
Had she ever touched him? Milo couldn’t remember the feel of her hands ever. She pushed food at him, had even pushed the bottle toward him when he was a baby. Had left him, naked for days at a time, in his own excrement, before finally hosing him down.
But she must have touched him at some time. To teach him to walk, to take care of himself so that she wouldn’t have to make contact. He didn’t remember.
Had he wanted to be an animal? He’d seen the tantalizing women of Fatima’s and he needed to be touched. He had always been too perfect. Milo wasn’t only a handsome boy, he was a flawless beauty. It might have made him popular in his exquisiteness if it hadn’t been such a dark beauty, so keenly edged that he seemed to have been carved from dark bone. And it would likely have helped his cause if he’d been willing to speak to people. But Milo mostly growled at folks, deep within his velvet throat like a beast. Most people around probably didn’t know he could talk. And he never talked to his mother. What would he say if he did? Touch me! Hold me? Use your fists and teeth until I am raw with you.
His mother hissed, “Devilchild.”
She’d left him on a dozen different doorsteps when he was an infant but the sheriff had always made her claim him. Why hadn’t she left him at Fatima’s then where he’d been so immediately accepted — even if he’d had to alter himself to do so? Was it because she’d become accustomed to brutalizing him from a distance? Had this granted her an outlet and an excuse for the ruin her own life had become?
Milo sat crosslegged before the mirror, butt naked on the cold floor, watching as his punctured skin slowly healed without scarring. No, he was too gorgeous for the holes to stay cut into his flesh. He wished the marks had remained, that he was pocked forever, for perfection marked him as being apart from all else. It made him furious, sitting there scratching himself, raking the elegant half-moons of his nails over his arms and face, desperate for touch, for sensation. Sometimes the need to be handled grew so frantic that mauling became a parody of contact. He dreamed of being torn apart by animals and that had to be a symbol of closeness burned in effigy. He healed, every time. The king of the wolves slunk ignominiously from Milo’s sad life.
Fatima’s special ladies turned away from him without recognizing him at all when his Uncle Rabe treated him to the carnival a few months later. They paraded their luscious deformities on the simple, ramshackle stage, shaking jelly mounds of flab or being wheeled on geek carts or doing perverse double-jointed calisthenics as they stared blankly into space. Smiles were frozen on their faces, refusing to acknowledge his presence at the foot of the stage, pleading up at them, craving a grope of their voluptuousness, wishing for any tidbit they might deign to grant this miserable, lonely boy.
Could it be that they had known who he was but realized that he wasn’t one of them after all? He wanted to reassure them that he hadn’t been laughing at them. It hadn’t been a charade.
“I wasn’t mocking you, Lizard Lady,” he whispered as the pucker-fleshed damsel wriggled by. “I love you. I only want to stroke and be absorbed by your travesty.”
She didn’t look his way but did seem to slow down as she slithered past him in the procession.
“You say something, Milo?” Rabe asked in surprise. He’d never heard the kid speak before.
Milo growled a response, felt it itch in his throat.
Two years ago on Milo’s sixteenth birthday he went to Caine’s Tattoo Parlour and had himself covered with teeth. There were trenchant wolf sabers and yellow canine needles, bloody fangs, gleaming feral thorns, bared in snarling grimaces and in wide-open attack. His whole body became a dangerous mouth.
“Look like yer bein’ et alive,” his mother scoffed as she spat.
Grrrrrrrrrrroooowwwwwwwwwwlllllllllllll, he replied.
Was he being eaten or was it protective camouflage?
I enter the jaws of death.
I become the jaws of death.
Was to enter them the same as being?
Milo began to lift weights until his slender Adonis form put on coils of muscle, stretching the threatening shows of teeth into rictuses of animal agony, throes of creature passion. Biceps and triceps oiled and flexing, he bristled within his cage of fangs. He could feel the grazing by their rotted but powerful enamel against his skin. He would wake in the night straining against a dream of violence to find that some had broken the veneer of his flesh to leave Milo speckled in hot blood.
“This is interesting,” he said to himself, smiling as he licked the blood off, reconsuming it. He turned his elbows back, his knees back as he’d seen Fatima’s ladies do. He cleaned his genitals as well as he could, shaking flecks of spittle from his lips. It was a dusky flavor, copper and salt like the bodies of the freak women.
He imagined that the spirits of the beasts who owned the many teeth that had been inscribed in his skin crept up in the shadows of the night to claim their stolen jaws. Then they fled to hunt under a savage moon that didn’t even need to be full like the stories said. A full moon was all right because it represented a haunch of meat, but a sliver of a crescent was just as well for it more nearly resembled a tooth. On slick ground they pursued the terror-stricken people and animals that Milo saw in his nightmares. And when they would catch their prey, oh, how they teased them, circling with wordless growls deep inside erotic throats. Reaching in to slash some meaty but otherwise non-mortal area, circling, biting, and bellowing thunder to the sky, laughing a jackal’s laugh even as they showed a wolf’s prowess. They then lunged to shake the soft, living bodies until riven meat steamed.
And Milo dreamed it, knew well what these spirit wolves were up to as they playfully snapped at squirts of arterial blood that took to the air like battalions of scarlet butterflies. As they rolled in the ribbons of ropy intestines like puppies with yarn balls. As they grew so aroused by the peppery carnal odor of carrion matted into one another’s fur that they mounted each other indiscriminately. They licked each other’s furry balls and assholes, domineered and submitted with howls of rage and rapture. Milo knew because he had worn the images of their fangs. The spirit wolves had taken their fangs back, and his spirit rode in their mouths as they committed their carnal crimes with the unbridled compassion of the predator. The graphic layers of carcasses spread open, the rutting, even ravishing the fresh corpses of the kill left Milo whining in his sleep, feverish from the ecstatic sensations of brute manipulation.
He’d wake up, feel the press of fangs on his flesh, the heat of blood across his skin that seemed to be more in evidence as each night passed. He was intoxicated by this rush of what had always been forbidden to him — contact. Even if it was brutal butchery. He had been there and tasted every scrap of gore, aching with its burn, savoring the pheromones of carnage and sex as they released like bubbles of boiling sugar. Had awakened close to his shroud of teeth, sticky and flushed.
Then one night upon opening his eyes he found a bloodied half of a breast on the sheets, the nipple bisected raggedly and the lymphatic glands trailing in uneven tendrils. Milo leapt up and raced to his mother’s bedroom. He had to peek through the keyhole because she’d always kept the door locked against him. But he might have gotten in through her window, mightn’t he? Had he murdered her at last, torn her callous body apart with his bare hands while he’d been dreaming of mercurial moonlight and the delirium to be found in galvanic homicide?
Her snore told him she was all right. He could see her flopping on the mattress and snorting, the sour stench of cheap whiskey gusting across the room. Milo shook his head in relief and confusion. Whose breast was it?
He searched the house and the yard. There were no other body parts. Was the blood on his skin not his own?
The next night the spirit wolves came to reclaim their teeth. He rode upon their tongues, clinging to the ballustrades of their honed incisors as they raced two counties over to kill three horses in a bluegreen pasture. The horses’ eyes bulged as they reared, trying to defend themselves with their hooves. Wolves jumped onto their backs
