Marie sat on the cold stone steps of the insane asylum, staring at the winter sky. Her black hair was messed up from the December wind, her fingers blue and numb. She didn’t care.
“Marie, come inside at once,” said the cranky Mistress Mae, the doctor from Connecticut. She glared down over her reading glasses at the pale fourteen-year-old.
It didn’t seem like Marie heard her at all. She had seen something and had gone into one of her “crazy modes.” But she wasn’t seeing things. She wasn’t crazy.
Finally Marie replied, “May I stay out for a few minutes longer?”
Mistress Mae sighed, shaking her head as she turned. But when she was facing away from the girl she smiled even more crazily than some of her clients.
Marie stared at the full moon above her, wishing the horrible images away. The images that had sent her parents to a nursing home fifty years early, four years ago, from being gravely disabled.
Her watch beeped, and Marie glanced at it. Midnight. She turned her alarm off and went back to staring at the moon.
There was a growl from directly in front of her. Her head snapped down to find . . . nothing. She warily returned to moon gazing.
Another growl. This time she jumped up and demanded, “What do you want with me?” No reply. People passing by glanced at the building she was standing in front of and wrote her off as a cook, just like everyone else.
Then the werewolf attacked her, leaping from the shadows and ripping out her throat before she seven had the chance to scream. No one had witnessed it.
It neatly disemboweled her, one organ at a time. By the time it was done the only thing you could recognize were her limbs and her face, forever frozen in a terrified expression.
When it had left, Mistress Mae walked out and clicked her tongue, sipping a cup of tea. She said to herself, “My my. I must teach them not to make such a mess!”