Archive of Our Own

the light is red all around you. the air is hot and wet and the boy from photography is stitching your wounds, broad hand and silver needle, in-and-out, bent over you tugging and sewing with a wolf’s-teeth smile tucked in the corner of his mouth. 

‘do i know you from somewhere?’ he asks, and you want to say yes but you don’t.

there is a cat’s-skull in his pack of cigarettes when you catch him on the front step of school in the morning, peering up at you, but then he offers you a smoke and there they are, one flipped upside down in the middle.

‘it’s a lucky cigarette,’ he says, when he catches you looking, tucks his finger behind your eye and slides it up like a radio dial to meet his gaze, dark and warm. ‘soldiers used to do it in world war one. you save it for last, and it’s lucky if you live that long.’

‘huh,’ you say, dumbly, tongue too big for your mouth, but he grins anyway and slides a cigarette between your lips, lighter-scrape-flick to the way his thumb passes over your mouth and you glance, smoke slipping right out of you, over your shoulder at the singular battered camera on the building. 

‘’s alright,’ he tells you, and you’re watching the folds of his jacket, mustard-yellow that has an eerie radiant quality in the drizzling gray, as he re-fills his pockets with his clumsy hands. ‘it’s been broken all year.’

‘cool,’ you say, and you don’t smoke usually-or-ever but it barely even hurts your throat and gives you a pleasant little buzzy feeling (even if that could also just be the way the boy from photography hasn’t shaved and looks strangely impressed.) 

the boy from photography is digging your grave. you're weak, feverlike, and your chest aches.

the light is red all around you. the boy from photography is developing film, and you’re propping all your too-long limbs on the countertop and watching his broad hands with your photos. he can’t see them yet, can’t see anything, but it’s heart-stoppingly intimate, as he explains it to you, because you missed a day of class. you were sick, horribly, shaking and sweating in your sheets. you dreamed of deer running through midnight forests, and you took a shower that burned.

you burn, in the darkroom, your finger-tips alight like bunsen burners, and you ask him, softly, if fire is a safelight. 

‘for these, maybe. not up close, obviously, but-’ and his hands work, his forearms, ‘it would probably be okay.’ 

your fever comes back. you shake in bed. you stain your sheets with sweat. he asks you if you were skipping, and you laugh too-loud and follow him into the darkroom. 

‘there’s a full moon comin’ up,’ he says. you’re wandering aimlessly, wondering about the way your legs feel coltish and too big for you, about the way a girl in front of you in geometry had scowled down at your unshaven calves. you mm-hm faintly, still absent and drowsy. 

‘you gonna take pictures?’ you ask, and he makes a noise like a laugh under his breath and says, ‘probably not.’

you will. you took your camera out last month, too, and- 

‘do i get to see these when they’re developed?’

the photos didn’t come out.

‘oh, uh-’ you don’t even quite remember what’s on that film. ‘sure.’

you photograph your naked body with a polaroid. it looks foreign. you watch the image appear under the lamp on your nightstand, pieces of skin fading into view. it isn’t yours. you burn the photos.

you shower until you turn red and you feel your bones shifting in your skin. 

you are red. the boy from photography is red. your shoulder-blades are tight and his broad fingers are rinsing your film.

‘what’s your name?’ the boy from photography asks, pressing something soft into your hand. it’s warm.

‘don’t you know it?’

the thing in your hand twitches.

‘no,’ he says, ‘really. what’s your name?’

(it’s a dead bird.)

‘so we just let them sit now,’ he says, ‘and in a day or two we’ll print.’ 

you are leaning on the counter on the heels of your hands and you nod, and you thank him, and in the red-black you can see him smile, and he invites you for a smoke afterward.

there’s a dead something in his cigarette-pack, but you blink and it’s gone and you’re looking into the blackeye of the busted security camera over his shoulder, the heady scent of tobacco and rain in your skin, in the heat of his hands when he reaches out to light your cigarette and cup the flame. 

‘it’s a lucky cigarette,’ he tells you, flipping open the pack. ‘soldiers used to do it in world war one.’ the sun is going down. the light is dim and hot, sizzling-heat, and you feel your bones shifting in your skin. you hunch your shoulders, even if it makes the ache worse. is the light blue, out here, really, or is it red? ‘you save it for last,’ 

‘and it’s lucky if you live that long.’ 

he gives you a strange look, but he nods agreeably and then says, ‘are you still sick? you’re all pale.’

you reach up and touch your face, like you can tell from the feel of it, and you murmur, ‘i guess so.’

‘huh. you think there’s somethin’ going around?’

your ribcage feels like it doesn’t fit inside your skin. there’s a thin layer of sweat down your back. your spine is too sharp. ‘maybe,’ you say. 

you take more polaroids. the body contorts into pointed lines, cords of muscle you can’t find on yourself, jutting of bone on this developing-thing that are unfamiliar. you can hear crickets outside in the dark, and past that the faint barking of a dog. the dark light through your blinds is red. 

the boy from photography is digging your grave. the name on the headstone is yours, anyway, and he approaches the digging with a steady focus that is identical to his hands developing your film, so it must be. you’re lying on your back in the grass and the damp and the blueblack sky. he is working steadily, strong and patient, and you are digging your fingers into the cold dirt.

'do you have a light?' he asks, and he leans on the shovel with a cigarette in his mouth while you reach out with flint-spark finger-tips to light it for him. 

'we've met,' he says to you, 'right?'

you are watching a security tape of a boy lighting a cigarette. your skin is humming with static. 

'i think so,' you tell him, and you lie back down and stare at the stars. somewhere, deer are running through the woods. 

'huh,' says the boy from photography. 'what's your name?'

you're printing your photos. he's lingering at your shoulder making sure you do it right. you don't remember when you took these. you don't remember what they look like. you think for a moment there'll be pictures of the moon, but-

the body in the polaroids is twisted. it's bleeding. the mouth is filled with teeth. 

'be careful,' he tells you, and his hand approaches your shoulder and doesn't quite touch. 

'i know,' you say, but you almost want to screw it up so he'll take your hands in his and finish the job for you.

'did they burn?' he asks, and you spread them out on the countertop. it isn't the best place to see new photos, flattened out to black and red, but you think if you leave the darkroom you'll leave him entirely. 

'no,' you tell him, trying to make sense of the images, 'i don't think so.' 

there is a dead doe you don't recognize. too neat to be roadkill, slumped over like she's only sleeping, and you can't see any sign of a wound. one is only a blurry shot of the trees in the forest. one is your bedroom wall, as if the body had been neatly removed from one of your polaroids. 

'this is nice,' he says, lifting up the doe. 'did you kill it?'

'my dad did,' you say, even though you've never been taken on a hunting trip in your life. 

'it's a nice job,' he says. 'did you go along to take pictures?'

'yeah.' 

when you look at the photo at home, under the light, the doe has a gaping wound in her chest. you can't tell if it's a gunshot. you can't tell anything except that it looks like her flesh has been removed in a ragged chunk. she lies there like she's sleeping. 

the body in the polaroids has blood in its mouth. 

you cut your hair close to the skull, cropped short, and the boy from photography gives you an odd sort of nod. you don't quite know why you did it, except that the weight of it on your shoulders had become intolerable. your bare neck is damp with sweat, standing in the woods taking photos, but cooler than it would've been otherwise. it's surprisingly bright in your backyard, all silver-white with the half-formed moon, stardust quality to it all as you raise your camera and shoot the dead robin you found lying in the grass.

you are feverish. you are lying in bed grasping at your chest like it is something foreign to you. you are taking a shower so hot it burns. you are burning. your skin is tearing somewhere. something is bloodied.

the boy from photography is shoveling dirt onto something, and he has teeth too large for his mouth, and you are asking him to develop your photos again, even as he says you must know how to do it by now, because he's been teaching you for all this time- 

you are watching a security tape and you are rewinding to the part where the boy lights the cigarette, and his replies are animated. his face sweet and open. you are watching a security tape, and you're looking at him, and the other thing in the frame, it doesn't look quite right, but it's okay. it's a shitty camera. none of it looks right. it's just-

but he agrees to develop your next roll of film, and he flips open his pack to reveal his lucky cigarette still intact. paradoxical, a thing like that, isn't it? it's only lucky if he survives to declare it so, can never be unlucky except perhaps in the eyes of those who desecrate the corpse. and maybe then they pick up the mantle of this abandoned luck, declare it once again to be a token of good fortune the moment it lights. are you distracting yourself? you can open your eyes. 

you are in a room plastered with photographs. your finger-tips are scorching. you aren't wearing a shirt. your body is heavier, somehow, more of a purposeful weight to it, but you aren't clumsy. 

several of the pictures are that thing from your polaroids. always the backdrop of your bedroom wall, some of them are you- others still strange photos of wolves, or pieces of them, teeth and claws, and a pile of raw meat crudely illuminated by flash that looks like it might be deer. you reach out to touch it, and you finger leaves a sort of cigarette-burn over the face of the thing in the polaroid.

the boy from photography is sweating. 

'full moon tonight,' you say, absently, not sure why you know.

'yeah,' he says, and there's a strange weight to it, but he only puts his cigarette back in his mouth and keeps quiet.

the boy from photography is shoveling that grave. 

'seriously,' he says, and his voice is raspy as if he's been shouting. 'i know you from somewhere, man, what's your name?' 

'you taught me how to develop film,' you say, and you open your eyes in the woods. redlight, red all over, but dirt under your hands and a hot ache in your muscles. a stinging pain in your chest, underneath your-

you are in the darkroom. you are swinging your legs off the counter and thinking about changing for gym and- 

you are in the darkroom. the boy from photography is printing another roll of film, and he is asking you what you shot this time, and he carries on as if you'd replied. the photos are near-entirely indecipherable. you can pick out, maybe, the jaws of something tightening around a smaller animal, or the slanting shape that could be a doe's neck, and he is picking up a blurry photo of a spotlight-moon that should be impossible, right, because the last full moon, last month, you tried to take those photos, and they didn't turn out. the lighting was wrong. you burned the film. any number of things.

'holy shit,' he says, to you, to somewhere past you, through you, 'are you alright?'

he is shoveling gravedirt. he's frowning like he's thinking. you're lying in the grass. 

(he has been here while you were gone, and so he picks up the conversation where you dropped it.)

'no,' he says, 'i only taught one freshman this year, and i only saw her-' 

you're watching a security tape. there is a wolf with a cigarette between its teeth. there is a figure wearing a jacket that is yours, one that sits oddly on its body, contorts to its muscle. hey, hang on, wasn't this camera always- 

he is rinsing a roll of your film. 'do you usually take pictures of the moon? are there any in here?'

'um. no, not in here. i didn't get to last month.' 

his hands are red. they're broad, steady, grave-digger's hands, working over your film, nodding to let you know he's heard.

'i tried to,' you say, 'but i, uh,' your photos didn't come out. 

the dirt is tossed out of the grave. you burn a finger-print through a photo of a doe.

'i got bit by a dog,' you say, and you lift up your shirt to show him the edge of the slowly-healing wound you know is there. 'or, uh, maybe more like a wolf? it was big.'

(it was feverhot, it was twice your size, its hot breath fanned out over your skin as it latched its jaws to your ribs, right beneath your-)

(it held you in its mouth while you shook and cried and you felt its teeth sink into you.)

'holy shit,' he says, 'are you alright?'

you are dizzy. the boy from photography is red. you let your shirt fall back down and tell him yeah, you've got it handled. he is sliding a cigarette between his lips and holding the open pack out to you.

'it's a lucky cigarette,' he says. it's the only one left. the light flicks on, somehow, an overhead yellow-fluorescent, and you see his mouth splattered red before you blink with your back in the dirt. 

'-like, twice,' the boy from photography is saying, as he shovels the grave. he pauses to sink the shovel into the dirt, leans on it, rifles in his pocket for his pack. 'hey man, you got a light?'

the thing on the polaroids casts a shadow on the wall that begins to take a shape that you recognize. 

the boy from photography has teeth too large for his mouth, too sharp and glistening, and he drags one clawed finger over your negative film, over the body of the doe that you can see, now, has been bitten open at the chest strangely, oblong, overlapping teeth-wounds, and he looks at you with blackbrown eyes and he is something between a wolf and a man. you are pinned, inelegantly, against a countertop, with broad muscled arms, and held there by dense body weight, while the hot-damp snout is shoved into your neck. you are flushed everywhere.

the boy from photography- the wolf- is beautiful, is hot and wet and breathes red down your neck, you are in the darkroom and the wolf is opening its jaw and locating with eerie precision the juncture of your neck and shoulder, where it presses canines to your clavicle. you are pinned, all of the heaving weight of it, of him, of where it brackets you in, where he- he- 

claws, needlesharp fingersized claws, prick at your hips. drag across the skin.

you shudder. 

'what's your name?' he asks.

'it's on the grave, isn't it?'

'who says this is yours?'

you sit up. he's still shoveling. the sky is red.

'of course it's mine. that's my name on the gravestone.'

he's still shoveling. the sky is still red. you are still burning.

'who says that's yours?'

the wolf's tongue is hot and wet on your collarbone. his claws are under your shirt. one of them is brushing up against your wound, but it doesn't hurt at all, just burns white-hot and beads sweat on your skin. you must still have that fever. 

the wolf opens his jaw achingly slow, removes the gentle pressure from your neck, and his nose presses into your short hair, his breath scented with cigarettes and somewhere the bitter aftertaste of iron. his hands are around your waist. 

'what's your name, smartass,' you say, lying back down to watch the faint stars.

'it's tim. i thought we knew each other.'

'we do. i told you, you taught me how to develop film. we did it all the time.'

'no,' he's saying, 'i only did one roll for somebody, i remember, and we just talked about- i don't even think we talked.'

the wolf reaches down to touch you over your jeans, and you gasp, a throaty kind of sound, and the wolf rumbles something pleased in his chest. he licks up your ear, and it makes you shiver, sends a hot thrill down your spine, presses your hips up into his large, steady hand.

'what are you digging this grave for, anyway? if it's not mine?'

'it's already dug.' and he's right, he's been shoveling it in this whole time, or you think so, anyway, and so it's already dug. you stand up on unsteady legs to go and peer over the edge of the hole.

you take a polaroid of your body. you watch it develop while your bones shift under your skin. the thing that rises to the surface is you, you know it clearly, the thing in your bedroom with teeth and claws and barely contained muscle.

he steadies you, so you don't trip into the grave, the endless black shadow of it, but under the bright moon the bottom is illuminated in silver where you see a doe lying there as if asleep, a hole in her chest where her heart should be.

the wolf palms your cock through your jeans, and you nuzzle into him and pant, in the red dark, an animal sound, a shaking human whine from your throat as his claws find purchase somewhere under your thin t-shirt, cut easily through the taunt scraps to reveal swaths of fur. 

'that's not right,' you say, the boy from photography's calm hand on your shoulder, 'the name on the gravestone is mine. what is she-?'

'i dunno, man, i just dig the thing. the stone's been here.'

you are kissing him- the boy from photography- the wolf- his neck, soft and downy over broad lines of muscle, and you are opening your mouth- 

‘where’d you get all beat up, anyway?’ the boy from photography asks, as he’s stitching up that horrible bite-wound, with your back on the red-black counter. his hands are streaked with dark stains.

‘a dog bit me,’ you tell him. 

‘hell of a dog,’ he says. ‘this looks more like a wolf, man.’

the needle goes in and out. the boy from photography has a scar on his chest, where his shirt is unbuttoned and you can see the animal stretch of his skin. 

opening your mouth that aches and pops and feeling your teeth that stretch your gums until they feel about to bleed, taunt-thin around jagged hunks of sharp bone that are closing around a beating jugular. 

'you ever been bit by something like that?' you ask him, looking at his mouth. 'y'know, a big dog. a wild animal.'

you are holding his neck in your jaw, and it is clumsy, an awkward fit, the bodies of predators not entirely equipped to consume each other. to be consumed. his pulse is hot and wet and red. 

'once,' he says, and tugs the needle through again.

the wolves- you, you are one of them, but they are wild and separate and you are afraid of it, faintly, as they embrace like lovers, like creatures, halves of something.

he makes you new scars with his hands like a sculptor, you like icarus sun-drenched and drowned, you like caravaggio with bloodied hands, you like an autopsy as he makes the surgical the romantic. you are autopsied under his hands perfect and masculine and you breathe in and smell cigarettes and iron. 

the wolf presses his body into yours and you sink claws into his back and teeth into his neck and feel whole. 

you are running through the woods, silverbright, and you’re- you’re- you’re chasing something. you can feel your blood in your veins like you never have before, hot and heavy, and you're- you're- 

your teeth are closing around something filled with bones that snapcrack in your ears, with liquid hot-to-boiling, and your saliva is dripping out of your jaws, your mouth hanging open with your breath heaving out, with flesh falling in ragged chunks from your lax, wet tongue. it tastes like the dress you wore on your sixth birthday. it tastes like your mother’s tears. it tastes like life.

you are running through the woods. silverbright. dawnbright. your muscles ache, but they are loose and strong and you are running, laughing and whooping wildly, baying, and you think you hear an answering call. the moon is full and beautiful.

you are running through the woods into the darkroom and it is red and you are red and you are panting, drawing breath on rough, worn lungs, and it's then that you see him.

'what are you doing in here?' the boy from photography asks, and the light flicks on. you're not in the darkroom after all.

'i- i'm jay.' your hands are red, suddenly. stark. 'i'm a man. i just killed something.'

the boy from photography squints at you. the light through the window is watery blue, dawn-light, sunrise-light. 'there was a full moon last night,' he says, slowly, almost conversational, and you nod, nearly hysterical with it.

'yeah,' you say, 'there was.'

and he looks at you, really looks, and he shepards you into the bathroom to scrub at the blood around your mouth.