Mom. I don't understand

She’d been twenty-two when her mother had taken her into the woods and told that Grandmother’s stories hadn’t been myths. The bruises between her thighs hadn’t faded before the moon had filled. She’d run to her mother, scared of the cracking nails and the way her knuckles split. Her mother had held her close, kissed her forehead and said it was alright.

Then her mother had taken her to the woods, told her a twisted tail of women generations before them and the curse placed upon them. She’d slid the leather bracelet from her wrist– the one she always looked at with a lingering sadness – and placed it on her daughter’s.

That change inside her had slowed, and within a few breaths her splitting skin had sealed, with just thick trails of drying blood being the thing that remained. Her mother was gone a mere moment or two later. The change had taken her fast, splitting the beast from the aging women’s flesh. She had left those woods alive, leaving her mother forever to the trees and praying to never need return.

“Mom… I don’t…understand…” She was in the woods once more.

In her anxious state, she worked the leather bracelet, eyeing the girl before her. It was all too familiar a sight: the splitting of freckled skin, the cracking of knuckles, the gnarled teeth cutting their way through bleeding gums. She thought of herself at twenty-two, so young, so broken, and so scared by the explainable changes taking over her body. Her daughter was only fifteen when a man’s unwanted hands had triggered the curse.

She knelt down, running a hand through the course hair of the child before her. “Carrie, I know.”

She hadn’t wanted to be a mother, even before she knew of this curse. But when that house of drunken boys had ripped the innocence from her and had left behind what the Pregnancy Crisis Center had deemed ‘a blessing from God’ she’d known she wasn’t meant to be a mother. She had her despite.

“Mom!” The cries melted into the beginnings of a howl. Carrie was on her knees, jeans beginning to tear at the seams. Her breathing was heavy, her spine starting to tear through her flannel shirt. It wouldn’t take long for the beast to emerge.

Her thumb touched the clasp of the bracelet that so many women before them had been forced to bear. Passing it down would save her daughter life but would damn her to the woods in her daughter’s place. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t give up the bracelet nor her life.

“I’m sorry.” She stood, gripping the leather tight as she dashed for the waiting car. She was tearing down the dirt road before the change fully took her daughter. She hadn’t been meant to be a mother after all. She could never provide what her own mother had sacrificed.

“… Mom…” The howl rang through the night as a new wolf greeted the filled moon.