For the love of my wife

I love my wife. I love her blue-eyed daughter, her dimpled smile and chubby fingers. I love them every twenty-seven nights except on nights like this.

It is for them I leave tonight. I will be back tomorrow, but tonight I need my solitude. They would not see the man they love. Only briefly they would see the beast, before I ripped their throats.

I cannot let is happen as it has too many times before. I know the bitter taste to lick my lips and taste a lover’s blood. On nights like these I need to be apart. Tonight is different form other nights.

I leave before dusk, and though the sky is covered in clouds the burning silver of the moon to will strike my eyes. I found an abandoned bunker a mile away, and I have equipped it with a time-lock.

I had a sheep delivered yesterday. My beast inside craves human blood, but a lamb will do.

Tomorrow I will wake, disgusted with my wool-filled mouth. I hate mutton.

I reach my prison ten minutes before sunset and lock the doors petting the poor lamb, knowing that tomorrow it will be dead.

The hour until moonrise passes slowly, with familiar tingles as my bones prepare.

It is dark and the door can only be opened from the outside until moonset. Grey shadows are moving on my prison walls and I can feel my nails becoming claws, growing hair are itching my skin, my teeth feels sharp against my tongue.

My mind is changing when suddenly the door burst open and my wife is there, daughter on her arm… moonsilver cursed.

Much later I am awakened by the bleating of the lamb — crying but sated.

I loved my wife. I loved her blue-eyed daughter, her dimpled smile and chubby fingers. But alas, I loved their flesh even more.

Werewolf by
Andre Masson

For Magaly at Poetry United I offer this gothic tale. Love the fiction challenge.
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September 1, 2019

18 responses to “For the love of my wife”

Owww…..

You, señor Björn, are a master of terror. It’s the way you start with those soft, sweet, and simply unnerving descriptions, with a main character that sounds so well-collected. And then, you go a prove it all–yes, the main character was very well-collected, indeed, we see in his resigned “alas” at the bleating of the lamb and the taste of fresh, loved food.

Björn Rudberg (brudberg) September 1, 2019 at 17:48 · · Reply →

Ha… I must say that I was inspired with the unreliable narrator, merging a bit of American Psycho into the werewolf myth.

Oy! Extremely fine writing. Wow!

A monster story to chill the warm-blooded.

We must have more Gothic writing! This is deliciously creepy and American Psycho – or even American Gothic! The sacrificial lamb is a nice touch, Björn, and I love the build-up in ‘The hour until moonrise passes slowly, with familiar tingles as my bones prepare’, and then the nails becoming claws, growing hair and teeth. The twist at the end is brilliant!

Björn Rudberg (brudberg) September 1, 2019 at 21:10 · · Reply →

One things we did in creative writing is to use the same sentence in the start and the beginning… this came from that with a slight change.

Oh that “I hate mutton” line, giving us the tiniest of peeks into the protagonist’s mind, but allowing us to quickly move to the next line before we can think to be too disturbed. Brilliant little sentence that has me unsettled and wondering. Loved this.

I love the movement of present tense to past. “I love my wife” to I loved my wife” Seems he loved her body more than her soul. And it’s an interesting flip that he becomes a monster every 28 days when normally it’s women who suffer the “curse” and become bloody once a month. He did try to save her from himself, to lock the monster away, and it was she that let him out so in the end he is blameless.

A surprising change of pace. Very dark, and yet, nicely sparse language. It cuts more close to the bone the fewer words you use, I think. I howl with delight.