The broken glass pierced his throat, and then he was dead, his head hanging over the sill, blood dripping down the wall to the floor.Īnd then my sister went to bed, and I sat in his small, dimly lit kitchen, on his lap, as he nuzzled my hair and then my ear and neck, and squeezed me hard and soft at the same time. The werewolf would howl, he said, his thirst for the blood of children relentless, until one night he came charging through a window of a house trying to catch the little girl inside. He could do these pitch-perfect character voices, and in that way, he was charismatic and appealing to children. One evening, when I was six, he offered to babysit me and my older sister at his house.īefore bedtime, Uncle Doug told us both a bedtime story about a werewolf who howled at the moon in the bitter cold of winter on top of a snowy hill, just like the hill outside the window over the sink in Uncle Doug’s kitchen.
Uncle “Doug” was an old friend of my parents he visited our family often and occasionally joined us for holidays.
