The Werewolves of Nyxryn

Chapter 2

I let the front door of the apartment ease shut behind me, and the apartment wrapped around me like a question I didn’t want to answer. The couch had claimed her—My mother slumped there, mouth slack, the cheap cardigan bunched in odd places. The smell hit me in the hallway: liquor, stale smoke, the faint chemical tang of someone who’d given up arguing with the world a long time ago. I could wake her. I could shake her until she remembered she had children to love and take care of. But I didn’t. I’d done that dance before. She would just open her drunk eyes, look at me like I was a stranger, and say whatever disjointed sentence the bottle had taught her to say that week. Talking to Mom in those moments was the same as talking to a ghost with better lipstick.

The room still felt like a house that used to be lived in properly — photos on the wall; one of them with my father in his work shirt, smiling too big for the camera. My siblings’ backpacks and shoes were a small constellation by the door, the laces knotted with that level of care only children could manage. The work of being grown had been handed to me in neat, angry piles, and I’d accepted it because I was probably the only one who could.

It stung, sometimes, remembering the way things had been for us once. Not long ago — longer than the years my mind wanted to admit — our house had been small and honest and full. We weren’t rich by a long shot. The floors of our house had creaked in places, the paint had flaked in others, but there was always enough food, always a reason to laugh in the kitchen. Love was in the air. My father could make a pan of eggs feel like a feast. He had this habit of humming off-key and pretending to conduct the kettle as if it were an orchestra. We would eat and talk and laugh, and the world felt like something we could hold.

Then the debts came.

Not the slow, fixable sort; something ugly and greedy and fast. Gambling had been my father's private flame at first — a shrug, a lucky week — and then it was an animal in the house that did not care about our faces anymore. It ate money, then pride, then sleep. The arguments between my parents started small, whispered across the hallway at first, then more ragged and sharp. I watched my father shrink into someone who counted on luck the way people counted on breath.

In the end, he chose a way out that had broken everything. He took his own life with a gun; that was the honest sentence, and it sat in my mouth like a rock. I didn’t dress it up. I didn’t add metaphors to make it gentler. He had killed himself because the debts were too big, because shame was a heavier coat than he could wear, because he could not see a path through.

I still replayed that day in bad, jagged snippets: the principal who came to pick me out of my classroom, the silence afterwards like something had been pulled from the room. After that, the people remaining in this family had kept their shape, but they had all lost the music. The happiness.

The truth was more complex: the debts were real; the bills remained unpaid; the bank knocked twice too many times. But guilt was porous — it found all the places where you thought you could have done more and leaked in. I had been fifteen when my father had passed. Stubborn as hell, and busy trying to be hopeful in small, imperfect ways. I fed my siblings as best I could. I tried to hang onto my mother as she slowly slipped away from reality, and it wasn’t enough.

None of it was enough.

After the funeral, there were letters and phone calls and men in suits who explained that there was nothing left to claim for us. The house, the few savings, gone in the tangle of loans and repayments. My father’s decisions left a ledger with our name on it, and the world, practical and unsentimental, expected someone to pay. I stepped up because I had hands that could work and people who needed to eat, no matter how many shifts my mother worked. That was the logic of it: work until work surrenders, keep the kids fed, don’t let the memory of what happened weigh them down. I became a ledger-keeper by default.

I didn’t let myself think about that other awful night often, but sometimes it just crawled up from where I kept it buried, heavy and uninvited. The memory was jagged, like broken glass. I couldn’t touch it without cutting myself, but I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there either.

It was after my father had died — after the bullet, after the debts he’d left behind swallowed everything else. The bank had already come. They took the house, the account, the sense of safety we had thought was permanent. What they didn’t tell us was that he hadn’t just owed money to banks. There were other men, harder ones, with smiles like knives.

I remembered the night they came to the door. My mother had gone pale, her whole body going stiff like an animal that knew the predators had already seen it. She turned to me, whispering fast and sharp: “Take them. Hide. Don’t make a sound and don't come out.” Her hands shook when she pushed my brother and sister into my arms, but her voice was steel.

The closet in the back smelled of old wood and dust. It was dark, cramped, our knees knocking together, our breath too loud. I held my siblings against me, one on each side, their small hands clinging to my shirt like lifelines. They didn’t understand what was happening, not fully. My brother started to whimper, and I pressed my palm against his mouth, whispering that he had to be quiet, that it was a game, that we were hiding, and if we stayed hidden, we would win.

The sounds outside the door still lived in my bones. The men’s voices were sharp and ugly. Mom’s voice rising, breaking, turning into something I’d never heard before. Then her screams — not the kind you hear when someone stubbed a toe or burned a hand on the stove, but the kind that ripped the world open. My sister buried her face against me. I bit my lip so hard it bled just to keep myself from making a sound. Afraid of what those men would do when they found us.

I didn’t remember how long it lasted. Long enough to understand. Long enough to know that when the door slammed shut and the silence came back, nothing would ever be the same again. When we finally crept out of the closet, the house looked the same, but it wasn’t. Mom was on the floor, shaking, her face pale and her eyes empty. I wanted to go to her, to help, but she shoved me back with a look I would never forget — not anger, but a warning. A plea for me to keep the little ones safe.

The next morning, I found her in the kitchen, a bottle in her hand. It was the first time I’d ever seen her drink in the daylight. She didn’t stop after that day. She never stopped. Not one sober day since that night. The woman who used to hum while she cooked pancakes, who used to laugh with my father at silly things, was gone. What those men took from her that night was something no one could give back.

I grew up in that closet that night, in the silence of holding two children’s mouths shut while the world turned into something cruel on the other side of the door. I had never really left it. Every night I came home, every time I looked at Mom passed out on the couch, I heard echoes of those screams. And I knew, with a certainty that chilled me, that the bottle was the only thing keeping her upright — even if it was also the thing that was killing her slowly.

And me? I had learned how to keep quiet. How to survive. How to step into her place without being asked. Because somebody had to. So, I did the same thing as I did every other day. I walked past my drunk mother, went to look over my brother and sister as they slept, and tried to find some sleep inside this living hell I called my life.