When I married you, I didn't know you were a werewolf, by Benjamin Niespodziany

Lupu Minariu, by Gosia Herba (Poland) contemporary. Click on image for artist website.

When I married you, I didn't know you were a werewolf.

On their wedding day, his side of the aisles were wolves and her side of the aisles were children. Her children. Many from a soldier who never returned from war. The children tried to pet the wolves and lost their arms. The children made weapons of defense. The mother did not notice. She was in love. That night, their first together, the werewolf said to never note his wolf, and if I leave at night, he said, do not follow. He swallowed the wine at once. She was lovedrunk. and when she woke in the middle of the moon, her children swooning dreamtops, limbless gleeful kids, stalks of whisk and feather, she ran to the woods in search of her new husband and her new husband had changed, rearranged his fur to show more fang, rearranged his tux for a luxury of mane, re-feathered, a car backfiring in exchange for a howl. How? she wondered. He was melting a gun. The handle was nearing the melt. Nearing drops of lava near the cavernous welt. It was heavy, the gun. She reached to hold it, to hold him, to beg him, and fell into the flame. He returned to disastered man with the tragedy of the magical moon. Sadly the gun was still there. Sadly the lava was not gone. His grief was a puddle on fire. An unmelted weapon. A hum.

Benjamin Niespodziany

Benjamin Niespodziany's writing has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50, Fence, Salt Hill, The Indianapolis Review, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net. He works nights in a library in Chicago