The marriage was final. In a valley under trees with leaves like parchment paper I am led to the end of the meadow by a beaver. I arrive and they are dyed red from a doe they have slaughtered. I drink them like water. They are of moonlight and we dance. We are both brides. Around us the creatures come to watch our consummation. There are possums and falcons and rabbits. Pastors attend but they cannot agree that this union is a good idea. The Baptists say no. The Non-denominationals say yes. The Catholics say sure, as long as your bride, your coyote bride, is baptized. They are not and so we lie. And in this clearing I made my wife.
They arrived with their dark hair and they took me back with them into their void, into their milky darkness. We sunk through an open door into an empty space crowned in magnolias and midnight skies. Halfway between the underworld and purgatory we dreamed. They made me the night, so I cloistered them in a veil of spider silk and laughter. My bride, my coyote bride. Their eyes are yellow as distant fires and their kisses are sharp. I can already feel the blood caressing my cheek like forbidden tears. And in the moonrise I awake to a moonlit halo of willows and water. My cheeks are pressed into the creek born moss and the valley roars with the wings of cicadas. They are underneath the water and I see their breaths falling and rising. I can see their eyes, open and silver and fat as a garland of intestines. I can see their hair, their raven hair, floating up to the surface. I lean on over the water and they wrap their arms around my neck. They pull me to their mouth and inhale me. In the moonlight their body glows like a pearl. Yes, Pearl is their name; and their eyes, well they dance like fire and lightning, take me back to a flickering campfire under the lips of tall blue pines. And I surrender myself to the river and let them take me with them into their state, their way of being, and in this way I became one with them.
Our house here is made of bones. They do what they can to feed me. They put their nose in my mouth, coyote mother. And they release a stream of fatty strands, blood, guts, meat and longing. I swallow them up like the beauty they are. I digest pieces of hair. It is not at all pleasant but I do it for them. They like to see me fed. And after dinner they open for me. I can see the ridges of their body and the remains of everything they have ever consumed constructing this house they have led me into. It is a dark place where they live. And because we are underwater as they ravage me I scream but my voice drowns and their caress is soft, the one thing about them that is soft. And there is not much of them which is soft, so I let them drape around me and love me. But I cannot hold my breath here forever. I cannot give myself to the bottom of a river. So I pray to god for freedom and when he listens I float like my heart is a sacred fish. They watch me rise like dough. They miss me when I leave, I know. I will have to come back.
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Darling, and I must admit this is more difficult than I thought. I thought loving you might be easier than loving myself. I see now that is not the case, because you are wild. I see you in the trees and in the clouds. You speak to me but I cannot understand a word you are saying. You expand every universe I have ushered, because it is in the ways that I don’t understand you that I am learning to love you. I see you in the stars, love, distant constellations.
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My bride, my coyote bride, is pregnant with our firstborn. They remind me it is mine, although I don’t know how it can be, wife and wife. They tell me that the baby better be made of good stuff. They will eat it if it is bad. I don’t know what is bad, I say, about what the two of us have made here. And the marriage is and has been an adjustment. The bones have been cleaned out of our bedroom. The beavers have drained half the creek so the bed is only visible in some places. There is no longer discreteness to our arrangement. They no longer drown me each night to love and kiss me. The passion has burned; the fire in their eyes has shifted to sapphires. I don’t know what I do wrong. I try to feed my bride, my coyote bride, and I put my mouth into theirs and spit up chewed up spinach and basil. And they spit it out and growl and leave the river where we live. They will hunt for themselves, they say.
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Darling, and I must admit, love hurts like nothing I’ve ever had.
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They still love me, this I know, and I always thought I’d know danger when I saw it. But some nights I am looking into their open mouth and all I see are stars. They are always reminding me they could rip me apart and it would be easy, and I always told myself that if I was in a position where there was danger I would run before the world snapped around me.
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Darling, the world is already split. The river bed is completely dry and you have been excavated. I see you for what you are now. I see you, covered in hair and bristling in pain. I see you and wonder how to love you. I thought I knew how but you have changed. I try to feed you what I can but I am not a hunter. I do not tear through the flesh of lamb. I do not have that piece of you in me. You have imbued me with many things but your cruelty is absent from my body, and for this I repent. I walk through the quivering pines and shaking aspens alone, wanting your company. Bride, coyote bride. Blood bride. You are going to make me do something I do not want to do. Next time I go hunting I will have to bring you something more substantial than carrots and kombucha and tofu. Your hunger demands it.
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Our house of sun bleached bones looks like a prison and when they open their mouth it is not for a kiss. Call me provider as I put my face into their heavenly maw and regurgitate a dead fish. It was the easiest thing for me to kill. Mammals, love, are too familiar, I say. I am sorry. But they are hungry and I will kill for them again. They are bloated and I bend to their needs like a waterlogged tree. The next thing I kill is a squirrel. I am slow but this one is sickly and I feel myself break as I break its spine. I bring it to them and hide in shame. They have given birth by now and maybe this is the glue between me and my bride, my coyote bride. They snarl at me weakly. I snarl back. There is no room in this relationship for weakness.
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Darling, there is not much I deserve here now. I have destroyed what you were. This place we dreamt could not hold our collective ferociousness. It could not contain the wild mountains we transverse under cloaks of stars, welcome mats of terror. It could not hide our brilliance. And now, bride, my coyote bride, I have turned a river into a desert. I no longer sink into your mystery but I excavate the sandy bottom with a shovel. I see the cactus grow and I see you searching for shade. I’m sorry to say the baby looks more like me than you, wonderful. You have carried our screaming cub and there she is, as wonderful as every storm in heaven but absent of tail, of teeth. She is absent from the cruelty that you carry with you through the world. For that, Darling, I am overjoyed. I do not want our baby to know the slippery salty taste of blood. I do not want our baby to drown her bride in overflowing rivers of envy and life. What we have made here is new. I have named our baby Flower and then Springtime. To me she is both and I know you’d rather call her Fire and Fury. Your love undomesticates me but I am still myself. This is my last call for help and this is you on your deathbed. I am leaving now, with our daughter. The beavers will drown this section of the river and turn day back into night. And you, bride, my coyote bride, do not grieve me. I am going home.