Kathleen Frank
Kisses for the Vilkacis
Anna Schachner
A quick midnight search on Google, her laptop perched on her knees, told Sandra that there were fewer affordable places to cheat on your husband around town than there were ways to become a werewolf. At $64.99/night, The Hillside Motel featured free beef jerky and access to a two-lane bowling alley built into a large metal shed out back, and, for $69.99/night, The Do-Drop Inn had a pet gerbil named Gidget and would let you park an RV out front for an extra ten dollars. Sandra did not have an RV (and if she did, she would not drive it to a hotel), just a husband, Arvis, who might not love her anymore, the suffering of which had her doing outrageous things like practice-flirting for the webcam and sneaking werewolf tips while he slept, oblivious, beside her.
So far, her favorite ways to become a werewolf were: drinking rainwater from a wolf’s paw print, being cursed by a troll, and not going to confession for ten years. Only the last one seemed plausible to her—because she hadn’t gone in God knows when (and, unfortunately, God always knew when), and she might not ever again, seeing as she didn’t like being judged. The more she thought about it, though, the soon-to-be cheating might call for a quick trip to the confessional box so long as she hadn’t yet become a werewolf (ha!). And was truly sorry for her sins.
For both the upcoming cheating and the sudden interest in werewolves, Sandra blamed Arvis’s mother, who slept on the other side of the wall on the queen-sized pull-out couch they bought for her special on Craigslist. Once a year, Silva, tall and elegant and with cat-green eyes, visited. She came all the way from the homeland in Latvia, where Arvis had been born, bringing Arvis pretzels with a sugary topping whose name Sandra could never remember, a heap of nostalgia, and maternal pressure to renew a famous promise that made Sandra feel about as significant as the bread crust she cut from sandwiches she sent with Arvis for lunch at the factory: he—no mention of her—promised to be buried in the family cemetery back home. In forty or fifty years, his would be a perfect geographical, if not life, circle that totally discounted another circle, the gold band from Zales around her finger for the past six years, a stretch of time she had to admit had not been perfect.
Over the last year, in particular, Arvis, alive, disappointed her nearly every day—what with his weekend hunting trips leaving her at home alone watching Hulu and his three-word dinner “conversations” that made the cat seem more fluent in English than he was. But Arvis, once dead, would deliver the worst snub possible, navigating the forever and ever of the afterlife with his mama, not her, by his side. Game on, Sandra mumbled. If Silva, decomposed (which was and was not that ugly of an idea), was her competition, she’d give Arvis his: winking Everett from her office, who just might appreciate a warm-up game of bowling. And who was completely composed.
The sudden power she felt from finalizing her decision to cheat on Arvis led Sandra right back to thinking about werewolves. Earlier that night, Silva, a folklorist at the university in Riga, told Arvis and her about a paper she was writing about the Vilkacis, what the Latvians called werewolves, or more specifically, why there were so few famous women Vilkacis. Arvis had asked, “Well, you got your famous witches, don’t you? Why worry about werewolves?” Silva had then shot Sandra a knowing look, but Sandra couldn’t tell if it was because Silva was suggesting she give witchhood a try or because Arvis’s question was sideways snide or because only another woman would appreciate that broomsticks and spells were lame, tame, and not the same as growing claws and flesh-gorging. That was the thing: Silva did everything but carry Arvis around on her hip, preening in front of Sandra, and yet sometimes her trilingual, scarf-wearing mother-in-law seemed to be trying to bond with her, as if she was pointing out flaws in Arvis that Sandra had missed. It was hard to tell, harder to trust a woman who, werewolf or not, could shape-shift with the best of them. As such, if Silva was implying that Sandra try out a broomstick and a tall black hat, Sandra was way ahead of her: why should she settle for witchhood when she could be a werewolf?
Sandra reached around and pounded once—hard—on the wall behind her. Arvis bolted up, flinging an arm into her chest. He wore nothing but his gold cross around his neck and boxers below. “Wha, wha, what, what, is going on?”
“Just telling your mother good night.”
He rubbed his eyes, disorganizing his bushy brows, and then cocked his head. “Really? I don’t hear her saying it back.”
“It’s midnight. Maybe she’s out doing research.” In the webcam, Sandra caught herself smirking while Arvis plopped back down on his back and promptly turned it toward her.
When his sleeping breathing—what sounded like long, slow gushes of dirty wind—started back up, Sandra clicked again on the Do-Drop Inn’s website and booked a room for Friday night. It might have been a bit more costly than the Hillside, but it had a gerbil named Gidget. There’s your fancy folklore, she mumbled and shut the computer.
Sandra backed her Corolla into the space in front of Room 14, making sure she was square in the middle of the two yellow lines, and cut the engine. Unlike Arvis, she had lived her entire twenty-eight years in Greer, even earning her college degree online while she worked for Piedmont Insurance, where she met Arvis—sexy accent and healthy dose of cologne, smiling at her like she was the home policy he had come looking for. But she had never once been to a motel there, not ever.
She had never once been to Latvia either. Arvis could make an hour loop around Greer and track her whole life, but all she had seen of his life in Latvia added up to one thing: Silva. If the mental image of the family cemetery she had conjured, witch-like, with its grassy hills and mossy headstones also counted, then two.
It was 9:03, and Everett was late. Sandra checked her phone for a text: nothing. Cheating was stressful enough without being stood up. She had never cheated before, never considered it, but somehow worrying about a man not showing up felt familiar, and not good-familiar. She didn’t need Gidget—who was wearing out her exercise wheel in the window of the reception lobby—to tell her that for years, maybe even for always, Arvis had been way more absent than Everett was now, even when he was right there beside her.
And maybe it was the werewolf overload of the last few days, but Sandra felt anger sprouting on her body like hair, like it was touchable and wild and about to get real. She was just figuring out that it wasn’t Arvis she was mad at when a set of headlights flashed in front of her as Everett’s SUV pulled into the space beside her. Then, another set of headlights flashed. Even in the dark, Sandra could tell that it was Arvis’s truck with Silva driving it. He has sent his mother instead, she mumbled.
She got out of the car and held up her hand with a flattened palm to Everett. He started to open the passenger door, but she shouted “No” just once before he stopped, nodded, and stayed put behind his steering wheel. She met Silva at the back of the truck, her whole body heavy.
“Did you follow me here?”
“I did.”
“You didn’t believe I was picking up a friend at the airport?”
Silva shrugged. “It could be,” she said. She fluffed her bangs. “But the lipstick”—she swayed her finger in front of her lips—“it’s too red.”
“Agreed,” Sandra said. She was glad she was not smart about cheating. She glanced at Everett, who was slumped low in the seat, looking completely deflated.
“Arvis does not know,” Silva said.
“But you do.”
“Well, yes, but I also know Arvis. He is Arvis. He is all Arvis.”
Sandra kicked the truck’s bumper. “He doesn’t love me.”
“I don’t think so,” Silva said, slowly. “He loves me. And he loves Arvis.”
“But I don’t love him either.” It felt like the most important confession of Sandra’s life, but with all the attached judgment her own.
Silva unknotted the scarf around her neck and stuffed it into her jacket pocket. “Life goes on,” she said. “Come on,” she added, nodding toward the truck. “Let’s go.”
“I have my own car,” Sandra said. “Where to?”
“In Latvian folklore, there is one very interesting and quite beautiful way to become a werewolf. On the night of a full moon, you simply stand under a tree that has a branch grown back down into the earth. An arch, huh? Then you will transform.” She nodded. “Let’s go.”
Sandra looked up at the night sky, and there it was: someone, and she hoped it wasn’t Silva, had hung a perfectly round white moon for her. “Looks like all we need is a tree,” she said, thinking how a man that bends way too much to get back to his mother is a bad thing, but a tree reaching down to the earth is something to behold.
She offered a little wave to Everett, who sat up taller behind the steering wheel and then leaned over to mouth something through the passenger window. Sandra didn’t even try to understand what it was. To save face, he’d probably tell his own folktale at the office on Monday, but she wouldn’t be there. A lipstick-ed werewolf selling life insurance—well, that just felt wrong.
Anna Schachner is the author of the novel You and I and Someone Else. She has published short stories and flash fiction in many journals, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fugue, Puerto del Sol, and The Sun. Her collection The Lovely Woods Are Yours & Other Stories is forthcoming, and meanwhile she is at work on relearning the mandolin, improving her Spanish, and writing a novel that is both polyphonic and thrilleresque.