Brush back the wolf hairs falling into her eyes, say her snout is beautiful and glistening, her teeth will rend and tear. Point out her gold-tipped claws and glowing red belly, remark on the snowy delicacy of her ear tufts.
Don’t let her explain. It doesn’t matter. Sins are plentiful, and for women, they are infinite. You know this, too. It could be anything, look around—refused to get married, refused to have children, refused to stop dancing, refused to stop flirting, refused to stop singing, refused to stop learning, refused to stop working, refused to stop healing, refused to stop reading coffee cups, refused to answer for any of it. Good. She is now, in her pin-straight proudness, one of us.
Welcome to the pack.
Tell her.
Seven years is not very long to have a skin at all, she’ll see. And our daughter, our execution, you must know the value of an unlocked door, the orthogonal beauty of an open gate. Teach her all those words, teach her hatchway and ingress and entrance and egress. Forsake and escape. Her new body is a key, not a jail.
Tell her.
Sometimes changing feels like being ripped, the papery burn of cracked skin splitting in the cold. Sometimes it feels like choking on the rust-iron scent of blood. But, if she can, she should think of it like sinking under the water in a warm bath, like she might sleep and let herself drown.
Tell her.
Take back her late nights, to leave the lavash unfired and the grape leaves unsoaked, to feel the moon on her skin the way so many of us want—safe, thoughtless, galloping. Tear the doors from their hinges even as their locks spring open. Everything is you, nothing is closed, and nothing will ever be closed again.
Tell her.
Eat anyone she wants. Laugh so they can see all her teeth. Let them watch the bones grow and twist, and understanding will seep from their every pore. The fear smell, like oranges and salt. The regret smell, slightly mushroomy. Full of new teeth and the empty crawl of righteous hunger, eat them feet first. Let them see.
Tell her.
When he says the curse is over, when he asks for it back, advise God to mind his own business and keep it. Tell him that seven years is not very long to have a skin at all. Tell him the nose found the best healing herbs; and the legs walked for miles at night when she could not sleep, just her and the widening sky; and the locks of the city sprung open at her approach so she could take hard bread, good wine, and fat olives into her yawning maw.
She is us and we are her and everything inside of her will align when she changes her skin and when she slips the lock and when she flings the doors and she will know and know and know we are all pelt and glory together and there are no bones we cannot crush.