Sometimes, it feels as though there’s an animal trapped inside of me, trying to get out. Sometimes, we switch places, and I find myself the animal who is trapped inside of it. 

It hits fast. One minute, I might be enjoying a perfectly innocuous evening, chilling on the couch with Patrick and Taylor, watching trash on TV and making cute little paintings out of our boobs. 

Then, my skin prickles. Suddenly, some hot, dark little mouth opens up inside of me, vomits gasoline into my blood, and the next thing I know, I’m crouched in Taylor’s kitchen, stabbing my cute little canvas to death with a knife, weeping.

It’s enough to make me wonder, had I grown up a humble shepherdess in a medieval Slovenian hamlet at the height of mid-1500s werewolf hysteria, whether I might have allowed myself to contract a very mild case of lycanthropy. Only the delusion of it, obviously, not the real thing, and the whole thing would obviously be semi-ironic. But at that time, it might have been the best container I had for giving a name and an etiology to that mouth. 

To be clear, I’ve never bitten anyone. I’ve only punched furniture, men, and a hole through a screen door while trying to punch a man. I once kicked my foot through an ottoman and busted the flimsy piece of shit, and somehow couldn’t extract it. I had to stomp around the house, mad as hell, wearing an ottoman as a giant shoe, to swallow my pride and apologize to Patrick so that he would stop laughing and help me. I’ve done worse, so much worse. You should see my road rage. You should see me drunk. You should see me when the moon is just so unbelievably aggressively bright that it doesn’t even feel like night at all, and I’m somersaulting naked around the house, eating everything, leaving a mess that Patrick will sigh and clean up in the morning if I cry and beg enough. I don’t understand how he can sleep so soundly, so peacefully, like a little lamb. I try not to disturb him. At least, I try to remember to try. 

Once, I crept outside into the absolutely blinding oppressive moonlight, and kicked the absolute shit out of a dumpster. I didn’t stop, not even when an orgy of rats sprayed out of some unseen crevice and scattered, until I was winded and my foot throbbed. I limped back home, feeling wrung out and ridiculous. I slept for 14 hours. I woke up drenched and starved. 

🩸

Obviously, I didn’t grow up herding sheep at the threshold between late feudalism and early capitalism. (Quite the opposite, in fact.) As such, my introduction to lycanthropy was through Shakira’s critically acclaimed 2009 music video for her dance-pop hit single, “She-Wolf.” 

At the beginning of the video, the moon shines like a big open eyeball out the window and Shakira is awake in bed, next to a sleeping man. We do not care about him or think that Shakira likes him very much. Shakira walks into her closet (coincidentally, exactly what my 14-year-old self would also do immediately after watching this very video) and ventures all the way to the back. She gently parts a set of velvety red labia, I mean curtains, and steps into a glittery red-walled Jungian dream of a cave. 

Inside of the womb-cave, Shakira is now wearing a skin-tight black bodysuit with a cut-out exposing her navel. This, too, is evocative of the womb, which is famously beneath the navel. But something’s not right. She juts her navel forward and she yanks it back. She jerks it awkwardly to and fro as she dances. Shakira is never awkward. It must be that there is something else inside of her, something alive and sentient. It is trapped. 

The camera cuts. Elsewhere in the cave, there is another Shakira. She is in a cage that looks to be the kind of cage one sees in the club. We can tell it is a different Shakira because she is wearing a different, more naked outfit than before. It is suddenly clear how constricting the first Shakira’s skinsuit was, but this one isn’t constricting at all, and she shows us all of the ways in which it isn’t constricting at all. 

I remember watching this video for the first time, at a sleepover with a group of girls, and feeling suddenly very stressed out by what Shakira was doing. I was afraid that one of the other girls was going to look at me, looking at Shakira, and see something in my face that I couldn’t hide. Of course, nobody was looking at me. Everyone was looking at Shakira, twisting around in the domestic cage of her own womb, the she-wolf (in the cage, in the cave, behind the curtains) in the closet. Darling, it is no joke, this is lycanthropy…

🩸

Anyway, I’ve been working on this joke about lycanthropy. 

What is the difference between a woman on her period and a werewolf?

(Pause.)

Branding.

(Mostly silence, rippled by some polite, forced chuckles and a scattering of isolated claps.)

What is the difference between a woman on her period and a werewolf?

(Pause.)

Historically, one of them was regarded as a fearsome quasi-animal who posed a direct threat to the social statuses of men who owned private property.

(Pause.)

The other one was the property. 

(No claps. No laughs. A few finger-snaps of solidarity from a polycule of white bisexual pagans from generational wealth. Elsewhere in the audience, someone coughs.)

What is the difference between a woman on her period and a werewolf?

(The coughing person keeps coughing. People are checking their phones.)

Imagination.

It’s not quite there yet.

🩸

Once, I asked Patrick, my loving and very patient partner, to help me find my phone. When he did not immediately jump to his feet, I took this to mean that his love and patience for me had finally run dry, so I howled in unspeakable agony and punched the cushions of an armchair about it. The cat, who had been asleep on the ottoman near the chair, woke up in a panic and ran from the room with her tail like a toilet brush. 

“You’re scaring the cat,” Patrick said quietly. “I don’t like that.”

I hated myself for scaring the cat. I really did. So, I accused him of loving the cat more than he loved me, then I stomped into the bedroom and locked him out. By locked, I mean that our door doesn’t lock, so I literally dragged our bed across the floor until it barricaded the doorway. I waited for him to start banging on the door and begging me to let him in, which he did not. At this, I was inconsolable. I collapsed into the bed and sobbed violently for quite a long time, until I had exhausted all of my emotions, leaving behind only the bare and innumerable shames of the past 30 years. 

Finally, I dragged the bed back to its original location and shuffled back into the living room. Patrick forgave me my outburst, of course. He always does. 

“You just can’t scare the cat like that,” he said, although the cat had clearly forgiven me, too, and was already rubbing herself up against my legs and purring. 

I nodded and began to cry. “I know,” I sobbed. 

“I also found your phone,” he said. His tone was very gentle as he handed it to me. “It was in the couch.”

I nodded again. That made sense. My phone was usually in the couch.

Most of my friends feel badly for Patrick.

🩸

In the final and best track on her 1994 live album, Dolly Parton describes a violent force that periodically comes over her, one that no man could possibly understand and which she does not fully understand herself. It steals her usual self away from her, subordinating her to another creature inside her for whom a “pitbull ain’t no match,” and which takes over her body “like the devil.” Under its influence, she hurls dishes uncontrollably, gnashes her teeth, and generally tries her very best to inflict her own suffering upon everyone around her. At this, she does very well.

As a child of eight or nine, I was still many blissful years away from knowing my own ass from a hole in the wall, but I already understood that there were forces, cyclical and possibly supernatural, that turned people into angry strangers for a spell and then, just as mysteriously, reverted them back. I grew up in the kind of family where one’s neck becomes accustomed to such whiplash. It learns to go sort of floppy.

Dolly Parton’s blues made for a banger. They made for a song that was playful, tongue-in-cheek, full of rhymey little one-liners that were fun to yell along to (god almighty, SLAP somebody…!). But looking back, the song also gave me an advantage. It gave me a preview—though I didn’t know it was a preview, yet—of how this whiplash would manifest in me, and what I could and could not do about it. The devil she sang about, the one that took over her body, was the same devil that was currently dormant inside of my own. 

By the time it awoke, I knew I couldn’t control it. What I could do, though, was laugh in its ridiculous face.

She called it the PMS blues.

Of course, that’s a devil that’s gone by many names. In ancient Greece, two thousand years before Parton chalked her PMS blues up to the generational curse that spawned from Eve’s naughtiness in the garden, I might have been suspected of harboring a “passionate and sentient” wild animal in my body that wandered around inside me, crawling in the spaces between my organs. This was how Plato conceptualized the womb: as the “animal inside the animal.” It has, naturally, been widely recognized as the objectively wrong way to conceptualize what it is that a womb does. 

It is also secretly my favorite. I am charmed by the idea of a wild animal. I’m envisioning, specifically, a small woodland critter—perhaps a muskrat—who lives inside me and gets mad when I don’t give it a baby, so it gets inside my head and tells me to start shit. I would call the muskrat Mom, and she would be the perfect scapegoat for my character flaws. I would love it if someone told me that the source of my bad behavior is from something entirely independent of myself, rather than something intrinsic to my nature. 

Currently, the devil goes by the name of premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Doctors mainly treat it by waving a spoonful of antidepressants in front of the patient’s face and singing “Here comes the train!” until we play ball. It’s not so bad. To be honest, since I’ve started playing ball, I haven’t punched or otherwise been physically violent toward a single person, which is technically progress. Not even when they really, really deserve it. Not even when it’s me.  

🩸

It always creeps up on me, subtle enough that I can easily wave it off as a bad moment, an isolated oopsie, a one-off. It’s normal. Don’t I always bark at Patrick to hurry up and put his damn shoes on? Why is he staring at me like that? What did he see? 

It’s okay. The moment passes. Just a hiccup. Just a cute little hiccup. 

Then, on the train, two rancid-looking neckbeards are loudly guffawing as they make some of the most jaw-droppingly heinous comments I’ve ever heard—She said I groomed her since she was 15, the lying bitch. I fucking wish!…Woof, you smell the pussy of that one who just walked by? Talk about a dry rub… Everyone can hear them. Everyone is exchanging tight-lipped looks of mutual pity and disgust. No one confronts them.

I decide that I will confront them. With my fist, oh yes. My skin prickles with anticipation, my body rushing and roiling like it’s three, maybe four whiskeys deep. I roll my wrist around in its socket, waggle my fingers to work out the kinks. Patrick, reading my mind, puts his hand over mine and squeezes it gently.

“I know,” he says. “Just hang tight. We get off in two stops. You can make it.”

He’s begging me with his eyes, but I’m begging right back. “Please?” I whisper. “I can pull it off, look—the second the doors open, I’ll ram the heel of my hand straight up to the bridge of the bigger one’s nose, yeah? We’ll jump off before he even knows what hit him.”

It was a perfect plan. I don’t understand why he’s being such a pill. He’s the one always telling me that I have far too much compassion for men, that they do not deserve empathy so much as they deserve to be lobotomized or hunted for sport. But I don’t want to sour the night, so when we stand to get off the train a minute later, I swallow down the impulse, clenching my stomach to keep it from rising back up, like it’s vomit. It tastes just as bitter. As we shuffle past the men, I try to at least catch eyes with one of them, so that they can see, plain as day, just how much I want them to actually, literally die. I want them to feel so taken back by the hate in my face that they instinctively shrink back from me. I want them to feel ugly and stupid and wretched and impotent and small. 

But they don’t even glance up. They’re just guffawing at each other. They don’t even notice me. It’s like I’m not even there.

🩸

I am thinking about Sadie Craddock, who, in 1980, was put on trial for killing a man.

It wasn’t her first act of violence. It wasn’t even close. Her behavioral problems had been well-documented in her institutional records, as well as in the diaries upon diaries that she’d dutifully kept over the years. In these diaries, she described monthly episodes that would turn her into a “raging animal,” one that compelled her to act in ways entirely uncharacteristic of her usual self. 

More than any official document, it would be her own words, her own self-made archive, her faithfulness to the project of bearing private witness to the unravelings of her own self, that would save her. The history, the patterns, the data were all irrefutably there. Based on these records, the expert witness in Craddock’s case, Katherine Dalton, diagnosed her with the formerly niche condition known as “premenstrual syndrome.” Craddock’s original murder charges paled to manslaughter charges, then to probation. 

It wasn’t a one-off. Later that same year, another woman, Christine English, employed a similar defense after the raging animal inside her seized control of the steering wheel of her car, running down the man who had betrayed her with his womanizing ways. It worked for her too.

The tabloids went rabid over the story:“Premenstrual Frenzy!”—“Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde!”—“Once A Month I Become a Woman Possessed!” These were real headlines. There was pushback, of course, from feminist groups who warned about the social progress these trial outcomes could undo, the echoes of hysteria these media narratives contained, echoes that contained echoes echoing back to the wandering womb.

The general public, however, ate it up. 

They ate it up when it became a running gag for sitcom writers and stand-up comics. 

They ate it up when Katherine Dalton, the expert witness who had diagnosed Craddock, published a revolutionary self-help book—geared, not toward the “deficient” women suffering with premenstrual dysphoria, but toward the men in their lives who felt in over their heads during luteal week. She advised the men to track and chart their womenfolks’ moods on a calendar, to monitor what they ate and drank, to administer and record the times of their medications, and to strategically plan any important dates, appointments, conversations, and decisions around her times of madness. 

That’s the story of how, for better or for worse, PMS became a household phrase.

It’s not lost on me that the affliction only entered into the public consciousness once men had a reason to be afraid of it. 

Afraid of us.

🩸

At Taylor’s, we drink Costco wine in front of our favorite reality television show. By now, I have accepted that it’s probably good that I didn’t break anybody’s nose. Still, I feel blue-balled by anger, aching with instinct that has nowhere to go. 

It’s one of those reality shows whose primary draw is getting to watch conventionally hot people trigger each other’s personality disorders on beaches. These shows have always been cathartic for me, though I find myself increasingly underwhelmed by the toxicity of more recent seasons. It made for better storylines when the producers could inflict psychologically torturous conditions on the cast with more impunity, keeping them starving and sleepless and lonely and gaslit and trapped in bad contracts and drunk. They are less relatable now. In tonight’s episode, instead of popping the fuck off in the way that I need them to, the opposing parties simply sit down and exchange therapy words with one another while trying in vain to produce a single tear. Finally, they hug it out. A bubbly swell of techno music rises to applaud their conflict resolution with a plasticky reggaeton beat. We cut to a time-lapse of a palm tree. We cut to a confessional where they are saying how grateful they are for this experience. We cut to a teaser for the next episode, which promises real drama this time: someone is going to speculate whether everybody is “here for the right reasons.” I feel sick.

Afterward, Taylor brings out these cute little canvases with cute little sets of paints. She suggests making boob art. To make boob art, we first daub paint across our naked breasts with abandon, then hug our canvases.

I love the idea. My breasts have been a real problem this week, swollen and engorged to cartoonish, pornographic proportions, yet so impossibly heavy and painful to the touch that I cannot even enjoy them. Perhaps making boob art would remind me to find power in my body, rather than shame; to redeem my destructive impulses by sublimating them into an aesthetically pleasing form. 

Taylor’s boob art comes out incredible. She leaves an imprint on the canvas that looks exactly like the silhouettes of two bald-headed gay men kissing. She paints a sunset in the background behind them, illuminating the tender, serendipitous scene of their love.

I am moved and inspired. I want my boobs to create something sweet and whimsical like that. I pick up a canvas. Put it down. Pick up. Put it down. Experimentally, gingerly, I heave up one of my breasts, then grunt as I plop it down onto the canvas, just to see how much surface area it covers. The canvas disappears into the crevasse of my underboob like a gravity well swallows a star. 

“Fuck,” I grumble. “I need a fucking triptych per boob.”

“We can do that!” Taylor says, jumping up. “I’ll get more canvases!” 

“NO,” I bark. “Fuck! Does it look like I can fucking handle the pressure of that? What’s the matter with you?”

She sits back down, looking confused and distressed. “I didn’t mean to make you feel pressured,” she apologizes in a quiet voice, then turns back to her painting, looking deflated.

Patrick gives me a look. I glare at him. “You’ve got something to say?”

He shrugs. He takes a breath. He says, low enough so that Taylor isn’t a part of the conversation, “This is just a silly little activity. We’re just having fun. There’re no stakes. Nothing’s the matter. Okay?”

I narrow my eyes at him. “I know that,” I say flatly. “I know nothing’s the matter.”

“Okay. Well you made Taylor feel bad, and you’re being kind of intense.”  

“NO I AM NOT BEING INTENSE.” I wince, hearing myself, then gather up an armful of paint and brushes in my arms and storm out of the room. 

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to paint my boobs in the BATHROOM because now there’s all this PRESSURE on me to not be so INTENSE.”  I slam the bathroom door shut behind me, and then I turn around and look at myself in the mirror. 

Fuck. 

It is here, confronted by the grotesque horror of my own reflection, that I realize I have turned into something else. The creature in the mirror stands before me, wild-eyed, streaked wetly with red, naked except for some ill-fitting booty shorts. Her chin wears a beard of fresh, angry wounds from where she’d gouged animalistically at her pores, as though to exorcise her demons through them, while her body hunches over itself like that of a gollum, her spine warped, succumbing to the great untenable weight of her breasts, which drag on the ground behind her like two body bags of flesh as she lurches herself ungracefully toward me. Her jaw muscles quiver. Her forehead vein bulges. Her hair looks like absolute shit.

She looks at me, her face twisted into a mask of disgust and contempt. I am afraid of her. I understand, of course, that we are one and the same. That she is the she-wolf, released from the cage inside of the cave behind the curtains deep in the closet of my melodramatic bitch body. I do not know what we are capable of, or if we will bite, or whether we can stop, or how we will possibly fix it this time. I do not think, although I hate to say it, that even Shakira can save me. 

Let it out, she instructs us, so it can breathe.

🩸

Patrick knocks gently and pokes his head in to check on me. Asks if I’m good. 

I am not good. I crack open the door, let him look at me. “How can you possibly love me like this?” I wail. 

I can see the corner of his mouth twitching up with bemusement. “You look the same as you always do,” he says. “I promise.” 

I stagger back, struck by his words as though like hands, like claws. “Wow, so you’re telling me that I always look like this?”

“What? No no no—”

But it’s too late for him to walk it back. He has already hurt my feelings, or perhaps I am a hurt feeling, or perhaps I am every feeling that’s ever hurt me, covered in skin and paint and doubled-over, howling, because now I can see—finally, I can see it all clearly, now it all makes perfect sense—how I’m actually just the latest iteration of the same old hurt that’s always existed, running like a live wire through my mother, who has always been so angry, and her mother, who has always been so angry, tangling up with all the other wires, all them electrified by the same motherboard, the ancient mitochondrial Eve of all of the hurts. 

No, I don’t know what it is. I might have known it once, but I’ve forgotten.

Birth, I suppose.

I shove the canvas onto my titties and pray. I’m not expecting answers. I’m not expecting a reason. Dolly Parton already tried on our behalf: Eve, you wicked woman, she snarls, bitchily, wolfishly, at the start of “PMS Blues.” You done put your curse on me / Why didn’t you just leave that apple hanging in the tree? Unsurprisingly, she got no response. 

I’m just hoping for something good to come out of all of this.

🩸

In the ancient days, before we ticked days off on a calendar, we ticked them off on a bone.

By we, I mean whichever one of our pre-hominid ancestors knew that 28 was a number of days that was smart to tick off on a bone. 

By smart, I mean that the notches on the bone had been carved with clear intent, tallied into rows, grouped into deliberate clusters, as though acknowledging the existence of phases within this larger cycle. Regarding how to interpret these notches, anthropologists are largely aligned. “Behold!” they crowed. “Man’s oldest-known lunar calendar!” 

There were certain others, though, who pushed back. By certain others, I mean, well, you know. The angry ones. The ones who always seemed to have a bone to pick—and, oh boy, oh man, did they have a pick at this bone. They picked away all of its meat. They stripped it of its muscle. They sucked it dry of its juices, reducing it from a glorious, sexy testament to the ways in which human survival has always been intrinsically bound up with the cycles and the rhythms of the natural systems all around us—to a puny, unimpressive little nub. 

“Why would a man,” one anthropology professor famously scoffed to her students, in a prime example of this bone-picking, “need to keep track of 28 days?” I’ve got on me a special radar, Shakira croons, from somewhere far away.

I understand that the anthropologist’s question is rhetorical. That the point is simply to push back against the great academic tradition of the one-sided story. It’s just—

And I don’t even want this to be true, okay—

These teeth a-clenchin’, fluid retention—

I also want to reiterate that I have punched men, plural, in the face before—

Head a-swellin’, can’t stop yellin’—

That is to say, I’ve been violent—

Like the devil taking over my body—

One of them was even spitting mouthfuls of blood into the street, okay—

Suffering, suffering, suffering—

Everybody’s suffering—

I don’t even remember what he said to piss me off—

You know you must forgive us, for we care not what we do—

But let’s forget, for a moment, that the lunar cycle spans 28 days—the moon’s my teacher and—let’s forget, for a moment, about all of the practical applications of the moon—that great time-keeper in the sky— farming and fishing, voyages and hunts—I’m her student—

I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I’m not even trying to make a joke—

But a woman had to write this—

About boners or bones—

A man would be scared to—

Or the men who died by the most emasculating means possible, i.e., getting beat up by a girl— 

Lest he be called a chauvinist—

And maybe girls will just be girls—

Or just fall victim to—

Or maybe, men are victims, sometimes, too— 

Those PMS bluuueessss….

🩸

I walk back to the living room and peel the canvas away from my chest. The three of us gather around to look at it. For a long moment, none of us speak. I realize that I have to say something first.

“It looks like an abortion,” I finally say.

“It looks like a cancer,” says Patrick.  

“Aw, I think it looks kind of cool,” says Taylor, reliably validating. She squints and tilts her head. “Maybe a hysterectomy where they just kinda took everything out? Do they still do those?” They do not still do those. Alas, the resemblance is uncanny. 

I decide that I can save it. I’ll add some shapes and colors to make the painting kind of abstract, so that its ambiguity extends beyond the realm of medical violence. Taylor and Patrick go back to watching the reality show while I add more paint to the canvas, mumbling little Bob Rossisms to myself as I go. Finally, it starts looking a little bit better—like nothing in particular, rather than anything else in particular that it might resemble otherwise. 

I hold it up to be admired. “Behold,” I announce. “My hideous progeny.” 

Patrick and Taylor both burst into supportive applause. I know they are only humoring me, but I let myself bask in the glow for a moment. Riding the wave of confidence this gives me, I pick up the paintbrush one more time. 

“Babe? What are you doing? Put it down,” Patrick begs. “It’s already good enough. You don’t have to do this.” 

I wave him off.  “Just one last little touch,” I murmur. “Just a little piece de resistance…”

I load up my brush with emerald green, and drag it down the canvas with a flourish. 

Immediately, I realize my mistake. 

“God dammit,” I yell, throwing my paintbrush down. “It’s the green fucking ribbon from that Carmen Maria Machado story.” Patrick just sighs and tiredly rubs the bridge of his nose. Taylor squinted her eyes at the canvas and tried in vain to find something nice to say about what was on it. 

“I thought it was looking really good before the green bit,” is what she came up with. “What, um, what were you going for with that?” 

“I don’t even know,” I lamented. I think I’d been going for a nature vibe, a little pop of something lush and life-affirming to balance out the grim corporeality of the rest. Sure, I could have accepted that the painting just wasn’t going to be pleasant to behold—it was going to be strange and messy and visceral and violent, which was, of course, inherently enough—but I couldn’t. In trying to make it something other than what it was, I had only made it more so. 

“Are you crying?” Taylor gasps. 

“What? Ha ha. No way.” I force my face into a smile, even though it is clearly slick with tears. “It’s literally nothing. I’m over it. Do you have anything for cramps?” 

She sits up, excited. “I have,” she says breathlessly, “so many things for cramps. What do you need?” 

“Anything. I don’t care. All of it.” 

When she scurries up to go bring me a smorgasbord of options, I steal into her kitchen with my hysterectomy painting. I really do have cramps, the kind that feel so impossibly sharp and surgically precise that they feel like they’re coming from someone who hates you. Doubled-over on myself, I paw around in the knife drawer and pull one out at random. It is long, with a blunted end that punctures the canvas messily but easily, with a serrated blade that loosens up the threads around the hole, allowing me to extend them into gashes. I stab the knife into canvas, six or maybe seven or eight times, until it hangs in stringy tatters from its wooden frame. It splinters easily, like an old and brittle bone, when I bring it down over my knee. 

Relief.

I gather up the remains and bury them deep in Taylor’s trash, wash her knife, return it to the drawer, and calmly return to the living room with a glass of water. 

Taylor offers me a sampler platter of over-the-counter pain meds of varying shapes and sizes, and also ancient herbal supplements that look like rabbit poop pellets and smell of wet hay. I gratefully swallow a handful of whatever, though truth be told, I am already starting to feel better. Something had been trying to get out of me, and some of it did.

It would come back. It always did. This is not a linear narrative. It is a cyclical one. That means there is no resolution, no end, no redemption arc. 

There is only—and only temporarily—relief.

🩸

I am feeling more like myself again. I will close with a joke. 

I know why a man would need to track 28 days on a bone. 

(Pause.) 

Because he’s married. 

(Laughter.)

(Pause.)

To me.

🩸 

I’m still workshopping it.