Fleur and the wolf
editorial note: this is a short story i wrote over the course of a few weeks in january/february 2024, then cleaned up recently (mostly by correcting typos and adding a few sentences that made my original thought more clear). heads-up to the reader: it references disassociation and deals with a protagonist mired in self-hatred. i hope it’s haunting.
In the evenings when Fleur cannot sleep for any number of reasons (construction noise, insomnia, boredom, depression) she walks down six flights of stairs and across the street to an overpriced bar that’s supposed to resemble a speakeasy and orders herself two glasses of white wine. She tells herself that choosing walking over the elevator is to offset the Sauternes, but in fact it is because she did it the first time on a whim and she is a creature of habit.
The light is orange and syrupy and collects on her exposed shoulders. She takes a light sip from her first glass, eyeing the others at the bar. In Fleur’s mind people are only interesting to watch inasmuch as they are interesting to talk to, and of course you have to start a conversation with someone to know that about them. So it’s not so much the watching that interests her. She is a solitary, neurotic kind of person; she waits to be approached.
It happens. It always does.
Her femininity is lavish performance, almost gaudy, a series of sweet slick makeup products and the scent of light florals stamped over her sweat. In the light her pearlescent nails display cracks and chips, her dark red lipstick smudges at the corners of her mouth when she eats, and when she stands she has to pull at the end of her miniskirt in an awkward hurry. Only the best actors can make you forget that what they’re doing isn’t real, and Fleur wasn’t the best, she was just a devotee. But the pastiche she created of timeless beauty was as intrinsic as her affected accent, which gave the words she spoke a delightful flurried sound, as if they were falling over each other in an urge to escape her mouth.
A wolf with an awkward, swinging gait crosses the length of the room. He quirks an eyebrow at her and undoes the top button of his collared shirt. She thinks a woman must have bought it for him because it complements his eyes in a way men don’t usually notice. Regardless of this woman (who may of course be his mother, sister, cousin) he sidles up to her and takes the seat. Fleur is not a wolf but she smiles wide enough to show her teeth.
“I want you to kiss me and not call after,” says Fleur. Or thinks. Sometimes she doesn’t know.
The wolf grins.
It transpires that the wolf is named Andrea and that he graduated from the University of Chicago with a physics degree. He says this in a kind of presumptuous tone that implies Fleur ought to be impressed by it, but she does not see how it’s a particular distinction, given that people graduate from places all the time. She thinks that this personal information is an indicator that he sees her lack of romantic interest as something he can change.
All wolves tell you they’d love to meet a lamb that exposes its throat but when they do they go out and find another challenge.
She smiles, though, and lets him ply her with glasses of white wine. The night is tender around its edges and curls up like freshly painted paper. Within its boundaries she can go anywhere, be anyone. What she likes most about wolves is that their company enables her to wander the city after dark, lost in the fog and unafraid. What she likes least about a wolf is that he sees the walk as an intermediary between the bar and his bedroom, neither of which are nice places to live in.
Of course he takes her offer of a kiss and spins it into sex, which Fleur does not like as much because it forces her to confront the dirty reality of the human body as an animal, rooted in the unpleasant conditions of its arrival. Better to touch only the lips, leaving her mind at rest. Her thoughts can be a nebula wearing her body as a garment they can slip off at will. Her thoughts are so far from this man and his body and the uncomfortable way his stomach is pressed against hers.
Fleur often experiences months of intense disassociation. She showers in the dark. Her meals are impeccably timed, if only because in the absence of that consideration she’s sure she’ll forget to eat them. Her engagements with wolves are the most reliable triggers for these periods, a delectable haze of gray and swirls of cotton candy where her mind, free as a bird, is allowed to drift through a series of cumulus clouds. She imagines she is in fact a bird and her wing is cutting against the wind, cold and sharp and almost painful, but in the sky she is her own master.
On Earth there is a wolf and his bed is slick and slimy with sweat. His room is a cubicle, the quintessential downtown apartment, sparsely decorated and infrequently visited. He is above her and his body presses hers into the bed. She is uncomfortable in her neck and hips. This, she thinks, with some measure of disgust, cannot be all there is to intimacy.
Her solitude has long been precious to her. She has protected it fiercely and jealously, the way many of her lovers wish she would regard them—something you care for enough to safeguard. Fleur cannot help that it feels, oftentimes, more intimate to run her slender pointer finger down the curve of her own cheek than to feel a man inside her. She feels that on her own she can strip the rind and pith from her life and be left with the lovely orange of her thoughts, ballooning to fill her bedroom better than the best of company.
On the wolf’s desk there is a bulging notebook that she catches sight of over the pale plain of his right shoulder. Catching the ribbon falling out of an entry towards the middle feels more like touching him than running her hand through his hair, but maybe it’s just that his hair is somewhat greasy, like he hasn’t gotten the conditioner out.
When he’s finished he invites her to stay the night, thinking this is the gallant thing to do. Even though she would rather not Fleur sees that the time is 3:14 and accepts his invitation with as much grace as she can have in this state. Her skin is rubbed raw and pink, particularly between her legs and under her breasts, and her fine thick hair is in a cloud about her head. Fitting stiffly under his sheets she reaches to fiddle with a necklace that is no longer there.
It is small comfort to realize that the wolf is awake next to her, his bug blue eyes open wide, wondering at what he has done.
Lamb to the slaughter and killer howling over the meat.
Fleur enjoys a taste of the macabre but cannot stomach a single metaphor about cannibalism, or a survival story, or a special edition television episode on a police procedural. She dwells on this now, wondering whether it has something to do with her childhood or possibly her father, and tries to sleep but her eyes continue to flutter back open like a doll’s. On the backs of her lids there is a puppet show about dead dogs.
She wishes she were a bird in a dog’s mouth because it feels more respectable.
When Fleur was younger she once sat in the shadow of the renovated Sagrada Familia and watched them paste an advertisement to its side. Like stapling a FOR SALE flier to a beached whale. The sun was warm on her brow and the perspiration dripping down her cheek left a long line in her makeup. She thought that she wanted to be a writer, or maybe a lawyer, anyone whose primary currency was words. She thought that she had an unerring talent to skim the fat off of life and repackage it as something beautiful and that it would be a waste if it went unused. Mostly she was thinking about how self-involved you had to be to shill an iPhone on the side of such a beautiful building.
Inside the church there is one room where photos cannot be taken and it is a prayer room. When Fleur was there she sat on a bench with her forehead on the back of the one in front of her, hoping that what she perceived to be her one true talent would come in handy at least once. She hoped for a lot of things when she was younger, because her grandmother had told her that it was a time when the whole world was open for you like an oyster you had to suck the meat out of, and Fleur had loved her grandmother very much before she had died so she remembered those words as gospel.
Fleur thought she had so many choices, turns out they were between lamb and bird, turns out she hasn’t made the right ones.
Next to her the wolf’s chest expands and contracts, tight enough that she knows he hasn’t fallen asleep either. Maybe he wonders why he is sleeping next to a stranger. Maybe he didn’t take Spanish or Italian in university but French, maybe he remembers a different church defiled, maybe he made the same prayer.
She wonders what talent he thought would save him.
We are stumbling after salvation, all of us, until we are on our knees in the dirt. Most of us call it love, others religion, still others the bottom of a glass. I think it means to save, Fleur said in first-year Italian, scrunching up her nose. Salvare. Someone, somewhere, save me. It has been the great obsession of her poetry and her truest failure, which slices to the core of her being and sticks out of her back when she walks.
She turns over in the bed so she doesn’t have to hear him breathe. Has he found religion? Poetry? Physics? Is it all the same? You have to believe in something bigger than yourself. Surely he has not found love. The apartment is dank and dismal and of course she is in it. All she knows is that the wolf does not want to love someone he cannot possess.
Fleur doesn’t mind the principle of being possessed as much as she minds the principle that she would go unloved if she left. Certainly she isn’t expecting a lover to be hung up on her forever, however, it would be nice to know that in her absence there would be yearning, some sort of a tug, a string that bound them together beyond transient earthly desire. Anyway you can’t get that if you don’t first have credit with a person, if you don’t stick around for long enough that your departure is felt. Fleur hasn’t had that with someone in a long time. It is the fever dream of a lamb with a broken leg.
There had, of course, been someone different. Everyone is entitled to one great love, regardless of how unsatisfying.
He had a soft round face and calluses on his fingertips from woodworking as a kid. The result of this was that his handwriting scattered on the page but his touch was infinitely gentle, as if preemptively apologizing for the unintentional hard shell. Once he had apologized to her for his second-rate translation of Crime and Punishment and she was so hopelessly charmed that she forgave him.
Anyway he is gone now and there is no use thinking about it.
One great love is all you get.
The beginnings of dawn start to slip in through the window and stain the room with gray light. She watches as the bed and desk and floor are slowly enlivened, like a picture book. Good morning sun. Good morning shoes, good morning plant, good morning clothes in a pile on the ground. She winces. The skirt had been expensive.
Fleur shifts the blankets off and stands up. She feels as if she has been through a meat grinder, bleary and disoriented, but she has always been unwilling to sleep where she cannot control the environment. Beside her the wolf stirs. She is not sure when he went to sleep or if he did at all. She is afraid he is going to call her.
“Do you want coffee?”
“Not particularly.”
“Breakfast?”
“I think I’ll just go, if that’s alright with you.”
He shrugs. If she knew him better she might be able to deduce whether he was upset.
“Suit yourself.”
Then again, maybe not.
She’s often been criticized for being cold. It radiates off her body, like cartoon lines that represent gooseflesh. Too quick to withdraw. Too quiet. Emotions sit sharp and shadowy inside her, lodged in all the wrong places: beneath her kidneys, tucked in the rugae of her stomach, pushed into her tooth in place of a cavity filling. In fact she feels as if emotion has swallowed her up and spit her out, and the only way to compensate for how all-encompassing it becomes is to let it sit in her body, humming.
One great love is all you get.
From the ground she retrieves her bolero, her pleated skirt, her overpriced designer purse. These signifiers of status comfort her in a purely materialistic sense. She wishes she were better than that, but only incidentally, in practice it’s more valuable to feel better based on something that doesn’t matter than put the work in to be reassured by something that does. Like love or inherent goodness.
“Have a nice day,” she says, tinny and robotic, as if bidding goodbye to someone who made her a breakfast sandwich. Then again, on a fundamental level, had they shared anything deeper than the exchange of goods and services? They had not given each other anything more than physical pleasure, nothing that was so intrinsic to them that it could not be easily retrieved. Fleur does not even know whether he has a middle name.
Which isn’t an important thing to know about a person, not really, but in the moment it feels like the nail in the coffin.
She doesn’t want to leave the wolf before he sinks his teeth into her side proper; she has become a hunted animal adapted to the condition of its hunting. She wants to learn a laundry list of bands she will never be able to listen to again after, look up things like ‘how long do skin cells take to regenerate’ and ‘make my room stop smelling like his cologne’, wants to see his name in a book one day and snap it shut. Fleur’s sudden masochistic desire is not unfamiliar to her, and she shakes it off like a bug in the springtime. In the bed the wolf has turned over and covered himself with the slimy sheets. She does not allow herself to entertain the possibility of a future with him that lasts, regardless of its brevity.
What talent can she claim that the rest of the world doesn’t have in spades? What could she possibly offer him that he couldn’t scoop out of her body, leaving it a barren, bitter place?
Her whole life has been a long lesson in shirking responsibility. The saltwater dripping off the edge of her nose at her high school graduation, sloughing through her mismatched concealer. The ashamed way she’d shuffled on another stage after a six year long bachelor’s degree, her shoulders hunched and family absent. The dark circles under her eyes because she cannot even be bothered to show up for herself, and if she can’t do it for herself, who can?
The wolf grunts and she takes it as a sign to go.
Consumption is a form of love too, the one language that Fleur and her city have in common. An expat with no sense, no history, no claim or heritage, just the capacity to chew someone up and spit them out, call it love. Call it anything you want, just not the humiliation it has to be. She pads gently across the hardwood floor and thrusts the door open. She is always reliving the same second, the same moment, her father’s daughter in the space he left unscathed.
It ends like this, then. In a small, unsatisfying sort of way, the same way she has ended so much in the course of her life. There is no sense of closure, much less climax, just Fleur’s bony pale hands closing around the door and opening it.
She is Orpheus. She doesn’t turn.