Caleb wasn’t the type of guy to find himself in a tattoo shop. No, not at all. It was Ramine who’d convinced him to do this. He was embarrassed. They weren’t young like the other couples who did this sort of thing. He was forty-one and she was forty-two. Well seasoned. Past the point of these experimentations.
The owner’s body was practically alive with art—he was portly and just a little older than Caleb. Since it was a small town, and a small shop, this man was also the artist. He watched the two of them leaf through his tattered book of designs. While Caleb pointed at crisscrossing spiral motifs, Ramine wanted something simple.
“Pure,” she said. “Our love isn’t that complicated.”
The red tattoo room reminded Caleb of a dive bar—comforting despite his nerves. And he liked the way the needle’s hum filled the space. Ramine watched calmly as the artist worked on his design and then took her own turn. They were both done in less than an hour.
Later, Caleb felt three identical circles of pain around his fourth finger. The thin bands were painted close together in a deep green that looked black when held away from the sun. They matched Ramine’s pattern exactly. Caleb was surprised to find that the series of rings felt cold, akin to the touch of real metal kissing his skin. He caught himself rubbing the slightly raised lines in the weeks they took to settle, wondering if the ink would be bold enough, whether it would wane quickly and become indistinguishable from his dark tone. But the markings never left him—not that year, not the next, and not through any of the ones that followed.
• • •
They made no legal commitment, no proclamation of their cemented status in front of family and friends; there were few such connections to begin with. The next day, Ramine went about life as though nothing had changed, peeling from their bed before sunlight had drifted back to their side of the horizon. By the time Caleb arose at seven, she had already gone for a swim, showered, and left for the office where she kept bread to toast and oatmeal packets.
Caleb navigated his morning by following the trail of energy she left behind. Peek outside for the newspaper. Wash. Feed himself. He went for a walk to the Guatemalan bakery three blocks down to clear his head and soothe his sweet tooth, then returned to the kitchen and methodically washed dishes from the night before. Ramine had conducted a bout of frenzied cooking, being at the phase where her mind was full and active to new ideas, challenges, and projects, including recipes. This week she was trying a series of stir-fried noodle dishes, and the newly acquired wok took up the majority of the sink until cleaned.
At lunchtime, Caleb headed to the warehouse ten miles away. He was groggy and still half asleep when he arrived, better after slurping through a cup of the sludgy break room coffee. He was finally awake once he’d strapped on his back brace and started heaving sixty-pound boxes from shelf to pallet, then forklifting the whole load over to the export dock. The work was drudgery, but meditative, so he didn’t mind too much. Sure, it made him ache and he’d need to quit soon, should have years ago already. But the work also focused him, took away the need to worry.
By the time he got home, very late in the evening, Ramine had already made dinner and was cleaning up the new dishes. She came to kiss him and then went back to her task, humming lightly. He loved watching her like this, unguarded, yet filling out the room. Her neat braids were set free from the updo she fashioned each morning for work, and she’d changed into an airy robe that suggested all her curves and made him tingle with faint desire.
“The garden needs something,” she told him.
“Oh?”
“Yes. Purple! Bougainvillea, I think.”
“We could do that.” Caleb’s muscles protested at the thought of more labor, and he pulled a seat from the kitchen table to rest, making an audible groan of relief as he did so. It was his favorite time, these few moments when their daily rhythms synced. He could tell Ramine was worn from a long day wrangling clients and reviewing business plans by her underlings at the marketing firm, but she was soft too. Tender in a way he could scoop up and make his own.
In bed that night, he pulled her to him, letting her scent fill his nostrils. She smelled like the woods outside their door. Caleb relaxed into her, letting the rest of the day wash from his skin as moisture, salt, and heat. He slept as if dead that night and woke in a blissful, disoriented fog.
Caleb was entwined with Ramine in ways he’d never considered possible. He felt inklings of how she was doing throughout the day, her stress a tightness or easing in his own chest. He often texted her for the pleasure of confirming what he knew with his body. I’m slammed this morning, or The contract finally came through, she’d reply. Ramine swore that she knew Caleb’s thoughts before he spoke them, and it was true that she would sometimes hand him a spoon or his beer before he’d known himself that he was about to ask for it. Caleb’s cousin teased that the connection was supernatural, though the two of them knew it was not—attunement, that was a better way to put it. Ramine and Caleb matched each other the way a guitar could be pitched to meet a tuning fork.
They shared everything in this way, except, of course, that one moonlit night every month—the only occurrence able to pull them apart.
• • •
Caleb had noticed Ramine’s idiosyncrasies slowly.
They met through the cousin, who worked at the same marketing firm as Ramine. “You have to see this girl,” he said. “She’s got the craziest ideas of anyone here, and I don’t know why, but I feel like you’d hit it off.”
Caleb, at thirty-nine, still had remnants of awkwardness in those days, a trait Ramine later soothed out of him. Always the first to try and leave a social gathering, no matter how many people he knew there.
Still, his cousin’s sense for their connection had been right. Caleb met Ramine at her neighborhood coffee shop and was pleasantly surprised she didn’t look down on his blue-collar job. She didn’t ignore the difference either—they talked about it, what it meant for him to use his body so unshielded to make money, why he both preferred and feared that arrangement, what it meant that her work was so different. Caleb saw what his cousin meant; Ramine’s eyes lit up when she talked about her work, and it made a parallel fire ignite inside himself.
Ramine was thick and confident. Caleb loved the subtle curve of her cheeks, her toned forearms, and her careful, warm voice. He was enveloped by her energy and also embarrassed to find himself imagining at that first introduction her head cradled on a pillow next to him. Their relationship developed immoderately fast.
“Sex on the first date?” he questioned, when she wanted to come over. He tried to laugh away the butterflies.
Her response was a withering stare and firm tug of his arm. She remade him that night, took parts of himself he wasn’t even aware of and gingerly brought them to the surface. Caleb did his best to return the kindness, running slow fingers over the long, jagged scar on her left side. He didn’t ask.
But there were times when she was different. When her entire personality changed and she insulated herself from him, one time going as far as to hold her hands over her ears and screw her eyes tight against his presence. She would disappear for days on end, sometimes showing up with scratches and strange bruises, then apologize for her ways, winning him over with kisses and mouthwatering cooking and affection every time, despite his worries.
While Ramine said she traveled often for her job, he eventually noticed these “trips” followed a near-monthly cycle. One night, when he was missing her company, when he texted too much and she didn’t reply, he went outside, saw the full moon, and began to wonder.
He didn’t try to force her into telling him, though he suspected she knew that he knew. When they moved into a tiny house together on the edge of town, close to where the forest became dense and curious, it was only a matter of time before the truth came out.
One night, she allowed him to see.
• • •
Caleb watched as Ramine carefully removed each article of clothing and perched on the edge of their living room’s ottoman. He observed the black-gray pelt that arose from her cheeks and encircled her chin, then the perimeter of her face. Ramine’s nose elongated as her body hair thickened. She sank to the floor once her limbs rearranged themselves, and Caleb could tell from her eyes—the only piece of her old face that remained—that the process was immensely painful.
After ten minutes of twisting, deflating, and growing, the transformation was complete. A dignified, fully formed wolf paced the floor before Caleb, whose own mouth was agape with awe. He had left the door unlocked and ajar at her instruction, and the moonlight spilled into the foyer. Ramine was drawn to it like iron filaments to a magnet, but paused at the entrance and looked back, seemingly asking him to wait for her return. She raced into the open obscurity.
Caleb had never felt more alone than in the moments following her departure. He could only marvel at the process that had unfolded before him and question what was happening with Ramine beyond the safety of their home. He wondered why he wasn’t afraid of what she was, but then again, he understood her the way he understood his own breath. He had to trust that he would know if she were about to cause harm.
He stared at the door for fifteen minutes, then closed it most of the way. Caleb walked the few rooms of the house and rearranged the small messes, putting scattered papers into tidy stacks, folding and putting away the laundry, shelving the books that were out. When he finished cleaning, Caleb returned to the living room with one of the books and tried to read. But her scent was all around him, earth and violets with a tinge of smoke. Caleb looked up every minute, convinced she’d just come back in the door. He awoke to Ramine’s early morning return.
Ramine’s reverse process was faster than the initial change. Her arms and legs quickly differentiated themselves and shrunk back to their usual length, as she curled and whined. Her nose reverted from its horizontal position. The fur retracted. Moments after returning to herself, Ramine stumbled into the bedroom and collapsed into a weighted slumber.
When Caleb arose to lock the door, he noticed the carcass of a rabbit outside. The animal’s remains had been scored into the dirt beyond the porch, leaving a smeary mess. He disposed of the body and took himself to bed beside Ramine, wondering how they would ever be the same.
He awoke befuddled. His limbs were tangled up in hers, a thick fuzz coated his tongue, and his vision blurred as though his eyes were broken lenses trying to fix themselves. He picked hairs out of his mouth and absorbed the scent of Ramine’s sweat—the remnants of a heavy odor like a dog who had slept between the two of them all night.
Ramine didn’t look at him as she stirred, and he was afraid of what that could mean. Was she angry at him for seeing her so vulnerable? Consciousness seemed to weigh on her, on them both, and they dozed between efforts to rouse themselves, anxiety sowing itself into Caleb’s dreams. The thick fog of slumber was like a force he needed to fight, making his way back to her.
Somehow, they both picked themselves up out of bed by noon and managed to put together breakfast—bacon, sausages, and eggs. Hearty, meaty food that Caleb took the lead on preparing. He was as ravenous as she was, as if he’d been out with her all night. Ramine seemed to relax as she ate, but some leftover of the morning’s distance remained in her eyes. She called in sick to work, and Caleb made it to the warehouse just in time for his shift. He moved at double time, hustling the boxes at breakneck speed.
“Don’t leave us all in the dust,” his friend Art laughed.
When he got home, he couldn’t stand the tension any longer.
“Are you mad at me?” Caleb asked.
She looked startled, pausing the TV drama she was watching, swaddled up like a baby on the couch. Confusion studded her features.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Are you upset I know you now? The secret? You’ve barely talked to me all day.”
She hung her head and was silent for a moment. “It’s not you,” she said eventually. “I don’t want you to have to handle more is all. You already do so much. I’m worried you’ll put everything you have into supporting us, supporting me, when I can’t—when I can’t care for myself.”
Caleb released a thick sigh of relief. He went to her and gathered her in his arms. “Don’t worry about that, you never have to worry about that with me.” His words were both enough and far from it.
Weeks later, when the sky’s white orb ebbed to a misshapen oval, through its semi state, and back to the one empty night that granted Ramine total peace, Caleb and Ramine exhaled.
He grew adept at identifying the phases of the moon based on her mood and behavior. At the halfway mark after the full moon, she was full of energy, alive to the possibilities of her career and their life together. She planned vacations and booked conferences, took on more clients and supervisees. Caleb kept up with her mind as best he could, encouraging her passions while nudging her away from drastic changes that needed a cooler head. During the new moon, she was rueful of her recent enthusiasm and took a more measured pace. By the night before the full moon, she was wired and exhausted at the same time, anticipating the change. He tried to be extra available to her at this phase, keeping their calendars as clear as possible and cooking her protein-heavy foods to lift her strength. Even with his best intentions though, Caleb couldn’t help sometimes picking at the little fissures her changes wrought on their relationship. There were times when he resented the gaps he couldn’t bridge.
“What do you do out there?” he asked her one morning after.
“I run. I hunt.”
“What else?”
Ramine looked at him, exasperated. “I smell the trees. I swim and get dirty sometimes. That’s enough. Not so much thinking, not so much analyzing.”
“Do you miss me?”
She shook her head. “It’s not personal. The present takes over.”
Her answers were deeply unsatisfying. Caleb was jealous hearing of her adventures without him, not because he wanted to experience them himself, but because he wanted to understand these moments that so defined her, to know her in all her wholeness. But he was also scared.
There was the scar that she never told him about, a symbol of the natural dangers to be found in the woods. There were the local reports and whisperings of poachers more active than normal. And there was the way Ramine always came back exhausted; he saw the toll each moon circuit wrought upon her bones. The phasing forced her high and low, over and over. Caleb worried for her. He worried that one day the strain of changing would be too much, that she would get stuck in the middle without the energy to fully transform one way or the other. Each time she left him, he bit his lip to pieces until her shape once again darkened the doorway.
• • •
“Why are you watching me?” Ramine demanded one early morning in bed.
“I’m not.”
“You are. You’ve been watching me like I’m a porcelain statue. I’m not fragile.”
“You’re not fragile.”
He pulled her to him, removing the few impediments to their nakedness. He searched her with his fingers until she tensed and went limp. But when he moved to kiss her face, his chest caved in as he realized she was crying.
Caleb cradled her, ashamed at his eagerness. He waited until, slowly, her spine uncurled. Several more minutes passed before he could again find words.
“What does it feel like—when you change to the wolf?”
“Like flying.”
“What about when you turn back?”
“It feels like I’m coming apart.”
• • •
Then came the night Caleb told her not to go. Sleeting rains reduced visibility in the already black night, and the wind battered the side of the house in angry gusts.
He had a bad feeling, one that nagged at him until he couldn’t help but plead, “Stay here. Baby, stay home tonight.” Caleb knew as he asked that she could no more obey his wishes than he could force his being to merge with her own.
Still, Caleb did something he’d never dared before—he blocked the door with his body after she changed. Ramine growled, pacing back and forth before him, and when she snapped her teeth, he was for the first time afraid.
Ramine feinted to his left before cutting through the opening to Caleb’s right. She was gone before he could turn around. Caleb’s dread turned into a dizzying wave of panic, and he sat down fast to avoid a fall. His breath hitched and caught. Should he go after her? He knew he’d never find her in the woods. Caleb forced his chest out and back in, concentrated all his will on the impossible task until he created a regular rhythm. He stayed huddled on the floor like that, just breathing, for hours.
Later, he wouldn’t remember how he fell asleep. He certainly shouldn’t have been able to with all the adrenaline. Maybe it was the crash. Because there was around him now a thicket of trees, dark boughs heavy with wetness. Sheets of rain at a slant. Surrounding forest alive and storm tossed.
And a wild, beautiful wolf, honed to the possibility of prey.
She slalomed through the pine trees. A glimpse of dark gray. Barely visible through the night’s weather, barely moonlit. The shimmering brush swayed with fierce gusts and downpour. He wasn’t walking or running or even there at all, but somehow, he followed.
Laughter. Her thoughts? His own mind?
She raced. Glory and abandon over the dirt and pine needles. Mesmerizing speed. Scraped past trees she should have collided with. Essence of life.
Something nagging. Something bad, wrong.
Warn her. But how? With what mouth? What body? What presence? The fresh air slapped and hammered.
Teeth. Snarling, wet teeth out of nowhere clamped to her neck fur. An awful howl. Desperate song.
She yelped in pain, struggled, snarled back. This was wrong, all wrong. The wolf should be free, blazing. But she was losing. She knew it, was angry with the knowing, fought harder to escape.
He struggled against that which held him in some different dimension, some reality apart from the one he was watching. He saw the second wolf tear into the first. He could do nothing as she bled and snapped and writhed.
She was on her side now, struggling for breath. Skin and fur hanging loose where awful gashes exposed flesh. The second wolf slipped away, and five small shapes streaked off as well. A litter.
The hurt wolf moaned and whined, but her sounds were already growing faint. Her heaving side. Damp fur. Mewling pain. The molasses, the weight of the air he couldn’t fight through.
After a moment, silence.
Distance yawned, unbridgeable—the truth of it a torturous, walloping blow. He tried to stay in the dream place, the one that couldn’t possibly be real, the one where she was, but it was no use. A tug, a blink, a darkening of the dark. Caleb woke.
• • •
He didn’t want to go into the woods. But there was no way he could leave Ramine alone.
He found her by piecing together the fragments of his experience, remembering to turn at the tree with deep scratches in the bark, to hop the small stream that rose up five minutes later. He sought her with the full power of his mind and body, crushing pinecones and bursting through thickets that got in his way. She was human in her final repose, limbs back to normal length and fur retracted. But she bore marks of the attack, neck ripped and stomach leaking entrails.
Caleb lay next to her body and tried to be just as still as her, to make his own breath and heart stop. He was there for nearly two hours that felt like mere minutes; he would only know the length of time later, after having called the authorities, his first resistant step on the long pathway of life he would now travel without her.
• • •
Caleb woke early most mornings after Ramine’s death. While the vividness of their night-centered existence faded with passing months, he heeded some invisible alarm clock, rising at three or four each morning to regard the moon outside—flat and round, or crescent, or empty. He made coffee after, grasping the steaming mug and waiting for the birds to wake. Sometimes as Caleb listened for them, his ring finger itched and his face ran slick, salty.
The cruelest part was that the one person he most yearned to share his sadness with was Ramine. Caleb longed to see her, touch her, but the only pieces of Ramine left were the circles decorating his hand, the shine of the moon, and the echo of her howls. On the rare nights when his eyes stayed shut until morning, Caleb dreamed of yips, panting breath, and small lives rent in his mouth.
• • •
When Caleb married for the second time, they had their rings cast in bronze. The jeweler was an involved one who loved to show his clients the creation sequence. He took them through the back of the store to his workshop. It was like a playground—hulking metal equipment, large and small vats, and scraps of bright shining material littering every surface Caleb could see. His fiancée, Kate, marveled at the space and squeezed his hand tightly. It was a simple moment, but simple in a different way from how he and Ramine used to be. With Kate, simple meant easy, warm, what you see is what you get. Caleb had told Kate about his first marriage as soon as he’d met her, but she’d never felt the need to ask much about it, and he’d never felt the need to tell her.
The jeweler showed them the pink wax cast of the design Caleb and Kate had picked out—dimpled and perfectly round, with the word cherish written inside the band. The crafter explained how he would first place the wax pattern in plaster and then transfer the combination to a scorching hot oven. The wax would melt out, and the jeweler would be left with a perfect inverse of the original shape. Next, the bronze would go in, set, and be doused in water, so the plaster would dissolve to reveal the perfect ring. One week later, Caleb picked up the results.
On their wedding day, his bride slipped the new ring over his prior one, metal to skin. She gave him a rueful but genuine smile when the new band wouldn’t cover the third tattooed circle. The bold ink peeked over the gentle lip of the ring, and for a moment Caleb thought he heard Ramine’s chuckle in the air. A breeze blew through the church. His senses sharpened. And then the pastor said the words that bound him once again to life.
• • •