A little metaphysical fairy tale
When the winter wind cuts like a knife and a cloak of black night covers the full-bellied moon, the Howler stalks in the dark places in the wood, under heavy boughs and over twisted roots. Devastation follows after him.
Between his teeth, sharp as hunger, winter-dry branches crack and splinter. Under his claws, long as the beaten swords of the King’s knights, the frozen earth crumbles away into nothingness, soil and frost shimmering as it falls. His coat is a storm at sea, wind and waves crashing upon his back, and everywhere he goes he leaves a wound in the world. Stone shatters, trees fall heavy upon the ground, and the air rushes to fill the empty spaces in his wake, but nothing is louder than the Howler himself, wailing in the agony of unbeing.
At the edge of the wood, under the shadow of the mountain, stands a tiny cottage. Smoke rises from the red-brick chimney, gray in the gray night, a tiny bulwark against winter’s slow advance. Before the hearth sits the woman-child, weaving a cloth of sunlit gold.
The Howler, formless and aching, tears through wood and stone and snowy air, carving a path to the cottage door. His mouth, wide and deep as the void, devours the lintels and shakes the foundations. Ash and dust fall like snow upon the floorboards.
The woman-child, all dressed in red, rises to meet him.
The Howler’s eyes are the eyes of greed, of fear, of helpless rage. He reaches out with bladed claws to destroy her, to turn her into nothingness like the path he’s carved through the forest, and he cries in a long, keening note that turns the ruined room into a tightening spiral, but she will not be touched.
She studies his formlessness with a bright, knowing gaze, and with her clever fingers, she draws him away from the terror of winter famine that sings in his throat. With her sharp silver scissors, she cuts the threads that bind him to the war across the water, and severs the whispers of dark magic that are braided into his hair. She divides him from the fog that filters through the trees and the winds that moan laments in the night; from the storm outside the cottage walls and from the destruction within.
Here lies the forest, and here lies the mountain. Here is the hearth and the fire and the cloth of woven gold. And here, at the center, is the Howler, falling to the floor. Matter strikes matter, solid and unyielding. Pain cuts into his knees and the palms of his hands, now flesh and blood and bone. Cold night air caresses his skin.
“What am I?” he asks, the first words he has spoken in an age falling from his mouth to the knotted rug, mingling with ash and splinters and snow.
She knees in front of him, smiling at her handiwork, and draws her scarlet cloak about his shoulders. “You are a man, I think,” she says.
He lets the fabric run through his hands. Ten soft fingers find the ridge of each woolen thread and the valley of each careful seam.
When he looks at her, his eyes are the color of fog. He takes her offered hand. “What does it mean?”
They stand, eye to eye under a black sky sparkling with snow.
“That,” she says, “is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.”
I first wrote this in undergrad, as part of an impromptu, Angela Carter-inspired story exchange with my dad. Present-me isn’t in love with the gender dynamics, but they seemed consequential, so I left them in during the editing process. I wonder what I was thinking at the time.
Expect more short stories in the future! Not like, a lot of them, because I have three serial projects still going, but some.
This story was updated December 2023.
Space Whales Press 
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