I told my 14-year-old sister Anna that werewolves were so make-believe because of her ridiculous belief she had been a werewolf in a former life, as if there was such a thing as werewolves dying and coming back to life in werewolf stories. According to those stories, they only died when shot by a silver bullet and stayed good and dead.
“Phil, do you know what your problem is,” Anna said, her eyes flashing with annoyance. “You’re too much of a dumbass to understand how werewolf things work,”
“I’m being real and I’m older than you and know more,” I said. “Besides you should know by now werewolves aren’t real and just the made-up stuff in horror movies.”
“That, dumbass, is where you are so wrong. Totally wrong.”
“Swearing shows a lack of intelligence and explains why you believe in stuff that doesn’t exist.”
“I once read that Einstein swore once in a while. Would that fit into your swearing is a lack of intelligence theory, Phillypants?”
I scratched my head and thought about how winning an argument with Anna was like trying to tell a drunk he should stop drinking himself to death. Impossible.
“What’s wrong, Phillypants? Does losing an argument make your brain itch or were you trying to jumpstart your brain to rev up enough smarts to argue better with me? You know you can’t out-argue me. And I know I’m as right as right can be, Phillypants.”
She knew I hated it when she called me Phillypants, but she was kind of right about not being able to out-argue her. It wasn’t that I couldn’t win. It was that she wouldn’t give up even if she said the world was flat and I showed her NASA photos that proved it was round. In spite of the way she was and how she irritated me with the Phillypants, Anna was my sister and I loved her even though she was the stubbornest person I knew. Her stubbornness reminded me of the saying you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives.
But I loved Anna and I could always count on her to have my back. Many times she stood up for me when my parents accused me of doing something wrong, like the time I stole five dollars out of my mother’s cookie jar bank, and Anna said she did it. I couldn’t let her take the blame, but she was so convincing she got punished instead of me and was grounded for a week by our mother, who didn’t tell our father about the stolen five dollars or the punishment. If she told him, things would have been worse for Anna, and maybe for me. Our mother was strict but she always protected us from our mean father no matter what it cost her.
After school, Anna had to come right home and couldn’t go out again until the week was up. I gave her half of my allowance for a month after that but felt it wasn’t enough to pay her for what she did for me.
Anna was a great and caring person, and I was proud of her for those beautiful ways she had. But the werewolf craziness was silly and stupid. I wondered how someone as smart as Anna, a straight-A honor student and smarter than most older kids, could be so thick-headed in her foolish belief in werewolves.
A day later when Anna got her first period and told me all about it, it was a way too-much-information day. It made me queasy even thinking about her bleeding like that. Yuck! It was something I didn’t want to hear about even with a girlfriend, let alone a sister. It was worse than kissing your sister. Yuck!
On the night of Anna’s godawful period talk, the moon was full, and you know how the rest of this story goes. You probably guessed that night I saw Anna turn into the scariest real-life monster ever. I saw and heard her body cracking and expanding. Her head, jaws, and teeth turned into those of a scare-you-to-death giant wolf’s head with long fangs that looked like they could rip your head off. And her monster body got real hairy and grew nine feet tall. Her bones and muscles got big and wide like champion bodybuilder’s with forearms bigger than my calves. She had become even scarier than werewolves in horror movies.
It’s one thing to see a Hollywood werewolf in a movie. It’s another to see a real and scary werewolf in person. And if you live to tell about it you will probably have werewolf nightmares for the rest of your life, and never go out of the house when the moon is full. As I write this my body is shaking and goosebumps are popping up all over me because I’m so scared remembering what Anna had become.
As Anna came nearer to me, her eyes got red and glowing. Her fingernails got real long and sharp and looked like they could slash me in pieces. I got so scared I wanted to scream my lungs out and probably would have screamed myself to death. I wanted to run away too, but I was paralyzed with fear like in those nightmares where you see a monster and freeze unable to scream or to run away from the monster that keeps coming closer and closer to you, only I always woke up before it got me. This time I wasn’t dreaming and Anna could have got me, but I was lucky that night. Anna just growled, girl-like, if you can imagine a big scary werewolf growling girl-like. She said, “See, I told you so,” and leaped downstairs to the kitchen where my father was yelling at our mother and threatening her because he didn’t like what she cooked him for supper.
Anna didn’t give our father a break like she did me because he was always hitting our mother and us. Once our mother had to go to the emergency room but never told on our father when he nearly killed her and she spent three days in the hospital. As was his usual way to make up every time he beat up our mother, our father brought her flowers and other gifts and apologized to her over and over and promised her he’d never hurt her again and begged her to stay with him, “if only for the children’s sake.” I knew his forgive me and take me back spiel. I heard it too many times and wished I was older, bigger and stronger so I could beat the hell out of him and throw him out of our house forever and get a job and support my mother and sister.
Anna showed him no mercy. She slashed him to death in seconds with explosive, lightning-fast power. After she killed him real good, she began walking out of our house with his bleeding, cut-up dead body under one of her big hairy arms as easy as carrying a barbie doll. She stopped just outside the front door, looked up at the sky, howled at the moon, which was very scary to hear. Then she disappeared into the darkness of the night.
My mother told me she knew Anna was going to become a werewolf someday and didn’t look even a little angry or sad about Anna killing her husband of twenty years. In a weird moment, I got the feeling she’d been praying for that day. She smiled and looked happier than I’d ever seen her. She began singing an old song called Happy Days Are Here Again and told me to help her clean up the pools of blood and shredded skin and guts on the kitchen floor. As I shoveled up my father’s blood-soaked body parts and dumped them into a trash bag and heard my mother singing, it was like I was in a crazy movie filmed in a lunatics’ asylum. I’ll always remember how bizarre that night was and how awful it felt shoveling pieces of my father into those trash bags with his blood dripping off the pieces and all over the kitchen.
We never saw Anna after that but often heard her howling in the night during full moons and sometimes when there weren’t any full moons. And on the news, we saw many reports of people slaughtered during those nights, like slasher horror movies come to life.
I suspected she had a hiding place somewhere near our house, but she stayed away from us. I think she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to control her need to kill people and kill me and my mother if she came near us when she was werewolf crazy. And the reported kills in the news kept increasing, which made me think she no longer needed full moons to let the werewolf in her come out and play.
Though I was wrong about Anna’s werewolf craziness and afraid she wouldn’t be able to control her bad killing habit and might kill me someday, I still loved her and missed her terribly. Sometimes I’d get a little crazy and think maybe if I found her on a full moon night, she would only bite me instead of killing me and let me be a werewolf brother to her, but I’m not ready to take that risk. Though when the moon is full I do feel like trying it and maybe there’s some werewolf blood in me that makes me feel that way but doesn’t turn me into a killing creature of the night like Anna. At least not yet.
Bob Boyd