The Nocturnal Rehearsals

The Nocturnal Rehearsals names the enchanted month in which Nightbitch's involuntary transformation into a dog becomes a chosen, deliberate practice—a vital part of her artistic practice, a development of her work, as she herself frames it. This period follows her discovery of the patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck, which she had first dismissed as a good-natured self-deprecating joke when she referred to herself as Nightbitch, only to find the joke turning physical and undeniable. What had begun as a source of bewilderment—her husband laughed when she told him she thought she was turning into a dog, and she did not—now becomes the raw material of a new identity, one she no longer resists but actively cultivates through the long nights of her weekend roaming.

The Transformation of the Home and the Beginning of Rehearsal

The rehearsals unfold against the backdrop of a domestic space that has itself begun to change. Nightbitch's house is a mid-century bungalow with odd angles, built by a builder who didn't know how to build, a place she had once convinced her husband they needed to live despite its questionable wiring and single bathroom. Now she is angered by the doors, all too narrow or too short, by corners that are not right angles, by a house that never feels clean no matter how much she scrubs. This same house, however, begins to show signs of her new life: when her husband returns from a week away for work, he finds the kitchen orderly and clean, the bathroom shady and smelling of bleach, the beds made and the carpets vacuumed, and beside their bed a new kennel, bedded down with a soft throw blanket and a down pillow from the bed. There are no dirty clothes on the floor, no wayward toys strewn about, as there usually are. The house has been prepared for a different kind of inhabitant, and the husband walks through it calling for his wife, asking where she is, unaware that she has already begun to disappear into the night.

The Practice of the Nightly Roam

At night, after her family is fast asleep, Nightbitch wanders the night-inked streets, moving through tidy garden beds on the corner lot and into a thicket of lilac bushes where she strips herself of her clothes and grows her hair long. She tests the strength of her elongating muscles, stretches and scratches, then burrows deeper into the thicket and out into side lawns and back lawns, under a swing set, between two loose boards hanging crooked in a fence. She sniffs at suspicious holes in the ground, sticks her head into the big ones, and comes out with grass hanging in her hair and dirt marking her face. She finds a leaky faucet dripping at the back of one house and laps from the puddle beneath it. When she spots a tabby cat crouched on a step near a screened-in porch door, she takes off in its direction with lightning speed; the tabby hisses and scrambles beneath the porch, and Nightbitch sticks what she can of her body beneath and growls low and hard, snarling at the cat to come closer, but the tabby will not budge, pushing itself deeper into the darkness with eyes flashing yellow-green in the moonlight.

The Artistic and Sensory Expansion

These weekend excursions are not mere escapes but rehearsals in the truest sense—a development of her work, a deepening of her artistic practice. She moves through the neighborhood following the dark constellations of shadow that tatted the yards and streets, visiting the soft patch of moss she likes to roll in, feeling its velvet softness on her naked back, her chest, her thighs. She traipses through flower gardens and sniffs each bud, then tastes the green twists of leaves and stems that seem most promising. She sprints to the elementary school ten blocks down to smell the playground equipment as she pants and huffs, to sniff the ground for stray pieces of chewed gum, candy wrappers, a bit of sandwich or candy bar, or to find a good ball for chewing. She continues on to the soccer field behind the school, where bunnies like to nibble on dandelion greens, and watches the small, twitching bodies in the moonlight, plotting her attack. The following weekend she sets out in the opposite direction, to the train tracks and creek where she had gone that first night, to find sleeping men on benches whom she passes by without fear, despite her nakedness, her vulnerability, because she does not feel vulnerable, not a bit. She rules this neighborhood, presides over it; she is its monster, its mistress, trusting the strength of her body and the depth of her rage, the rage now tempered by her vision, her singular direction deeper into the mystery and creation itself. She wades into the creek to wet her fur and muddy her underbelly, to drink the cold, clear water, to push her nose into the soggyrottensweet of the muddy banks.

The Return and the Husband's Devotion

It becomes habit, after her weekend traipses during that enchanted month, for Nightbitch to return to their quiet home in the cul-de-sac in the late-night or early-morning hours, to stand at the back French doors and watch her husband splashed in the blue glow of his computer. She taps lightly on the window, and he lets her in, then leads her to the bathroom as he would a child, to turn on the hot water, light a candle, peel off his clothes, and wordlessly help her into the shower. He washes her body with soap and a cloth, cleaning her face, her breasts, in between her legs. He washes her hair, massaging the mud from her scalp, then slowly working a comb through the tangles with conditioner. She tells him he is a prince, and he says Shhh, shhh, and kisses her back, her shoulders, her eyelids, her mouth. They make love each night after she returns, after he cleans her, after she has wandered so long and far that her muscles ache and her bare feet are raw and riddled with splinters and she is all over covered with dirt and sweat and the sweet midnight dew of deep summer. What a husband, to love her through such a thing.

The Culmination and the Turn Toward the World

The month of rehearsals ends on a Monday, as summer makes her final overtures on fine September days with a heat that still inspires trips to the ice cream stand by the river. Nightbitch and the boy go to the dog park, although they don't have a dog—one of the last perfect days to run beneath a blue sky and taste the sun-sweetened wind. This outing marks the transition from the private, nocturnal practice of her transformation to its public emergence, the moment when the skills and identity she has cultivated in the dark begin to move into the light of the everyday world. The rehearsals have served their purpose: they have converted her earlier confusion and shame—the sense that society, adulthood, marriage, and motherhood were masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there—into a source of power and direction. They have also connected her to a deeper lineage, recalling the skills she gathered during her quiet Appalachian upbringing, the knowledge of how to keep bees, dip candles, brush wool, use a spinning wheel and make yarn, dry onions and garlic, develop photographs with vegetable juices, bake absolutely anything, make every single sort of braid, sing every single sort of song, track an animal through the woods. The rehearsals are the bridge between that forgotten inheritance and the monstrous, magnificent future she is about to claim.