The rain pounded against my window with tree branches scraping. Outside all was dark except for lightning cracks. The power had been out all night, I was alone in my little apartment with its four walls so close together where spiders gathered and mice troddened the floor. I’ve always been afraid of cramped spaces. That window was the only window in my apartment so I slept beneath it on a mattress that lay flat on the floor. There was another beneath it to fool the rats that probably had bugs crawling in-between, though I never looked.

I never liked my apartment. It was small and smelled rotten, more so than the subways and alley lanes where I once spent my nights. At that age I thought for sure there must be a body hidden somewhere under the floor boards because in my experience nothing else could create such a long lasting stench. Outside there are parasites and bacteria to clean up the stink, something I didn’t understand until many years later, but indoors fresh air gets kept out so none of these little cleaners can get in. So the place just stinks and stinks worse every day.

That’s another thing I hated about my apartment. I was cut off from everything. I used to have nightmares about getting locked inside until all the air was gone. Other times the air didn’t disappear. In these dreams the walls start closing in, only I never noticed until the apartment got so tiny I had to sit on my knees. Sometimes my door wasn’t locked, but when I opened it I found only more doors, behind which were more doors and behind those even more doors and no matter were I turned I always returned somehow to my tiny apartment. Once the dead man was waiting for me and he had no eyes.

My dreams are the worst. I’ve dreamt about my teeth falling out in the mirror, I’ve dreamt about pits of mice nibbling off my clothes and pidgins pecking out my eyes. I’ve had strange dreams about falling into a trashcan and being carried to the dump like a heap of old tin cans or riding to a metropolitan Never Land on the back of a mangy rotwiler. I once had a dream that I was talking to seven of my best friends in the middle of Central Park, not realizing I was the only one able to see them until Billy Joe Bob told me so. Also, he pointed out, I was in my underwear.

I have never done drugs.

Okay, alcohol I sold on a few occasions, but that’s all.

I had no clock; I knew intuitively that the hour was late. By this time I should have been fast asleep. Thunder and lightning don’t frighten me, they never have. Neither does the dark, which by this time was no longer an obstacle. My eyes adjust to nighttime in a blink. The cold brings me no discomfort. Loneliness I’ve coped with all my life.

Echoes, like dusty ghosts in my tiny cubical, kept my senses jostled all night long. The room felt alive to me. I could hear it breathing, gasping, waiting for sleep to drive me into submission.

The one window kept me sane. Its panes were cracked as though struck by a baseball or an angry fist long ago. Bars of steel, sharpened on either end, cut the glass into sections and split shadows across the floor when lightning boomed. Beyond these bars there stood a tree, the only tree for miles, with little circular leaves and birds that tweet-tweet in the morning.

There were no birds that night, but the tree was my friend when it rap-a-tap-tapped the glass. If I felt afraid I told myself that I could go outside, see that tree, and be assured that the world did not end at my super intendment’s door mat.

My eyes must have been bright yellow when I finally started to doze. Their natural color is hazel green. The fear had not been enough to sharpen my finger nails or prick my ears and certainly my hair retained its dusty tan curls.

In my dream, however, I did change. I felt lucky for it was one of those good dreams I have from time to time. Dreams where the air itself is blue, not just the sky, trees abound where skyscrapers once reined supreme and grass and dirt and rocks rule the earth beneath my feet. When I thirst I find not drippy hoses but shimmering crystal lakes that stretch so far and wide that sky and water become one so you spin around dizzy until you can find which way is down.

Sometimes when I go there I’m human, naked in the woods and without a care. Most of the time I come in my other form, most of the time I come as a wolf.