I was eleven,
and the house was so quiet it felt like it had stopped breathing.
Downstairs, my family was watching
some dumb show - Dad in his easy chair,
Skipper curled on his lap,
my mother probably knitting,
my brother and sister laughing
at canned jokes from the set.
I had my own show,
upstairs, in the dim hum of my bedroom,
the black and white TV I bought
at a rummage sale for five bucks.
The picture was small,
but it worked if you hit the side just right.
That night, The Wolf Man came on.
Lon Chaney Jr. - big, sad eyes,
that fog-soaked forest where the moon
seemed to know what it was doing.
“You can’t escape,” someone said in the movie,
“the curse of the werewolf.”
The words hung in my room like smoke.
I remember the light
from that tiny screen moving across my walls,
how it made the shadows
twitch like something alive.
When the camera followed Chaney
through the trees,
I could hear branches in the wind outside my own window,
and I thought they were claws.
When he turned...when the face changed -
the hair growing in patches,
the teeth, that animal moan -
I felt my heart bolt like a frightened rabbit.
Some part of me knew
it was just makeup and moonlight,
but another part - the part that believed
in what happens when the lights go out,
that part stayed awake for weeks.
I’d lie in bed,
the sheets up to my chin,
listening to the furnace sigh
and the soft steps of Skipper downstairs,
wondering if he’d bark
if the Wolf Man came up the steps.
I hoped so.
But sometimes I thought maybe
he’d just wag his tail,
like dogs do when something familiar
comes home again.
At school I tried to act like nothing happened.
My friends hadn’t seen it -
they were out riding bikes,
or asleep by nine.
I wanted to tell someone
how strange it felt
to be scared by something
you also pitied.
How Larry Talbot
didn’t ask for any of it,
how he tried to chain himself up,
how even love couldn’t save him.
But nobody at eleven wants to talk
about pity.
I learned something, though.
That you can’t always choose
what follows you out of a story.
That sometimes a movie monster
feels too much like
the people you know...
lonely, trapped in their own skin,
doing harm they don’t want to do.
That night, when the movie ended,
I sat there a long time,
the credits rolling up into static.
Downstairs, laughter.
The glow under my door from the hallway.
A part of me wished
I’d been there with them -
safe in the ordinary noise of it.
But only part of me.
Because there was another part,
the one that liked the fear,
the ache of knowing
you were alone with something
you couldn’t explain -
and that part stayed upstairs,
in that quiet house on Lincoln Street,
watching the screen fade to snow,
listening for a howl
that never quite came.
_____ ♱ _____
Years later - nearly fifty of them,
I sat at my workbench
on Boulevard and Street,
putting together a model of The Wolf Man.
A plastic kit,
glue with that sharp, sweet smell
that drags you backward in time.
The tiny fangs,
the ridges of fur molded right into the plastic,
the way the eyes needed the faintest touch of yellow
to come alive.
Outside, the wind was blowing dust across the driveway.
Inside, I was eleven again,
and the moon over the fog-bound set
had found me.
It’s funny how these things come back -
a scent, a line from a movie,
the angle of light on a gray afternoon.
While the glue dried,
I thought of Dad in that easy chair,
the dog snoring,
the laughter drifting upstairs.
Everyone gone now,
but the sound still there if I listen hard enough.
I thought of that scared boy
trying not to breathe too loud
in case the Wolf Man heard him.
And I thought about Larry Talbot again -
how he begged, “Don’t let me change.”
And no one could stop it.
It used to terrify me.
Now, it just feels true.
We all change.
We all get pulled, sooner or later,
by some moon we can’t explain.
I brushed a bit of dust off the model’s base,
looked at that small, frozen snarl,
more sad than savage, really...
and I smiled.
Because after all those years,
he wasn’t chasing me anymore.
He was just standing there,
a reminder that even monsters
are mostly human underneath,
doing their best not to hurt anyone.
When I finished,
I set him on the shelf by the window.
The late light came in soft and gray.
And for a second - just a second
I swore I could hear the wind
moving through the trees outside,
like it did that night on Lincoln Street,
when I was eleven,
and the world was darker,
and every shadow had a name.
GBS
2023
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