The Howling Girl by MariJean Wegert

There is a girl inside my house and she is howling for love. She is howling because she does not yet believe she will be tended; she is howling because she’s never met someone who did.

This knowledge comes with patience and this knowledge comes with time. 

I used to hate her howling; I used to keep her in the attic, and I used to shut the door and put on a big wolf grin for my guests, “ignore the crying; she needs to learn to be quiet,” I would say. 

But the howling grew louder, and my wolf grin grew into a wolf. The thing you grow into when you starve the small and powerless thing within your own house.

I will not allow a wolf in my own house so I will set a place for her at my table, I will wash clean sheets for my best guest bedroom and hang lace curtains from the windows and I will open them to the breeze. I will set teacups at her bedside and fill baskets with fresh flowers. I will make orange almond cake and set it on the hutch with a sprig of rosemary; I will put handmade quilts on her bed. I will take her out after dark to see the stars. I will pack picnic baskets full of worthy feasts.  I will sing her to sleep with the songs of my ancestors. I will let her write her own. 

She is small and frightened, and wakes within the night, demands food at odd hours; wants to be held while she trembles. Often, she is ugly in her grief. It is not for sympathy—it is for survival. She is not crying for you. 

If I invite you inside my house, I will watch how you speak to this ugly howling girl. 

If you cannot let her live here, in my house, and bring her a small but earnest gift as a true and invited guest, you will not be invited back. Gift for the host, gift for the household—and she is part of the household. 

If you cannot sit in my kitchen while I excuse myself to tend her, then this house was not made with arms to welcome you. If you clap your hands over your ears and demand her exile to the dark rooms beneath the roof, you will be shown the front door.

Because we all have a howling orphan within us. And the way you treat this orphan is the way you will treat your own. And the untended orphan is the one who grows like a shadow into the shape of her hunger—the silenced orphan is the one who grows into a hungry shadow, prowling the kitchen at night, breaking the porcelain and raiding the cupboard. We wake to broken windows. 

What’s more—what’s worse— is that if you are not careful, you will grow into the shape of her nightmare, too. The long shadows of her fear come true. The guest, the ghost, the theft. She knows by the bones in her body the truth. She can smell the skeletons in your closet, dead from neglect, from despair. 

We can so easily become the nightmare that wakes them with sharpened teeth. We can so easily become the monster in their hall, haunting their sleep. We can become the reason they howl.

We are being dreamed, as well as dreaming, and how we tend the small powerless thing in our houses becomes the shape of our souls in their dreams.

I know her nightmares well. I was one of them. You could be too.

So if you visit my house, invited to the feast I spread, the gift of my spacious rooms and my dear company, know that I am allies with my orphan now —I trust her knowing as she trusts my tending. Then I will invite what’s crouched in the corners of your house to my table as well. There is room for all of us.

“Howling Girl” art by Adriana Maxwell