Loss…
Pain…
Fear…
Shame…
The wolf lifted his nose to the sky and howled a cry that his human self would have heard as, “Why?”
And all the life in the fields, the trees, the skies, and the rivers, shrank back. Even the moon slipped behind some clouds as if to hide its face and avoid the question.
* * * *
Randy closed his eyes and ran a palm over his face. He’d been staring at the screen of his laptop for way, way too long. It was stupid, really. He’d done so much Google searching in the past three weeks that he could recite most folklore by memory. Yet even so, what he’d learned, in his opinion, amounted to absolutely nothing. It all held too much fantasy for him to wrap his head around any of it.
What he should have been doing—as he’d told himself well over a dozen times since he’d
