Rules for Werewolves by Kirk Lynn Read Free Book Online Page A

normal, that you don’t play by the normal rules. So they can’t assume that you won’t growl at them if they make eye contact, that you won’t rip their arm off if they tap you on the shoulder.
    I wish we were vampires instead of werewolves. I think I would like a room the size and shape of a coffin. I read that hotels in Japan are like that, only a little bigger. I wish I could go to Japan. I would like to have just exactly what I needed and no more and no less. This is my only set of clothes. When we do finally do our laundry, when it finally gets to be too much and one of us has dog shit on our clothes or something we just can’t stand, I walk around the house in a blanket. I feel like a sheikh. I don’t know what I’m gonna eat tomorrow. Sometimes I steal a book from a house and that is my whole library for a while. I read it and reread it. I like being able to touch all the walls of a room at the same time. I like being able to reach the ceiling. If I were the god of our society, our houses would be much smaller or we would be a lot bigger.
    I had a science teacher in late high school who said, “If the universe and everything in it doubled in size every night, we would never know it.” He was trying to explain relativity or something. But I suddenly felt two hundred feet tall. I felt huge. My pencil was twenty feet long. Everyone in the room was a giant. I decided to adopt doubling as a belief.
    I like to lie in a little room, alone, and try to sense myself growing bigger. Tomorrow I’ll be over ten feet tall and weigh 280 pounds, and when I try to open the door to the pantry I’ll crush the doorknob in my fist. I’ll be able to open the canned tomatoes by squeezing them and I’ll be able to step over fences and walk back home in a straight line and pick up my little brother and put him on my shoulders, and we’ll walk across America like Johnny Appleseed telling people about how to become werewolves or vampires.
    My biggest regret, besides leaving my little brother behind when I ranaway, is not taking Susan to my room in the pantry. We just went upstairs to some empty room we’d trashed. I don’t know why. I didn’t even know what was happening, really. I was embarrassed. Our hands and our faces and our necks are gray with dirt, but the middles of our bodies are pale. We were fucking glowing and then I turned pink with shyness. I pulled her to me and started right in so she wouldn’t see me blushing. I ended up rushing through the best moment to happen to me in a thousand years. But why be embarrassed if someone wants to have sex with you? If we come together again I’m gonna take her to the pantry. I have exactly what I need. A bed, a book, a candle, a box of matches. The candle makes just the amount of light you need to read and no more. It’s like everything else I like. Just the right size.
    I like matches because they come in matchboxes. Whenever I run out of matches I look around for more. If I can’t find a new box of matches I ask around. I don’t want a lighter. A matchbox is like a little room. When the matches run out I draw a picture of a bed in the bottom of the box and I draw a picture of me and Susan in the bed and I draw us a TV and a dresser and a dog on a rug and then I close the box and leave it behind. That’s magic to make her become obsessed with me. I think she would like the way I lay out a room. If Susan came back to my pantry with me it would be twice as small because of the space she takes up. That’s a doubling, too.
    I love Susan. I love imagining the two of us lying naked in our bed with the candlelight making everything flicker and each of us with our clothes bundled up under our heads like a pillow and with books at our side, but we’re not reading, we’re just talking about what sort of room we want next, in what sort of house, in what sort of neighborhood, in what sort of city, in what sort of state, in what sort of country, in what sort of world, in what sort