When she finds the grey wolf standing in her kitchen, she turns away and pours herself a glass of water. The wolf drops down to its skinny haunches, lifts its sharp pointed head and looks at her. She sets the glass on the counter, still full. Shakily, she unlatches the back door. Go on, she says in the hopes that it will leave. The wolf approaches. Together, they peer out into the mangy yard, the jagged, snow-capped mountains beyond. Go home. The wolf backs away from the door. Well then, I’m going. I need a bit of air. She grips the railing and winces as she descends the stone steps to the yard. It has rained. Her shoes squelch and the tip of her cane sinks in the muddy grass. She lowers herself into the wicker armchair where her husband used to set up his easel and paint: the luminous purple spray of her crocuses, the fey jubilance of her spring daffodils. He’d painted the robins pecking for worms, swollen tomatoes bejeweled with dew. Sometimes he’d painted her: kneeling over the carrot bed, or cradling a bushel of sugar snap peas. Ruddy and round, with freckled arms, flyaway curls blowing loose around her face.

How shy he’d been the first time, his quick, keen gaze darting from her face to the page, the stick of charcoal gripped in his bony, blackened fingers. The way he chewed his lower lip. She’d watched him as he drank her in in furtive sips, there on the schoolyard. He drew her as she was: with the mountainous shoulders and untamable hair that caused Mother to fret, Father to look through her. Do you want it? he’d asked, holding out the drawing, and she’d brought it home tucked into her notebook. All evening she snuck peeks at it: this tender, guileless rendering of her, her likeness stark and beautiful as a tree. At the dinner table, sitting next to her lithe, pretty sister who glowed in the limelight of Father’s gaze, she felt different, like a changeling no one recognized. Had she sprouted eagle wings, they would scarcely have noticed.

She leans back in the chair and gazes out over the garden, now gone to seed and ravaged by deer. Behind her, she hears the sound of careful paws padding across the waterlogged yard. So you’ve changed your mind. The wolf sinks down in the grass, parking itself at the foot of her chair. In the waning amber light, they watch the squirrels scampering up and down the oak tree, the lop-eared rabbit browsing in the grass. You’d better run, she warns the rabbit, or the wolf will make a dinner of you. But the wolf puts its great soft muzzle in her lap. It nuzzles her hand with its cold dry snout. They look out at the pond overgrown with weeds, where the tadpoles once lived, where her daughter used to play. Barefoot, wading thigh-deep in the murky water, skirt tucked into her underwear, that girl would catch those slippery creatures with her hands: fat, bug-eyed, wriggly things with tiny legs and translucent tails, neither tadpole nor frog but something in between. Look! the girl would cry, brandishing her prize in gently cupped hands, stroking its back before setting it free.

How could you let her wallow in that filth? Mother said, horrified by the girl’s muddy legs.

Father eyeing his granddaughter with wary disdain at the table as she gnawed on the hard crust of her dinner roll. Young lady, he intoned. Were you raised by wolves? The girl shrank in her seat, crestfallen and confused.

Don’t talk to her like that. Her words rang out like a slap. Father’s mouth pressing into a hard, thin line, Mother’s a startled, glaring O. Her daughter staring at the piece of crust in her hand, moist from her mouth, mottled with bite marks. Her husband surveying the table in silence.

Dried paint on his shirt, his cowlick sticking up. Looking at her with those sharp, twinkling eyes, drinking her in. He said, who wants dessert?

The sun is slipping away behind the mountain peaks, dusk descending like a shroud over the garden. The arbor that she and her husband built stands starkly naked against the purple sky. They’d stood under it on the day of her daughter’s wedding, the bougainvillea blooms spilling over the wooden beams. Her daughter flushed and radiant in an ivory tailored suit, her daughter’s wife an elfin beauty in a cream-colored sheath. Father and Mother hadn’t come in spite of her pleas, nor her sister who by then had children of her own. Gazing out at the small crowd of attendees—her daughter-in-law’s parents and jovial relatives, the girls’ giggling, ragtag mob of college friends—she’d felt, through the incandescence of her joy, a searing rage at her own kin, red and raw as a canker sore, lodged in her chest like the tip of an icepick. But then her husband popped open a bottle of champagne, guests shrieking as it spewed a deluge of white froth, people ducking, champagne splashing into the potato salad, the knotted string around her heart unfurling as she laughed and laughed.

Like a sponge, her bones have absorbed the chill. It is nearly dark. She rises stiffly out of her chair. Come. She makes the slow, labored trek up the steps. The wolf limps beside her. She lets it back in the house. In the kitchen, she struggles with shaking hands to open a pack of raw hamburger meat. Emptying it into a plastic bowl, she sets it down on the floor. The wolf turns away. I don’t blame you, she says. She hasn’t felt hungry in days. When her daughter had phoned, she’d lied. I’m fine. I’ve been working in the garden. She keeps all her daughter’s postcards. From Borneo, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador. India, Japan, Morocco, Vietnam. Long letters written in her girl’s spidery hand, in her wife’s neat cursive. They come to visit once a year. Clattering up the road in their little campervan, blowing into her house like a warm summer breeze. Their tumbling laughter and mellifluous chaos. They want her to sell the house, unburden herself. You could travel with us. Think about it, they say, but she knows she’ll never leave. Heavy-footed and slow, she is rooted to this place. The house, the garden, her husband’s paintings on the walls. The heaven they built with such painstaking care.

The wolf crosses the threshold into the living room and climbs onto the sofa. It curls up, resting its head on its paws. She looks at the glass of water on the counter, the bowl of glistening meat, the crusty, moldering dishes in the sink. The wolf looks at her. She nods slowly. Alright. Her feet are numb, ice-cold, but she wills them to move. One step, then another. She grips the side of the couch. Taking her place beside the wolf, she listens to the husky rasp of its breathing. Gingerly stroking its matted back, she can feel the nubs of its vertebrae, the narrow scapula bones jutting under its skin. The room is growing dark, the darkness spreading like ink, bleeding through her vision, closing in like a tunnel. Through the eye of the tunnel, the wolf beholds her loneliness.

Don’t leave me, she says.

I’m coming with you, says the wolf.

Talia Weisz is the author of two chapbooks, Sisters in Another Life (Finishing Line Press) and When Flying Over Water (Plan B Press). Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Journal, Atticus Review, and The Manifest-Station. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.