Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

shoulders, even though she knows this pelt is not her own. Remembering the demon, she loops the forelegs together around her throat so that the hide won’t slip off and fall in a heap to the floor.
    Were she to stand before a mirror, she would see reflected there the perfect image of the skinwalker who took away her true form. In the placid, unrippling glass, she would encounter again those same moss- and spruce-green eyes staring out at her. Because the magic is complete now, the curse consummated and absolute, and she would gaze into that same inexorable determination that greeted her when she awoke to find herself flayed and gasping beneath the star-haunted mountain sky.
    But there are no mirrors on the way back to the kitchen. She finds a sharp carving knife there, a stain less-steel surrogate for the teeth and claws the demon stripped from her. And then the girl who was born a wolf, but who knows that she will one day die only a human woman, sits down on the man’s sofa, facing the door, and waits to see if he will return.

The Bed of Appetite
I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is owe kind with an amenable disposition-neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, fallowing the young maids in the streets, even into their homes.
    Charles Perrault (1697)
    “Such big teeth,” I say, and your laugh is the quietest sort of which you are ever capable. Only the cobwebs shudder at the sound; only the curtains rustle. That is almost the sound of my heart in the presence of you, the easy brush of velvet against the windowpane. I am writing, and you are sitting naked at the foot of the bed, watching me and listening to the scritch of my pen across paper. I have learned to write while you watch, and I have learned to pause for your questions,and I have learned to explain myself and my ridiculous stories in words that will not make you scowl and brush it all aside with a dismissive wave of your right or left hand. I have learned how to forestall the contemptuous rolling of your grey eyes.
    “And such big eyes,” I say, and this time you do not laugh, but only shrug your thin shoulders and nod.
    “So, then, what is it this timer?” you ask, pointing at my paper, pretending that you are actually interested when I have long since learned to know better But I have also learned not to argue, for you are not the sort who asks questions which are then permitted to go unanswered. Whether you are authentically curious or have even the least bit of enthusiasm is completely immaterial to your desire to have an answer. You despise incomplete equations, you have said.
    “It’s a love story,” I say, and this time when you laugh, it is the splintery sort of laughter that makes the air wince and the candlelight grow very slightly dimmer for a moment or two. “It’s not like I am entirely inexperienced,” I add, expecting more laughter and more flinching night, but this time you only smile and lean towards me and ask,“So it’s autobiographical?”
    “Such long, long claws,” I reply, and you stop smiling and look down at your hands, checking to see whether they are only paws again. It is November, the nights of the full Hunter’s Moon, and so you are never quite confident of your mercurial anatomy’s disposition.
    “It’s not an autobiography,” I continue. “It is a love story for cannibals, and for someone who loves a cannibal.”
    “So it is an autobiography.”
    “Do you want to hear this or not?” I ask, risking impatience, and you shrug and lick at your palm in the most indifferent manner possible. But I put my pen away, my pen and the notebook, and then roll over onto my right side so that I don’t have to crane my neck and peer over my shoulder in order to watch you.
    “Two women are in love, and one of them is a cannibal,” I begin, and you make no sign that you’re still paying attention or have even heard me. “The other, she wishes to be consumed, that her