By Stella Seifried
Edited by Alloe Mak

There was something wild in her eyes as she consoled me on the black leather couch that used to sit in the back room of our house. We often took this form. As though we had paced in circles, choosing the best place to lie. As though without it, any warmth we did have would have evaporated from our coats. I didn’t understand then what kept us returning to tucked paws and hot tears. I saw myself in their amber eyes—I didn’t understand then that we could be different. We were cut from the same green eyes and sarcastically humoured cloth. To me, then, that was all you needed to be—the same species.

Her canines grew in before mine—they grew in bigger, too. I would ask, “Wolf, when will my teeth grow big and strong like yours?” and she would tell me, “Soon.” Years would pass, and my teeth would never grow an inch. I think that’s when I started to see it—that my eyes weren’t ever amber like hers. We still shared the slight imperfection found between our lips, born from our refusal to have our jaws broken. So we have something. I have come to call us homologous; our structures indicate a shared ancestry—five digits, fur-lined backs, bowed femurs, the absence of a collarbone—but our functions have diverged. 

I’ve always wanted to be kept, held tightly, to be chosen out of the litter. They’ve always had an affinity for the wild, the alone but not lonely. They have always met snatchers with teeth bloody and bared. I follow beside or behind, licking the palms of those who have done me harm. Wolf tells me it’s because I wear my heart on my sleeve and that they wish they could do the same. I tell Wolf that I wish I knew how to use my teeth.

If you were hungry enough, you would bite your foot off. Chew through the bone—leave your severed foot limp in your stomach like nothing had happened. You would sustain yourself. Without hesitation. This is how I understand you, Wolf, through the tone of bone crushing bone. Your circadian instinct—the return of flesh to flesh. But I would dull my sharp teeth on weeds and stones, give in to herbivory, and try to maintain the belief that it is enough for me. I would starve before ripping a piece of me off, before feeding on my flesh. This is how I understand myself—by knowing, of all the things you would do, what I would follow, and what my body would reject. 

Wolf, I wonder if you think of me when you stand there, three paws in the dirt, bleeding out by your fourth. 

There came a time, Wolf, when your muzzle pointed to the north and mine to the east. I suppose this is where we diverged again. Did you think of me when you went off alone for years? Wolf, I thought of your return every day—of how to make something of my own sustain me. 

Wolf, I ask again, would you think of me when you stand there? Three paws in the dirt? Bleeding out by your fourth? I hope when they find your fossilized self, they will know who you were to me. 

Some days, I would hate Wolf. Because they needed to go off into the world. Because Wolf was everything that I wasn’t. Independent, tough, sure of themselves. Slender, pointed, and willing to embrace oddity. Dutiful, defiant. Sharp-eared with a sickle-shaped tail. They were smarter than me—they still are. Wolf had to explain to me why we want to tax the rich and the subway route to our high school. Showed me how to shave my armpits, and that I do need to be held when I am trying to push people away. 

When our fossils are found on different coasts, I hope they use us as proof that the continents were once connected. Just like Pangea, we too were once believed to be immovable, though mostly by our mother when we sat between childhood and adulthood. I am indebted to our homology. It reminds me of who I am—who you have always known me to be. I would do anything for them to know that there wasn’t always an ocean of forest between us—that you used to stick your cold feet behind my knees every time we shared a bed. I would pray to a God I don’t believe in, howl at a moon that doesn’t recognize me. 

I would bite off my own foot. 

Then, even if geneticists deem us separate species, and even if my bones aren’t found right behind or beside yours, they will know that we were sisters.