Novels I Haven’t Started Yet

By Alex Lake

Preview:

Wolfskin

It was explained to her one time, only once, before she was human. An instruction to leave, nestled in mud breath and panting, a warm body leaving her for the cool night air. They were the first body to leave, a mother or father or some other lifegiver that whimpered under their shape when the trees called to them. They offered their snarling, sleeping daughter before the fuzz shed from her baby skin, before the fire they smelled in the air reached them.

Sometimes she knew it was sacrifice. Other times,

Felice knew she walked backwards, sinking into the smoke, face never turning away from her sleeping family. Her brother, tucked loose in the ground with the skin already splitting around his spine, would be given next. He would follow her eventually.

Felice stumbled through the forest only because she trusted it enough to falter. She had carved each hole in the ground, had dragged her teeth across the neck of everything within it smaller than her. The moon's direction was bright and faultless, burning the dirt crushed against her eyes and drawing them up to blink against the sky. She could hear it sometimes, a crystalline throat-hum of pleasure during the nighttime runs or hunting of small animals, the milky beams of its light and voice filtered through the trees and bathing them in approval.

The moon was silent when the ground took her. It looked on when her legs buckled into the mud, when the slit in her spine smiled and opened up to the unraveling of her insides. They wanted to leave, to climb out of her and rearrange themselves on the dead leaves until they formed a shape so unfamiliar they couldn't be shoved back in.