The Power of Stories

I woke to Dad hollering at someone. I groaned from the pile of clothes I was curled on top of. That made me blink and look at the guest bedroom door. Dad had installed a simple hook and eye for privacy.

I couldn't believe I had shifted to wolf at some point during the night. It was Dad's clothes I had made a bed of. I sighed to myself.

Apparently everything I had been through had affected me more than I realized, especially if I still needed the comfort of sleeping on Dad's stuff.

He still kept the chewed up pair of shoes from when I was a puppy under his bed. I found them about a week after his extended run after Mom died, much the way I found myself this morning. I had gone to bed back then crying, wanting my dead mother and my missing father. I woke up with the old chewed up shoes under me, me in wolf-form under his bed, fresh naw marks on the old shoes.

They had been my go-to comfort whenever I woke up in the middle of the night as a kid. I remember pulling them out of dad's close