Free The Wilding by Benjamin Percy

“Everything’s okay.”
    She spots a bit of gray in his hair. “You’ve got something,” she says and seeks the something with her fingers. When she recognizes it as a feather, she flicks it away. “Jesus,” she says and sticks out her tongue. “I hate birds. I’ve always hated them ever since I saw that bird movie—what’s it called?”
    “The Birds?” Justin says.
    “That’s the one.” Again she shivers at the memory of the owl. “ God. Nature.”

BRIAN
    Sometimes the biggest challenge of the day seems to be figuring out what shows to watch. He sinks into the couch and flips through the five hundred channels available to him and shoves Doritos into his mouth until the bag is empty and his camo shirt is dusted over orange. A few months ago, on the Discovery Channel, he happened upon a program about skinwalkers. These were Navajo witches who scrabbled about on all fours while wearing wolf hides. Their eyes burned against their pale faces like red mites pressed into fungus. They chanted backward chants to raise evil spirits and they unearthed graves and they stole hair and skin and fingernails from the dead and ground them into a corpse powder that they blew in your face to give you a ghost sickness.
    He had always been fascinated by the supernatural. As a child he used his allowance to buy Tales from the Crypt comic books and he snuck from his father’s bookshelves novels by Stephen King and he asked to spend the night at a neighbor’s house only because he could rent R-rated horror movies. Nights he often spent with his blanket wrapped around him like a cocoon, the breathing hole at his mouth the only part of him exposed.
    In eighth grade he dressed up as an ape for Halloween. He had a full-body suit with shaggy black hair and a mouthful of teeth. No one at school knew who he was. He would walk up to girls and stare at them and say nothing and they would press their backs to their lockers and hide behind their friends to give him a wide berth. Some people laughed but with a nervousness that made their laughter come across as forced and wheezy. It was the first time he felt powerful.
    He kept the ape suit in his closet and sometimes he would put it on and stare at himself in the mirror and thump his chest—once, twice—while breathing heavily into his mask. He did not know why but it gave him an erection. Normally his father would not return from work until dinnertime, so he felt safe to walk around the house in the ape suit and watch television and do his homework at the kitchen table, but one day his father came home early and because Brian had the television volume up he did not hear the growl of the engine or the crunch of gravel or even the rattle of keys. When his father pushed open the door to the garage with a pizza balanced in one hand, Brian sprang up from the couch. This startled a yell from his father and he dropped the pizza box on the floor—its cardboard mouth burped cheese and pepperoni.
    Moths—Pandora moths the size of hands—fluttered in from outside while his father leaned against the open door and observed Brian with hooded eyes that revealed his curiosity and disappointment. “What’s wrong with you?” he finally said. The ape suit went in the garbage that night, but Brian hasn’t stopped thinking about it—the way an amputee will never stop thinking about a lost limb—remembering the sense of power that came with it.
    Over the past few months he has trapped weasel and pine martens and coyote and beaver and even a wolverine. For all except the beaver, which required an open-cut dissection, he sliced around the hind legs below the hock and sliced up the back of the hind legs to the anus and from there stripped the pelt off the hind legs. He removed the tail bone by slicing from the anus along the bottom side of the tail to its tip and then worked it free from the bone. He pulled the skin delicately off their pink bodies as if pulling a damp nightgown from a woman, pausing at