which has heard nothing for so long
some part of me that wakes up now after endless months and I am
—shaking, skin peeling, back arching as his spine reshapes itself, his body trying to remember how to shift. He shudders and reaches out, snatching at the clothes with one clawed hand (ahand); he clings to it but—
the wolf will not let go so easily
it’s bound itself deeply into my veins
it will always pull me back out of myself
but I had hands for a moment
I remember what it was to have hands
I remember I remember I remember and
—he shudders as he fumbles for the undertunic, feels the worn linen against his skin, and all he can think is:skin. He hardly has the capacity to recognise that this is a tunic, to remember how to put it on; he’s still half-wolf, body warping beneath him, but he remembers this from the old days in the forest when he’d drag himself to his hidden clothing and dress between spasms of change. He needs to convince his body that it knows its own shape.
But he’s worn another shape for so long, and his mind still runs the tracks of the wolf’s, thoughts cacophonous and rapid, past collapsing into present and other into self, and—
perhaps I don’t have a man’s mind anymore
perhaps I cannot remember that
—even clothed some things are stronger: wolflike wolfself wolfbeing, all present and hunt and rage and teeth—
perhaps I’ll never truly be bisclavret again
but I want to be dear god I want to be
I saw the look on his face when he left me here
I heard the tone of his voice as he murmured my name
he wants me here
his wanting grounds me it is a tether I can use to come back
‘you are bisclavret’
he said but what I heard was
‘please be bisclavret’
and
‘come back come back come back’
wanting is a rope thrown to a drowning man
or else to a stolen one, dragging himself
through the oozing sludge of a wolfing mind
–I remember his grief –
the way he mourned, a sorrow unending,
