Nocturnesque Chapter 1



by Jeff Lewis (aka The Werewolf!) © 1985


My mother has always told me to get married. Thinking about it, I think the first time she told me that was when I was nine. I thought she was dumb but of course I was young and cocky.

I live the usual day to day existence that most people do these days. I look at the women a bit with desire, mostly with a kind of fear. Oh, not so much a fear of the person (that's the best way to think of a woman, as a person) but a fear of how to deal with them.

I've noticed that as this decade wears on, people are getting very weird. People don't like people very much anymore. They make a lot of noise and seem to be drunk all the time or stoned.

I've heard all the lines about how drugs make you more creative and how they relax you and how they make you better able to cope, but from what I've seen, alcohol gives most people a license to be jerks and drugs turns most people into walking manniquins. Talking to a person who's high is like talking on a very bad connection. You have to repeat yourself alot and then you're never sure if the other party is really there.

I guess deep down I don't like people myself. Hey, why be different?

My parents still live around here and I visit them from time to time but while I love them, we don't see much of each other. I prefer it that way. My parents are the kind of people I'd probably not like very much if they weren't my parents.

Oh, they're not bad people. They mow their lawn and raise their kids well and curb their dogs but for the most part they're rather boring people and we share almost nothing in common other than chromosomes.

They've been married for all their life or at least 26 years. They threaten to split up at least once a year, kind of an anti-anniversary and then they make up and life goes on. I can't imagine them together, they don't really have that much in common, but then I can't imagine them apart, they seem like a matched set.

People tend to grow together with time.

As for me, I mentioned earier how women unnerve me. It's true. I don't think it's my fault either. After all, it used to be simple. Women were women and men were men. Men went out and found women and they got married.

Not any more! Don't get me wrong. I'm not against womens equality, but I've just learnt the rules for Monopoly and now we're playing Parchesi. Actually, it's worse than that because nobody's got the rules figured out yet.

That's what makes it so unnerving. I don't know what to say or do without offending and then I end up not saying anything to someone who wouldn't be offended and then I screw up both ways.

There are times I wish I could just get away from all of this. You know, become a trapper up north or a hermit or maybe a forest ranger, but I know deep down I couldn't live away from the city.

There's a kind of energy in the city that keeps you moving. There's never night in the city, it's always alive. Maybe I'm afraid of the dark.



I'm told that life for a girl on the prairies is dull. Don't believe that, I had a great life and a very close family. My parents married late in life after living together for a while. Pretty risque stuff back then. They both grew up in the same town, not far from where they live now.

Our town was originally founded by some Welsh settlers in the late 1700's who wanted a quiet isolated area of country to run small community farms. Sort of like a large town sized kibbutz. Everybody shares around here and there's a charge in the air that keeps you happy.

We owned our own farm area and contributed to the town stores like everybody else and everything was pretty good. As I grew up, I went to the local school and ran with the other kids.

We'd hunt and chase and have a great time.

As I entered puberty I learnt about the birds and bees and as my gang grew into young adulthood, we added some very exciting games to our repetoire.

We all had our little tricks and this made our games all the more exciting. Our poor teacher, a local, would have misery when the younger children would do it involuntarily as a reflex when she tried to discipline them.

The town reverend was presbyterian. He seemed to take it all in stride. I found out from my mother that he was one of our people. I'd read all the old books about my kind of people and had come to the conclusion that the church thought we were evil. I didn't feel evil. I've never hurt anyone in my life (except of course for Stevie Walker once because he kept punching me). Even when I hunt I try not to hurt the animals too much.

It was a great town. We had a really neat mix of people from all over the world. When they heard of our town they slowly came over and joined us. In a sense they were minority groups, but we never really made any distinctions. Couples mixed every which way would walk the board walks at night. We even had a few gay types. Nobody minded.

From time to time people would come to our town who weren't one of us and then the town had to be on its best behaviour. No outsider ever stayed too long. If they did, they would eventually find out about us, but by then, if they still were there, we'd just take them in, give them the gift and then they'd be one of us.

We've never had any complaints.

As I grew older though I started to feel a bit apart from my friends. It was assumed that I'd find a mate amoung the townsfolk but as usual it was my ever wise mother who told me to go where my heart lead.

She said every heart has a match. Usually souls are born close so you can find each other, but from time to time souls get lost.



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