Page 111 of Feral Werewolves

The farm had been neglected for days, so we all had things to do. We checked the chart that Clementine had made and we all got to work.

I was busy until evening, and when I came back into the house, Paladin was in the kitchen mashing potatoes. The whole house smelled good, and he said he had a chicken in the oven.

I took a shower, because I was dirty. By the time I was done, dinner was ready.

We ate, and Lazarus and Paladin got into a conversation about how behind we were on plowing the fields that needed to be turned over for spring, like everything was back to normal.

Clementine was quiet, but she ate a lot.

I, however, pushed my food around mostly. I felt antsy. This was not over. It couldn’t just be over. I still felt keyed up.

“I need my own room,” Clementine announced.

“Fuck,” said Paladin. “How have we not given you a room?”

“Well,” she said, “I was sleeping in the sun room with all of you. We’ve spent every night together since I got here.And I’m not saying we can’t just do that tonight again. I don’t mind if we do that, in fact, but—”

“No,” said Lazarus. “No, you could stand a night alone.”

Clementine speared a green bean. “Okay, I thought we talked about this.”

“None of the other rooms have beds,” I said. “So, why don’t you take my room, and I’ll sleep—”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” said Clementine. She turned to Paladin. “We can take a bed from the compound house, right? And I was thinking that I could have that room on the bottom floor next to the bathroom. You guys don’t have anything in there except that treadmill which looks broken.”

“It is,” said Lazarus, nodding. “I had this idea I was going to fix it, but that hasn’t happened.”

“You can put it somewhere else, Lazarus,” said Paladin. “Work on it there.”

“Totally,” he said with a shrug.

“We don’t have to do it tonight,” she said.

“What did you and Lazarus talk about?” I said.

Lazarus sighed. “Look, you three want to go fuck out your trauma together, fine. I just don’t function that way. I need time.”

I glanced at Paladin and then down at my plate. I felt embarrassed and stupid and ashamed.

“So,” said Clementine, “then that works. Lazarus gets time, and if you two want to sleep out in the sun room with me—”

“We’re just all pretending like nothing fucking happened?” I exploded. “I don’tgetyou people.”

I left the room.

I went to my own bedroom, despite saying Clementine could have it. I collapsed onto my bed and tried to make out the tangle of my emotions, but I ended up falling asleep. I hadn’t slept well in days, and we’d been doing labor on the farm all day.

clementine

AFTER WE CLEANEDup after dinner, I went to check on Kestrel, but he was asleep. I would have gone after him right away, but Paladin and Lazarus said that after Kestrel exploded, he was less than rational, and they knew from experience to let him be. He would just tell me to go away, anyway, they said, that he’d want time alone.

When I came back downstairs, Lazarus had disappeared too.

Paladin was sitting at the coffee table in the living room, scribbling on a notebook. He looked up when I came in. “Hey,” he said. “I feel like an ass. I can’t just volunteer you to be the leader of what is essentially a very small government. If you don’t want it, we need to figure something else out. You’re in no place to decide right now, though, so I thought I’d try to figure out what exactly needs sorting around here. I never really thought about it before. But I have this list of resources and the biggest problem, I think, is that everyone squabbles over them. The way Griff and people like him usually do it is to say that the leader essentially owns everything and that all of the resources are centrally controlled. He has the right to take anything and everything from everyone, at any time, and no one is allowed to say no. And what he gives us in return is order and protection. But there’s a better way, and I’m sitting here trying to remember why the Russian revolution failed and why communism doesn’t work and wishing I paid better attention in history class.”

I settled down next to him, smiling. I looked over his list of resources. Food, shelter, farm equipment, clothing, government rations, etc. He had written down women with a big circle around it and put an X over it.

“Uh, we’ve been treating women like property,” he muttered.

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