Janine in the grass licking old wounds. The night sky plays tricks on the green blades–splitting them black in shadow and blue in the light of the lemon yellow moon. Her mama called it a werewolf moon. She’d make her eyes go wide when she said it and do a frantic scratch behind her ear. A howling moon. Every man her mother’d ever known likened themselves to a wolf.

Wolfmen were easy, by all accounts. A torn shirt. A bent knee. But female wolves, Janine knew, were uncommon due to their swinging tits. Imagine a lady wolfman, her mama once said, out there with titties swinging left and right. You’d be laughing too hard to be surprised by blood when the shebeast attacked. She figured that’s why so many wolfmen. And here’s Janine, thinking the same thing, thinking of her breasts swinging left to right, mounted atop Rick.

Only a month since Rick. Phoebe called Rick “the dick” before Janine and he ever flinged, or whatever you called it. Janine pictures Rick’s sad face, frown-forward, as he said he wasn’t ready, was feeling overwhelmed, that he might need a break. This was after another drunken night, when he said wanna know how much I want it, followed by so fucking much I’m gonna take it, and that he loved being with her, as he bent her over. She fell forward, bottoms-up. His hungry tongue darted around her asshole, as she pressed her ear against the couch and his hands pulled her cheeks apart so much he was lifting her lower body into the air. She was elevating, and then, upon waking, grounded again. Another morning where he could barely smile, or look her in the eye.

Her rough mound calls from between her legs. Why shouldn’t she derobe, press her flesh against the grass before it dews. She’s got dew too, it’s what she makes when she conjures heavy breathing near her ear, like so many ladies behind a door in the movie scenes, waiting to release a scream. Like Rick, crawling up from her behind, and taking a lobe in his teeth, hot wet air huffed-and-puffed in her ear. Maybe that’s why so many wolfmen, too. For all those hot breaths on all those lonely lady necks.

A woman wolf would require clothes. She’d be in a bra, or a ripped tee, underboobs peeking through. That’d calm the giggles in the theatre from the hormone-having boys and the bored, hormone-having girls waiting for the hormone-having boys to catch up. She can see his appendix scar, the crooked line to the right of his belly button, where a fine line led to Rick’s red rocket. She snorts at the thought. The hungry boy that just. Had. To. Set. Her. Free. Who was freed, him or me? If she were a wolf, she’d rip that hot dog off with her teeth.

Janine practices widening her jaw under the citrus moon, while bullfrogs croak in chokes of air–their low moans echo across the pond. Her sharp teeth could come at any moment, she takes a suddenly thirsty drink from the bottle in her hand, thinking of his taste in her mouth, and then washing it out. The wine runs past her curled lips, twin rivers, black in the yellow light, meeting under her chin, rushing over her clavicle and soiling her bra.

“Oopsie,” she says aloud, and proud, just at the edge of feeling a little drunk. She runs her backhand across her lips, and after a taste of the wine-soaked, soft-fuzz of her arm hair, she sucks the ball of her wrist, looks down at the purple stain running down her white cotton shirt. Decides, fuck it. She digs her nails into the fabric of her tee and rips the shirt, splitting the wine stain in two. Unclips. Janine’s breasts fold over her belly. She unzips, slides out of her shorts. He cut the last pair of underwear she had with office scissors, part of his hungry boy routine. Rick the dick, throbbing in her dreams.

She’ll crawl in, on all fours, ass-up to anyone lurking in the trees, a bunch of nameless Ricks, who don’t get to lap this body. She gets on her knees. Tits swaying in the breeze. She lifts up like downward dog, a crawling V, and claws the earth. There’s a mud bed that eases into the lake, the wet earth oozes between her toes, she sinks her fingers in deep. She dips her face in the mouth of the lake, lets the soft thickness of the mud there hold her chin, gives the surface of a lick. Howling would be cliché. Instead, Janine releases a hot stream, marks the spot, to keep the animals away. She reaches her arms out into the black water creating ripples of light across the lake, and frog-strokes, underwater, away.

She swears if she’d stayed on land she would have taken a new shape.