Dinner in the Woods

Hunger and the wild had changed him beyond anything she could recognize.  Still, she knew how to drawn him in.  He would come to the kitchen when he smelled the fresh basil and grated cheese.  The warm garlic bread and a lasagna baking in the oven would be ready just in time for an evening meal.  A newly opened bottle of Shiraz was placed on the table to breathe, while she waited.

    He built his appetite high in the hills that afternoon.

    He watched his own reflexion in a still pool of water that nestled among a corral of rocks in the riverbed.  It had been a long time since he’d seen himself and he didn’t remember ever looking as he did.  But he wasn’t surprised at what he saw. 

  Awhile later he fell into the river, just above the falls, while chasing a salmon.  It had taken all his strength to pull himself out of the rushing current, which dragged him with all its weight toward the edge, slurping him toward the jagged rocks below.  

    The salmon was lost but he was saved.  He’d pulled himself up onto a flat slab of rock and rested in the late afternoon sun to dry, before walking down to the cabin.

    He’d tasted her lasagna many times before.  It was rich and filling, served perfectly with the french garlic bread and red wine.  They’d shared the meals together every summer in the mountains, spending weeks there inside the logs he’d pulled together two decades before.

    It was before he’d grown facial hair and before she’d grown claws.

  They’d met in the big city at a small neighborhood bar.  There were some mutual friends between them, but over the years they’d become one another’s only friends. Lovers, parents, siblings, children and confidants too.  They were everything, together and apart, indistinguishable and yet somehow incompatible.  They loved and hated all the same.  

  His sharp teeth followed soon after his facial hair, and she countered with quick reflexes and lunges.  She could catch the branches of tall wooded pines that guarded the cabin’s outer perimeter.  

  On this day, he returned home with a casual saunter.  He entered unannounced and caught her by surprise.  Her back was to the door and she’d been busy leaning over the oven, taking a peak inside to check the progress.

    The bottle of wine was broken in his rush to dine.  It was thrown from the table as she jolted to get away.  She’d clawed and screamed, but in the small constrained cabin, her best defense, a quick sprinting flurry, was impossible.

    The meal didn’t take long, but it was satisfying.  He finished everything and then went outside to roll in the dirt.  He let the sun warm his back and belly.  

  The lasagna went uneaten, trapped inside the oven, burning and catching fire.

  The cabin smoked and would burn down, but he’d long since discarded the need for such possessions and comforts many years ago.  His thick coat could withstand the nights’ ravishing from ice blasts that invaded through the Sierra passes.  

  When his sun bath was finished he would stroll casually back to the river, stomping his own path, leaning over the ground, closely watching all four steps.