Lupine

Kayla’s stomach felt heavy, as if she’d eaten a supper of lead the night before. She folded her pillow in half and leaned against it while thinking about her team leader, Geraldine. The way she’d yelled at Kayla for being rude to a patient. How the old goat’s nose looked like a snout.

Yawning, Kayla imagined leaping from her seat at the team meeting later that morning. What would it be like to fall on Geraldine and tear into the greasy flesh of her throat?

She licked her lips and tasted copper. “Must have bitten my cheek again last night,” she muttered, stretching her arms above tousled blonde curls. Probing her cheek with her tongue, parts of a dream came back to her. She’d been free, loping through city streets with the wild abandon of an animal. Her pulse quickened when she pressed against a swollen place in the soft, moist flesh of her mouth. She shook her head as her fingers scrabbled for the water bottle on a wooden folding table by her bed.

Minutes later, while she tugged at the khaki slacks she was required to wear for work, the Hedgeville AM newscaster—the one with the soft eyes and devilish goatee—said, “Be careful out there today, folks.” Kayla stood and grabbed one high-top athletic shoe from her cluttered dresser. The announcer continued. “There’s been another brutal attack, this one on Reedville Lane.” His voice was strident and high-pitched. Kayla thought of a small mammal squirming in the jaws of a predator. She grabbed the remote and pushed mute.

Listening to details of yet another attack—victims found behind bushes or sheds, bellies ripped wide, arms and legs gnawed to the bone—made Kayla’s stomach cramp. She shook herself and said to the TV, “Why do I need to be careful in daylight? Whoever’s doing this only works at night, you scrumptious thing, you.” She kissed two fingers and pressed them to the screen, right over the newscaster’s mouth, then hit the power button on the remote.

“Who am I kidding?” she muttered. “Highly unlikely a TV personality would want somebody like me.” She studied her reflection in the mirror screwed to the back of the bathroom door and winced. Light glinting on the glass hurt her eyes these days, especially after one of those dreams about racing around like an animal. She pulled purple nylon curtains across the small window behind her, but the fabric was too thin. It barely cut the glare.

In the cloudy, desilvered mirror, tawny curls framed a round face. Hazel eyes sparkled near an upturned nose and dimpled cheeks. Kayla smiled, revealing straight white teeth.

The smile drifted into a scowl as she surveyed the muffin top hanging over the waistband of her khakis, fabric stretched to the breaking point around her thighs. She turned away from the mirror and grabbed her keys from the off-kilter plastic shelves in the hallway. “I’ve got a boyfriend anyway,” she whispered as she tugged the door open, making it screech. “Even if he is in prison.”

On the bus, lurching toward the hospital where she worked, Kayla counted her gripes about Geraldine. First of all, why did the woman have to call a mandatory meeting on Kayla’s day off? The timing seemed vengeful—Kayla had long suspected her team leader didn’t like her. Second, the odor. Geraldine gave off a meaty essence that prompted a hollow feeling in Kayla’s gut. A low growl of disgust escaped from Kayla’s throat. She covered her mouth with one fist as a Latina woman across the aisle glared in her direction.

“Are you okay, dear?” the blue-haired biddy seated next to her said. Her voice sounded like a chicken’s clucking.

Kayla smiled. “I’m fine. It’s just…” she belched, one hand over her mouth again. “My, uh, stomach. Some mornings.”

The old woman clucked knowingly as she patted her own belly. "Expecting a little one?” she asked.

“Oh my God. No,” Kayla said. She swiped at her phone before adding, “I’d have to be…uh…exposed for anything like that to happen.”

The woman’s eyebrows shot toward her steely helmet of a hairdo. The bus slowed to a stop next to a sandwich shop. Kayla’s stomach gurgled.

“I’m not—I don’t...there’s no man in the picture. Right now, anyway,” Kayla said, casting her eyes toward her phone.

“Oh.” Her seatmate lifted a worn handbag onto her lap and began to paw through its contents.

Kayla looked at her phone screen, but Jadon’s face danced before her eyes. Despite their best efforts, nothing remotely likely to put a baby into her belly had ever occurred during their visits in the Broadville Penal Institute. Her lips turned up slightly at the thought of the name, Penal Institute. She and Jadon had exhausted all the jokes and puns. Now—after eighteen bleak months, they were left with only the gritty reality of an institution formed to make men regret they’d ever set foot inside it.

Fingers tightening on the smart phone, Kayla thought of Jadon’s arms, holding her, comforting her. She loved Jadon. But how much longer could she go without that kind of touch? Without sex? How much—

A screech ripped the air. The bus jolted to a halt. Kayla stood and exited.

On the sidewalk, diesel fumes made her nose wrinkle. She watched the bus pull away. Then she trudged through bright, sunlit air laden with the smell of fresh mown grass until she reached a vast brick building labeled UltraMed.

Inside, a crowd had gathered outside the break room where the meeting was to be held. Kayla edged her way past chittering people clad in blue polos, a round UltraMed logo on every chest. When she reached the open faux-wood door, Michaela, the girl who sat in the cubicle next to her, grabbed her shoulder.

“Meeting’s canceled,” Michaela said, frowning. Cold fluorescent light flickered above the crowd. The air smelled of disinfectant.

“Why?” Kayla’s fingers clinched of their own accord. This was just like Geraldine, making Kayla come all that way for nothing.

“That attack last night? The one on the news?”

A thrill ran from Kayla’s chest to her fingers. She nodded.

“It was Geraldine’s neighbor. The one that was killed. They’re saying Geraldine found her. In the yard, behind an azalea.”

Kayla clenched her eyes shut as her toes curled in her high-tops. Images from last night’s dream danced inside her lids. “Oh, how awful for poor Geraldine,” she said.

It was awful. It was. Kayla probed the wound inside her cheek and imagined how much more awful it would have been if Geraldine had been the one found behind that bush.