As the moon climbed higher my heart broke into a gallop. Cool tremors like ice water trickled down my spine, flowed across my chest, and splashed over my arms. I trembled and gasped. It started with a pop, followed by a crack. Bones shifted. My spine jutted forward. I crumpled, helpless against the law of gravity. Mother Nature crushed me in her cold palm, turning me to clay to be reshaped and polished into new form. Her fingers were calloused and unkind, but she worked her craft with skill. It was the same with every lunar cycle.

My palms stretched like rubber. Suddenly they bent, jerked in the opposite direction with a noise so loud it scattered the birds from their roost. I screamed, but it became a gargle. Though I was unable to move I saw, in the corner of my vision, a pink ribbon sprouting from my rear. Claws from my hind quarters dug into the grass. Fur breezed across my chest and legs in grey and white. Between my eyes my nose began to ascend, I felt as though I might sneeze. My chest folded forward, lagging behind in the change, the delicate process of moving my vital organs from one place to another.

The pain dulled. New sounds and smells sprang to life in the forest. Crickets chirped in the night. Wind whooshed through the grass and shook trees over head.

Time seemed to unwind before my eyes. I saw myself, at first, a human lying in the woods to wait for the full moon to deal out my fate. Now I was gone, crawled into a corner far away where no one could ever find me – not even myself. The wolf awoke, puzzled by its new surroundings. I understood our place, but the wolf could only comprehend a few fragmented shards of our collective memory. The wolf could not see with the clarity of my human eyes, and so my mind was impaired by his cloudy instincts. As the beast trotted away I rode along as the helpless passenger of a creature I could not control. Aware yet unaware, I watched the world pass in dreams. Something was there and then it was not. A flash, a blur, a rush of color. The sounds, the smells, the feeling. It meant nothing and everything.

Before the sky set its white-yellow clock in motion the wolf had sat in my place, locked in its cage in the back of a human mind. Now, I suppose it’s only fair to set it free.