Hati: A Lunar-Lupine Romance — The Icarus Writing Collective

by Julia Biggs

Everyone said that a wolf couldn’t swallow the moon, until finally, one day, it did.

☾

It began with a brief lick. I wanted to feel his smooth light, cold as milk, on my tongue. I got hungrier as the months and years passed, my tufted snout pushing between his silver fingers, gently nibbling at the crescents of his nails.

Growling, I took to chasing his pale feet across streets and forests, sometimes fastening my jaws around his creamy ankles, gnawing just enough to make him tilt, and sweetly caress the coarse fur along my spine.

Waxing, waning, gleaming—his eyes were always full of pearls, spilling over my claws. He loved me then, bathing me in chilling ivory and watching as I, snapping and whining, drew back my lips to reveal sharp teeth.

Later, throwing wide his bright white arms, I would nose (lean and famished) into his glistering side and sleep a jittery sleep, dreaming of rising tides, falling mountains, biting winds and ink-black skies—the cosmos destroyed in the wavering howl of Fenrir’s cub and a confusion of paw-prints.

But now, his voice is full and pure as he promises this is the final hunt. You see, his heart’s deep, freezing craters have been waiting for my hot breath.

☽

Everyone said that it was so dark inside the wolf, until the eager moon settled in its soft belly.

Julia Biggs (she/her) is a writer, poet, and freelance art historian. She lives in Cambridge, UK. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ink Sweat & Tears, Black Bough Poetry, Annie Journal, Sídhe Press, Divinations Magazine, Streetcake Magazine and elsewhere. Find her via her website: https://juliabiggs1.wixsite.com/juliabiggs.