Mongrels

If you’re not a beautiful monster, then you’re a villager,

Everything makes sense if you look at it long enough.

Always feed a wolf his fill," the old woman quotes out loud, "lest you wake with your throat in his jaws.

When you're a kid, facts don't matter. It's how hard you believe. How much you wish.

The modern world, it’s custom-designed to kill werewolves. There’s french fries, for one.

What I was doing was making deals. With the world. I’ll take care of you, you take care of me, cool?

Damn the future, right? It’s right now that matters. When you don’t have a fu- ture, it’s always right now that means everything.

That’s how it is with werewolves. You have something, then you just have the story of it.

If you’re not a beautiful monster, then you’re a villager,” he said

A long time ago Darren had said that bears and wolves weren’t meant to get along. I thought he’d been talking about state troopers, though. This

This is how it is with werewolves. Even when they lie, it’s the truth.

Everything’s a trade-off when you’re a werewolf. It’s like the world wants us to be monsters. Like it won’t let us live the way normal citizens do.

Werewolves aren’t proud. If we were, we’d have died out centuries ago.

He’s the one who finally figured out the real way to recognize a werewolf. They’re the ones who never grow up.

Some people just aren’t fit for human company.”... “And some people just don’t want it.

Shakespeare snaking from the window to the door, to escape like we had.

And none of Grandpa’s stories were ever lies. I know that now. They were just true in a different way. He had

A thousand truck-stop T-shirts can’t be wrong.

Just like my mom, Grandma had died the day she gave birth. It was like a curse in our family. “Because

My grandfather used to tell me he was a werewolf. He’d

a strawberry wine cooler across to him,

People say werewolves are animals, but they’re wrong. We’re so much worse. We’re people, but with claws, with teeth, with lungs that can go for two days, legs that can eat up counties.

and the mechanic closes his eyes, knows that the people still don’t want werewolves coming to dinner. But they are anyway, he says to himself, to help his uncle. And they’re hungrier than ever.

So then they try to chew the world up, the same way a dog with rabies bites just because it feels good, because the world is pain. Might as well spread it around.

I’ve never seen one, but these man-wolves, these moondogs, they’re what the movies are based on. They can’t go the full distance, can’t transform like you can if you were born into it, but they can get half the way there, anyway. The claws, too much hair, the ears and the snout. The teeth. Their body, it’s trying to fight the blood, to keep it down. But the moon, it sings that blood up to the surface like a tide.

if there are any real answers about werewolves, then it’s a picture of them right there doing that, a picture of them right there trying to find each other.

It was the werewolf version of The Talk. Just, with more dead bodies.

He’s not a bad wolf either,” he went on, shaking his head side to side. “That’s the thing. But a good wolf isn’t always a good man. Remember that.

Right around sixteen, your teeth get too sharp for the teat, little man. Simple as that.