SAmuel Clark

Never Her Kin


When the physician confirmed Mora’s pregnancy, the priestesses were the first to suggest she be caged. Mora, of course, agreed. Not for herself, but for the safety of the baby inside her, animal instincts rising before her belly did. 

Mora’s secret wasn’t really a secret. The lingering fables of werewolves were telling, the mistakes that were made from past werewolves and townspeople alike: the werewolves who did not confess after their first turning, the townspeople who ran them out, who ostracized and abandoned them with no room left for healing. Or so said the priestesses of their village, the oral histories bestowed upon all of them.

Mora—she believed in history. In learning from the past to avoid repeating the same tired warfare, the stomp and holler and blood-soaked steps. So when the full moon rose and transformed Mora’s body, when she became all hard angles and teeth, her flesh a patch work of matted fur and hunger, Mora did not hesitate. After waking in the woods stripped of clothes and last night’s memory, the mangled carcass of a deer she had captured and consumed, Mora limped back to her town, to her people. She told them all the truth, the violent blood-soaked whole of it, of what little she remembered, of the werewolf deep inside her, dormant only until the next full moon.

The townspeople, much like Mora, believed in learning from history as well. The pitchforks stayed locked in their closets. The torches unlit. A headcount was conducted, of course, to make certain Mora’s thirst really hadn’t gone beyond the hunted deer. Mora didn’t protest. She wanted that, some peace of mind amidst the chaos, her sigh of relief louder than anyone’s when all in their village were accounted for, alive and well and adding Mora’s name to the prayer list, knees on hardwood floors, beads in steepled hands, candles lit at the altar for Mora’s well-being.

The priestesses worked hard for Mora. For the town. For the lives Mora’s curse would impact if they did not work efficiently and fast.

When Mora was born, brought into their world pink and screaming, she had been given a sweet tasting formula, one designed by the very same people who were helping her now. She never got the chance to ask her mother about it, the special tea that had been given to her once a month for as long as Mora could remember. And then, at the tender age of five, Mora woke to her mother’s empty bed. She’s passed, said the priestesses, we’re so sorry, and gave her a mug of the sweet-smelling drink, Mora dazed with sudden loss and its confusion. She drank in silence to the bottom of the glass, empty as her mother’s bed.

There’s a chance you might be wondering how someone like Mora could conceive in the first place. Changing anatomy aside, who would willingly make love to a werewolf? While it was important not to repeat one’s history, caution was still in order. A werewolf was not to be treated with violence or isolation, but handled by means of gentle footsteps and steady hands. To love was to tolerate. To condition. To make a werewolf capable of adapting was a gift of generosity and time. So who in their sanity would lay hands on the likes of her?

Enter Jonathan, maker of butter and jams. Mora would watch him collect figs from the community garden, basket full and brimming, humming to himself as the hornets swarmed and sang. He didn’t seem afraid of them, their sting and snap or the welts that would inevitably follow. She watched from her house as he smashed fruit at his kitchen counter, the purple-red pulp in its rawness—his kitchen window across from Mora’s humble abode. And of course—Jonathan, warlock that he was—of course he was watching her too, watching Mora pick lavender and hang it upside down, crimson purple above her door.

“Do you know what that does?” Jonathan stood outside of Mora’s home. Tucked under his arm, a basket of sweet potato loaves, a jar of honey butter and clover jam. He had come to confront her, tired of their staring. Flirting was fun, but only to a point. And Mora . . . the trapped wolf inside her worried him, but not for the same reason it seemed to worry everyone else. “It wards off evil spirits, yes.” He repeated her words back to her, confirming what they both already knew. It seemed more that he was digesting them, figuring out his next move. With visible hesitance, he placed the sole of his foot past her door frame, a playful smile pulling at his teeth. “It would appear,” he said slowly, “that the lavender has deemed me permissible.”

She pointed out his caution, to which Jonathan’s face fell, disappointed in his own poor communication. “Forgive me,” he told her. “I moved carefully only so that you’d have time to tell me no; I didn’t want to startle you.”

And so it was that Mora let Jonathan into her home, where the two ate bread soaked in jam and made love. And in the morning, when she awoke again to the empty space beside her, when she awoke again to the priestesses of her childhood surrounding Mora’s bed, she did not have time to speak before their influx of apologies—“He passed in the night, we’re so sorry”—before they crammed her full of tea.

*

It was important to learn from one’s history, but sometimes, if the circumstances were dire, one’s only choice was repetition of the past. “Violence will not touch you,” the priestesses assured, “but a degree of isolation is in order.”

Mora agreed—as has been previously established—worried only for the baby inside her.

And so, for the next nine months, Mora stayed within the confines of her small home, the lavender removed from her door frame to make room for the bars—Mora locked in from the inside—with only the priestesses having access to the keys.

The full moon came and went, came and went, Mora’s windows drawn closed, the priestesses serving her tea every day, mugs and mugs of it. Mora feared that her baby would be born under a full moon, the white light curse of it, and so—despite its immeasurable pain—Mora breathed a sigh of relief when, on the night of a waning crescent, she felt the floodgates of her middle pour open, felt the push and cry of her baby fight through.

But one baby begat another. And another. And another. Mora, despite her pain and confusion and obvious fear, counted six separate cries, six separate declarations of sex, assigned to her children before their first breath.

And Mora, who cried to hold each one of them, who plead to hold her babies, was denied even this, the scent of that familiar tea in the room, the splash and fall of something being poured in abundance, little tongues that lapped in ignorant hunger, assuming it safe with mother in the room.

With the ripe pink clarity of motherhood, Mora lifted herself up from the bed, legs trembling, the caps of her knees the first to shift as she caught sight of her litter, her beautiful cubs, the way their fur was already thinning from the tea, how their snouts grew shorter, their ears rounding out at the tips.

With a howl as long as her teeth, Mora swept the bowls away from her babies, her claws a veil between her children and those who looked on, horrified, the priestesses who were once her keepers but never her kin. They dodged her wrath, her changing body, the only real body Mora ever needed. “Mora,” they begged. “Don’t you understand what we’ve given you? Don’t you want to be human? Your mother, that warlock . . . they would have told you the truth. They would have let you live this way, this monstrous shape of you. We had to get rid of them, don’t you see? Please,” they said, “think of your children.”

“I am,” Mora said. The pups howled in delight at their mother, yipped and yapped against the spray of broken glass and splintered wood, Mora tearing her house down in front of them, the priestesses unable to stop her, unable to stop anything for once, for once.

Mora and her children leapt through the ruin, where they ran deep into the woods, far past the town and anyone who could reach them. Howling at the crescent moon and each other, their beautiful fur coats, their beautiful angled jaws, their beautiful fresh moving bodies.