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My next few months were filled with reading and conversations with Zee. I interacted with no one else, though I never thought much of that. The tranquility of being in-between the brutal indifference of The Wild and the overbearing noise and chaos of society felt as if I was suspended in air, in a way. I felt as though I was in a bubble, a peace amidst the cruelty of the entire world around me. I was taking only as much as I needed, and living as quietly as possible. The home I had built out of the ruins had become rather cozy, in it's own way, at least. It was empty, yet I didn't feel lonely. That yawning hole in my body no longer desired a constant companion, and I found that my visits to Zee every few days were more than satisfying.

The conversations were pleasant as always. He told me a lot about his life back home, before he'd move to the states. I told him a bit about my life before the woods. We shared honesty with eachother in a way that I was scared to do with most men. He knew so much about me, but I couldn't explain why I told him. I just did. He just was so gentle, his demeanor was so understanding, so wise. We'd had such wildly different lives and yet I felt like we understood one another. In another life, I'm sure I could've loved him as so much more than a friend. The way he looked at me, it was a friendship I felt unfamiliar with, something I had not experienced since childhood. I'd had men love me, sure, but there's a difference between a man that loves you and sleeps with you and one who just loves you, just because he likes you that much. His love felt familial. He got nothing from me but my time but he still looked forward to seeing me, as I did him.

One night, a comfortably warm night, he asked me something, though, in his best attempt at conversational English.

"May I visit your house, on my next day off work?"

He knew the brutal truth about my home, though, that it was a decaying structure of a home I had secured in the most minimal ways possible. There was a mattress on the floor and stockpiles of non-perishables, boards on the windows and doors, but though it was my home, it could hardly be considered a house. I reiterated that to him, and he was unbothered. He wanted to come see my home, and I made every excuse for him not to come visit. How lovely it would have been, though, to have had his company more often. Our conversations had grown deeper, over the time we spent together, and I considered him a dear friend. I believe he considered me the same. I was so embarrassed, though, to let him into my life, into the wreckage of my home, and of my soul. I was so afraid he would see me for who I really was, and would reject me. I was afraid he'd be horrified at the state of it all, the way I lived. I declined. He seemed disappointed, but understanding. I told him to give me a bit longer, to collect my life a bit better, and I'd let him come visit. He seemed excited to hear that, at least.

Time passed. It was a warm night when I went to visit Zee, around 3 AM. As I passed the dumpster where he left supplies for me, I saw that there was nothing sitting outside for me. This was the first time since he'd started giving me things that he'd left nothing for me, and though I found it odd, I didn't feel offended by it. Perhaps there was nothing to give this week. As I walked around to the front of the motel, I could see him there at the desk, and my smile would start creeping up the corners of my mouth. It looked as though he was reading a book as I approached, conveniently, and I was excited to ask him about it. I entered the lobby and greeted him, only to find he didn't respond. He was sitting at his desk, in his chair, but he was asleep. This had happened a few times before. He worked the overnight shift, and said that he often went his entire shift without anyone checking in or coming to home with questions. It was a lonely job, and in his old age he often nodded off at his desk.

I approached him slowly, so as not to startle him, but as I continued to greet him, he didn't respond. He sat still, sleeping. I reached over the counter to rub his arm. He was in his favorite sweater, brown, soft, the fabric often pilled from how much he wore it. He didn't respond to my touch, and he felt strangely rigid. I lifted his sleeve up a bit to rub at his bare fur and found his body was stiff, and cold. I gave his body a slight shake and found that he'd completely locked up. A subconscious part of me realized this before the conscious part of me did, but as I stood there speaking his name, gently trying to wake him, I became aware that he wasn't breathing. I knew it, but I simultaneously didn't know it. He'd clearly stopped breathing hours before I arrived. Tears were running down my face, though I still had not come to understand what was before me. I spoke his true name this time, Duy Khuong, as if that would somehow stir him. I wanted him to wake suddenly and laugh about how deep a sleep he'd fallen into, how the lobby was chilly. I wanted something that, deep down, I knew wasn't going to happen. I wanted him to tell me about whatever book he'd last read, but he wasn't going to do that. My conscious was catching up with my subconscious as I began to hyperventilate. I reached over the counter and grabbed the phone, dialing 9-1-1, but as I heard the operator answer, I found myself without words. I couldn't say what I knew was before me, that a man was dead. I held the phone in my hand as I heard the operator ask again for information, and my response manifested as me slamming the receiver of the phone onto the counter several times before throwing it, the cord pulling and causing the base to tumble with it, the entire mechanism crashing onto the floor. I left suddenly, running to treeline horizontal to the motel, where I sat behind the guard of the woods and watched.

The commotion i'd caused with the phone must've been sufficient as, within minutes, police were on the scene. Shortly after, medical was there as well. I watched from the treeline as they assessed the situation and came to the same conclusions that I had, that Duy Khuong was dead. Tears were running down my face still, but I was silent. I couldn't speak. I could only watch as the police went about their business, routine as usual. I watched as they chatted together, as they acted as if this was a normal weekday night for them. At times, they would conversate with one another, and then laugh, as if things were jovial, as if someone's friend hadn't just died. In those moment, when they laughed, I wanted to kill them. I wanted to charge them like a beast and bite their necks, turn their laughter to crying. I wanted to die silencing their laughter. It made me sick.

Duy Khuong was put on a stretcher and draped with a white sheet, and as they carried him to the ambulance, I saw the shape of his body maintained his slouched sitting position beneath the sheet. Rigor mortis had locked him there, asleep, waiting for his friend to visit him. He would never see my home, in any state. As they all departed, the building was again quiet. A different man had entered the lobby and seemed to be handling the motel's affairs, and my legs pulled me from the situation. I found myself running, sprinting, back to my home, back to the shack where I hid, and I began to scream. I barely broke the doorway before I fell to the floor, to the rubble I had mostly cleaned, and I pulled into my chest a bellow that burst out in a hoarse cry, releasing all of the collective energy that had been swelling inside me the entire night. My fists punched concrete floor until they opened, until they bled. I could not see it, but I could feel it. I could feel the throbbing, and how my fur wet progressively more as I punched the ground. My stomach was in knots, and I cried myself to heaving, turning my punching from outward to inward, striking myself in the thighs, then the chest, then the head, as if I was angry at my body for daring to take away from the pain of grief with physical suffering. All I did was succeed in beating myself to a dazed stupor, as I was known to do.

I fell asleep on the floor, eventually. I do not know when exactly that happened, but I awoke the next day with a pounding in my head, my entire body aching. The world was quiet. The birds outside were chirping, and sun cut through the unsealed portions of my home. I was in a substantial amount of pain, and I only laid there, letting it happen. I wanted that pain to consume me. I wanted it to hurt worse than it had the night before.

I was in luck, it seemed, as I eventually brought myself to my knees and found that the pain in my stomach was intense, searing. It felt as if I had swallowed fire, and it was sharp enough that it brought noise from my mouth, a whimper as I clutched myself at the torso. I had not struck myself there, nor had I eaten anything strange, so I found it odd it hurt worse than any other part of me. I finally went outside and relieved myself as usual, finding no blood or signs of sickness. The pain subsided only mildly, though, and I accepted it. I welcomed it, even. There was no part of me that wanted to endure the grief that was going to settle into my body in the upcoming weeks. How horrible it was, I thought, to have had so many opportunities to be closer to Zee, and to have never taken them. How stupid I was, I thought, to fall so easily in love with as terrible a man as King, only to be so guarded and averse to the men who really loved me. I deserved this misery. I deserved nothing but the worst pain. I prayed to a God i didn't believe in, that day, that the pain would kill me.

It didn't, unfortunately, but it also did not subside. Over the next several weeks it would come in waves, sudden shocks to my body that would bring me to my knees, as if something was biting on me from the inside. I had never experienced close loss like this before, and I had heard that grief was very physical, but I had no idea just how physical it could be. I was incredibly angry, and in incredible pain. It was a strange suffering that occupied my whole body, in fatigue and nausea and tension, in headaches, in panic, in every way it thought possible. Amidst all of it, I began to feel uncomfortable in my clothes once more. I had grown accustomed to wearing them again, after much struggle, because I needed to do so to visit Zee. After he was gone, though, they began to burn at my skin, and I eventually found myself nude again, in my home, and in the nearby woods. I had found, while wandering, a part of the woods stretched out rather far, and cut through civilization before branching out into something much larger and more dense. It felt like the wild I had grown to understand, and I traveled this path at night, crossing only one road before descending into wilderness once more. It was only when I was in the true wild, in the deeper forest, that the stomach pain would subside entirely. Even in the woods around the house, it came in waves, but when I went out at night, naked, it was gone. As soon as I crossed the road, it was gone. It was as if there was something so much larger and more dangerous that needed my attention. I could let go of myself in the woods, and forget my obligations.

I eventually realized that the road was the Parkway, the road that sliced through several states' worth of wilderness for scenic travel. I had not realized how close I was to it until one night, when I saw sign marking an upcoming overlook. There were legally untamed, as I wanted them to be, and I found myself descending into their madness once more. I would run through them exposed, hunting, and I had began to feast on insects and carrion as I had in the woods before, and to hunt fish, as King had taught me. The house I inhabited became purely for survival, and no longer for pleasure. The domesticity I had been developing shed quickly. After all, the only thing domestic life had done was hurt me once more. I could not live among men as I once had in my younger years, because it was far too painful. In the wild, pain was to be expected. I could handle the cruelty of the woods, and I let it speak over the pain I had experienced with the loss of Duy Khuong.

Still, as I would return home, so would the incessant suffering. My stomach would burn with pain, and I found the smell of my home to be progressively more stale, like mold. I was certain it was water damage finally exposing itself in the air, and I found it difficult to breathe after spending hours, nights in the woods. I could smell the mold, but I couldn't see it. There were no black patches to exhume, only the smell. The smell was all through the house. The supplies I had been stockpiling, they were all going to waste. The perishables were rotting, the non-perishables wouldn't stay in my stomach. I vomited often, though only at home. I could eat a freshly killed squirrel in the woods and it would stay down, but snack foods sat like acid in my belly, waiting to be heaved back up.

Regardless, I tried to return home often. There was a part of me that craved it, a compulsion that wouldn't allow me to become fully feral. Though I found the domesticity horrific, I had grown to feel a sense of control in having my "own" home, even if it had been purely scavenged from someone long before me. I liked my bed, and I liked my privacy, and I enjoyed how it felt to lie on my back, naked, alone, and know that the walls around me were my own. That and, though strange the feeling, something compelled me. It was as if there was something inside me pulling at me, beckoning to sleep inside at night, to take care of the bed, of the shelter. I had no idea why, but it brought me enough comfort that I continued to sleep inside most nights.

It was a lovely summer night outside, though, when I noticed something about me was changing. I had found and eaten an opossum, a growing favorite meal of mine due to their low likelihood of rabies, and I found myself lying on my back in the woods, sated and enjoying the loving cool of the dark night air. It was intoxicating, fresh, and I found my hand had wandered between my own legs, and I was very erect. I couldn't resist the urge, and I began to I stroke slowly, lovingly, at myself. The tip was already damp with precum, and it dribbled down my hand as I savored this moment of pleasure, as if it was begging for this. Every part of me wanted this moment to last. My body had a light tremble to it, an excited tremble. In the wild, my worries were behind me. My grief was waiting on me at the doorframe of my house, but out in the woods, I was a beast. I hunted like I beast, I ate like a beast, and I wanted desperately to fuck like a beast. Without a partner to soothe that last urge, though, I found the duty was my own, and while one hand tended to my sex, the other wandered my torso, rubbing my own chest and stomach. That was when I noticed it.

My stomach was tender to the touch in spots, strange spots. Equally distance apart, several inches below my nipples. There were six spots, I found, trailing from my ribs down to my waistline, which felt like insect bites. I assumed them to be just that, though as I pet my body, I found them erogenous and stimulating. I found myself rubbing them as I would my two nipples, and I found that it brought me to a climax that was intense and breathtaking. I shot stripes up my stomach and laid there, continuing to rub the bites with my fingertips even after I'd released. They felt so pleasant to touch, albeit a bit overstimulating right after orgasm.

The next morning, I inspected them in the sunlight and found them they had grown a bit overnight. They were indeed equal distance apart, and equal distance down from my nipples. In fact, they seemed to be exactly that: six more nipples on my stomach, starting to grow. They, and the two that had come before them, were a bit more raised than I recalled my nipples usually being. I felt as though I looked like a feral animal, vulgar nubs on my stomach on display like some sort of fertile creature. Still, there was no breast shape beneath them, so I assumed it to be some strange biological response to my lifestyle and nothing more.

In the proceeding weeks, my home had become less and less tolerable, and yet I found I was returning to it nightly, restless, shuffling the bed and belongings about in strange ways. I had taken to bringing leaves and branches inside, garbage like blankets and shirts that I occasionally found in the woods, anything soft. I sometimes felt compelled to take the old hotel bedding off my mattresses and throw it on the floor and sleep on that at times, only to wake up and find myself pacing about the home, pacing outside. Crossing the road into the wild would soothe these urges for a while, but I found them harder and harder to resist. My energy was through the roof, and I assumed it was my body's attempt at processing the energy from my grief. The smell of the mold was getting worse, though, and I had began to see it developing in the corners of the room, running down the walls where I assumed water damage was worsening. When I was home, I had grown to notice that, when I became aware of the mold smell, the pains in my stomach would intensify. It all made sense to me, the trauma of King, the loss of Duy Khuong, my own unhealthy lifestyle. I was physically and mentally sick, and it was easy to explain. So I thought, at least.

Over the proceeding months, I felt as if I was changing with the seasons. The order I had struggled so hard to bring to my life was collapsing around me, often physically. I had returned to a diet almost entirely of hunted game, forgoing the piles of stale snacks and non-perishables Zee had been giving me. There was something different about me, though, and I could not understand it. My ability to hunt had changed since the death of King. It felt as if that gnawing desire to die had shifted around inside my body, and had settled in the pit of my guts as the desire to kill. I no longer wanted to burn out alone in some shack in the woods. I had a tremendous, burning fire still inside me, and it wanted to live. It was a strange sensation, as it was at odds with my conscious self, which did very much want to die. I felt as if I was a vessel through which two lives were living, both wanting vastly different things. As a result, I fluctuated between the extremes multiple times a day, wrought with pain in my home, wailing and wishing death on myself, only to be out that night on all fours, chasing a deer, biting it's neck, hollowing out the torso with my teeth, alive, vigorous. I frequently became ill from doing this, eating raw meat, and yet I found myself going out hunting for it more and more frequently. Over time, the sickness began to subside, and I was able to keep down the meat.

My lifestyle had twisted into something ghastly to behold, a feral man in the woods, and I knew that it was unsustainable. The weather was warm, but I was certain I would die before the seasons became cold. It was a miracle I had not contracted some sort of horrific disease from the meat consumption, or become prey to something stronger or smarter than me. I was still sickly thin, though my stomach had noticeable distending in the lower area, much like several malnourished children in third world countries. I assumed my body was struggling to process the diet, evident by the frequent and agonizing stomach pains I was experiencing, the sleeplessness, the chronic vomiting. I sometimes would wake during the night in a delirious state, sweating, panting, a sensation in my body like movement, from my stomach upward. I felt as if something was inside me, trying to crawl free out of my throat. My windpipe felt compressed, and I would thrash about and try to come to my senses. When I would later awake again, though, the pain in my throat would still be present, as though the delusions were real.

I remained in this cycle through the winter, somehow. It was an arduous journey. I was blessed with the blankets and bedding that Zee had left me before he passed, though there were a few particularly frigid nights where I did have to burn some of the books to keep the fire going. I had accepted wearing clothes once more, to survive, though they felt like sandpaper against my body. Much of my days were spent bundled up, only hunting when I absolutely had to, and subsisting largely off the rations that I had been previously neglecting. There was something comforting, as I would peel open packages and dig into stale cereals or protein bars. It felt almost as if Zee knew this day was coming, and wanted me to survive. He'd given me almost entirely food that was made to last, like he'd wanted me to be stockpiling. Through his generosity and my own sickened feral state, I survived the winter.

The pain was peaking, though, and as the weather began to warm up, I was preparing to die. I knew it was coming. I frequently went with little to no sleep. The pain in my stomach was so intense, no position in bed would allow me rest. I knew I had contracted some sort of disease from the hunting, and I was merely waiting for it to claim me. It was my own fault, after all, for having made all these mistakes in the first place. Had I never been so stupid, had I never left Buck, or met King, or done anything that had happened, I wouldn't have been at the place I was at, doubled over one particular spring afternoon with saliva pouring from my mouth as I vomited up a grey, foul-smelling sludge onto the yard. I hadn't even hunted that day. In fact, I hadn't eaten in days, and it was that reality that made me aware I was very realistically living my last moments. The pain radiated up my spine, and as the pressure rang through my head it felt as if it was going to burst. I managed to crawl on all fours back into the house, wanting to at least die in my bed, even if that meant dying covered in my own excrement. I didn't want to die in the yard.

I sat on my knees, clutching my stomach when the next wave came. Bile poured like a river from my mouth before a sudden lurch would heave up a mouthful, bringing with a horrific feeling of something stuck in my throat, partially hanging out my mouth. I couldn't see it, but I could feel it, something noodly, slimy. I was choking on it, and though one hand went to pull on it, I found instincts had my other hand yanking bedding off the mattress and onto the floor. I had no idea why, as I was surely going to ruin it. As both hands took hold of the slime hanging from my mouth, my stomach thrust up again, and I expelled it entirely. It looked like some sort of organ lining, mucusy and slick. It was definitely organic, and as the pain shot through my abdomen I deduced it was part of my stomach. This fear was confirmed as the next regurgitation was all blood, pure crimson spitting out my mouth, chunks of something I couldn't properly inspect swimming in the red as it began to soak into the bedspread I had bundled up on the floor beside me.

The next heave was what I knew to be my last. Something physically shifted in me, a weight lifting from my abdomen upward, and I felt a tremendous pressure lodging itself in my throat, just below my collarbone. I couldn't breathe, though my body was still clenching and fighting to expel it. I was certain it was my stomach itself, dislodged from my body. My vision was blurry, and I thought in that moment about who would find me. I didn't want it to be Buck. I hoped it was someone who didn't know me. I could feel my stomach constricting to the shape of my esophagus as it pushed upward, the taste of blood sickeningly strong in my mouth. Amidst the chaos, there was so much running through my mind, and yet some of it was already accepting the reality of it all, more curious than afraid. I'd never thought myself to even live as long as I had, so to die of some strange disease alone in an abandoned house didn't seem all that absurd, especially in the face of everything else that had happened in the past few years. I had never heard of a disease where you regurgitate your organs, though.

I was just beginning to lose consciousness, I thought, when the weight of the organ shifted from the lower part of my throat to the upper, and I could feel it sliding from my maw. It all felt like a dream, a hallucination, some sort of preposterous scenario that could only be concocted by the mind. Here I was, expelling my organs out my mouth, and yet I felt very much still alive. In fact, the pain in my body had subsided, as I hung my head forward and watched as crimson and visceral purple hung out my mouth, heavy, swinging from my muzzle. I leaned forward, my lower body still sitting with knees splayed on the mattress as my palms pressed into bedding and I lowered my upper half to the piles of fabric I'd thrown to the floor. A guttural belch burst from my mouth and the organ was dislodged, falling from my muzzle with spit-strings of blood and flesh hanging off my teeth like streamers. I could see it, though my brain didn't seem to want to process it. Lying there, tinting the dirty fabrics dark red, was my stomach, full, thick with masses that shifted about beneath the layers of tissue. Everything I had eaten was sitting there, undigested, swimming about in lumps.

A thought slowly formed in my head, though. I hadn't eaten in days, and I'd been vomiting frequently. Nothing should've been in my stomach. Not only that, but I still felt oddly at ease, even somewhat comfortable. The pressure in my body was gone, and I felt as a weight had been lifted from me. I was in little pain, aside from a slight cramping in my abdomen and a raw feeling in my throat. More than that, I began to feel an intense hunger, something I shouldn't have been experiencing had I just lost one of my organs. Even more than the hunger, though, was something else, a creeping feeling that felt as if it's weightlessness floated it from the depths of my mind to the surface, to the most pressing issue. I needed to open whatever I'd just vomited. I slowly crawled off the bed entirely and sat on all fours over the organ, reaching down and nipping at it with my teeth, puncturing it and tugging back the flesh. Fluid began to ooze from it, murky fluid, and I chewed and consumed the flesh, strips at a time, as I began to free what was inside.

Squirming inside, very much alive, were five whelps. Their eyes were closed, their bodies slimy with the amniotic fluid, but they were all moving. No part of me questioned it, in that moment. I knew they were mine, and I knew I was to care for them. All the pain I'd been experiencing, all the endless agony and strange behavior, it had all lead to this moment, my eyes watery and curious, my mouth smiling for the first time in months. I was in a mental state unlike anything I'd experienced before, a state of tranquility, of satisfaction. My body was surprisingly still, no longer trembling, no longer feeling weak, and I consumed the rest of the sac before taking my place at rest in the blankets, in the bedding, on my side in a slightly curled shape, guiding my whelps to the nipples I'd developed entirely to feed them. They each found their place beside me, and I could feel them accepting the nourishment from my body that I'd been cluelessly developing the entire time. My eyes closed, my body curled just a bit more closed to protect them, and I drew a blanket over us. It felt as if everything that had had happened had been in preparation for this, my paternal crucible. There had been something inside me, all along, that I was trying so hard to avoid. I was sure it was death. I was sure it was something to defeat. All this time, life had been swimming in my stomach, begging me to care for it, and now here it was, physical, beside me, begging to be kept warm, needing me to love it.

And, I did.

I loved it.

I loved it so much.

---

It had been three months, and I'd dressed myself in the clothes I'd been wearing when I first arrived at the woods, making myself as presentable as possible to arrive at the desk where Zee had once sat. This time, though, it was daylight. This time, Zee wasn't there. It was a young woman who was filing papers when I entered the lobby, visibly dirty and disheveled enough to where she took note of me, and seemed a bit put off. I couldn't blame her, I could only imagine what a mess I was.

"My car broke down a few miles away, and my phone's dead. Can I make a call with yours really quick?" I asked. She gave me the expected apologies about my situation and said little else, sliding the corded phone from her side of the desk to mine. It was a different corded phone than the one Zee had had, and I knew I was to blame for that. I dialed the only person I thought could help, the person I least deserved to answer.

"Buck?"

"Nico?" he asked.

"I'm at the Motel 7 near the Yellow Bird Antiques. Can you...come get me? I wanna go home."

There was silence on the other end of the line. I knew he was upset.

"I have a lot more I wanna say, Buck," I began, "but i'm usin' a payphone and I gotta be brief. I'm a dad now, Buck. I wanna go home."

"You're a what?"

"I'd much rather you see it than tell you about it. Can you just come pick me up?"

Another pause would settle in, broken by a soft "I'll be there in twenty."

I hung up the phone and left the lobby, returning a bit into the woods, where I had hidden the children for a short while. Each swaddled in clothes and blankets I had fashioned from old bedding, all tucked well beneath leaves. I had been blessed that an early feeding and warm weather had them sleeping at the moment, and I sat with them and counted minutes until it was about time for Buck to arrive. Returning to the parking lot, I found him standing there, already waiting. He'd gotten there early, it seemed, and was looking for me. He saw me as I walked around the building, and met me just near the edge of the parking lot. He went to speak, but I had to interrupt him. I couldn't be away from them for but a moment.

"C'mere, I want you to meet them."

"Them?" Buck asked as I had already began to return to the woods, Buck following behind me.

"We'll talk when we get there, Buck, I--"

"Nico, this better not be more weird shit. I'm glad you're alive and all but I ain't going through any more--"

I turned and walked backwards as I flashed him a smile, the first smile he'd seen from me in years. I think it comforted him a bit, because he didn't finish his sentence. I brought him to where the kids were sleeping, all tucked up close to a tree, all bearing some resemblance to me. Buck would step up close beside me, his hands finding his hips in that nostalgic way, the way they always were when he'd stand on the porch and watch me leave from a good day together, smiling now like he would then.

"Five, huh? First time parent and y' had five kids?"

"I mean, I didn't even know I was gonna have one." I replied. He would turn his head to look at me, his ears tilting about curiously on his head as he asked "actually, uh...how did...how did you..."

"I'm still not entirely sure, but they came out my mouth, if that makes any more sense to you than it does to me."

We sat looking down at the pups, some of them beginning to stir from our conversation. Several of them were red, though some of them had a striking black fur, and they all tended to have some sort of marking to them. Two of them were skull-faced, and though Buck didn't remark on that. We both knew well who the other parent was. That didn't matter, though, to either of us. It never would.

"I...have a lot of apologizing I wanna do, Buck. Everything that happened, I just--" I began to speak, but Buck would cut me off.

"Later," he said, "we'll worry 'bout all'a that later. Let's go back to my place, get you washed up and changed. After that, we can go get some clean clothes for 'em."

"What about the new guy you're seein'? Won't he mind?" I asked.

"Mind? He loves kids. He'll be right tickled." Buck said, his teeth showing as he grinned at me. I couldn't help but grin back. The warmth of spring was soothing on the two of us, on my children, but warmer than that was the feeling that everything was going to be alright. Perhaps, I realized, I was never meant to be king of anything. Perhaps I was never meant to be anything more than the man I was. Perhaps the change I'd needed to make, all along, was simply to accept that everything was fine. It had always been fine, and everything that went wrong tended to come from me making something out of nothing. Much like King himself, the terrible things in my life only had as much power as I gave them. Letting them go, though, and letting them die, made me realize how much strength I had within myself to make right the things that had gone so horribly wrong.

I would always carry the results of my actions with me, as they were now waking up at my feet, but I would love them. I would love them because they were me, and they would always be with me. I would love them because I had made them, and because, through me, they could be something so brilliant, so incredible. My life had been forever changed, but there was something so awe-inspiring in realizing that. By running blindly from the path set before me, I had stumbled into a future in which the trail was yet to be blazed. I was not alone, though, nor had I ever been. I had only needed to see it, inside and outside of myself. As Buck helped me pick up the children and carry them to the truck, I thought about him, about my pups, and about my dad, my old friends, and the friends I was yet to make. Everything felt so uncertain, and yet it was so exciting. Tomorrow was a new day, and it would be nothing like the day before. The future, it seemed, was the wildest and most untamed of all things, and yet I couldn't wait to explore it.