Rage  

 Jennifer Perrine

I’ve been told my placid attitude must hide some menace. Mostly, it doesn’t. Mostly, I’m content to kick back in the sun, flicking at any mosquitos bold enough to sip at my skin. I get my fill of excitement gazing up into the waving limbs of the old walnut, watching the oak  with its galls full of wasps jettison catkins. Mostly, I’ve adopted sloth as my vice of choice, 

so if my voice comes out too brittle or loud, it could be the growls I’ve stifled when townsfolk scrutinize me, checking for points to my teeth, for fur tucked up my sleeves. It could be when their torches set fire to neighbors’ houses, I’ve extinguished my cries. I’ve gotten wind of their jokes, their critiques of my eyes: too golden, too lupine. I keep my wild from busting out.  

I know what could happen if my steadiness drifts into a snarl or shout. I’ve learned not to leave the house when I feel a certain set to my jaw, an untamed pulse in my chest. I can’t excise the beast. I don’t transform. It’s part of me, as much as the skin in which I was born, as much as the soul pleased to pass a day in study of a covey of quail at play in a zealous dust  

bath, all shimmy and flapping wings. I wish for such jubilant, haphazard abandon. If fury stings my throat, I try to pay it no mind. My kind was taught to wait out pitchforks and plots that paint us as villains. But I still know how to bound through moonlight, to transfix a mob with chilling howls, to slash a quaking thing to ribbons. I’ll gut what I must to go on living.