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Somewhere around 2006 I read an unusual and poignant short story written from the perspective of a female werewolf.

An American college professor goes on a trip to Eastern Europe and falls in love with a 14 year old. Turns out she is a werewolf. He is ok with that. A few days a month he enjoys the quite normal company of an energetic dog, the rest of the time he enjoys an enthusiastic young lover.

The protagonist/narrator makes a point of talking about how werewolves get a bad rap. Yeah, they can be trained to be vicious. Her, she was trained to chase thrown balls. She was a good dog. During her dog days they go on long walks in the woods together. During her human days, well, the term "sportfucking" coined by the author and used repeatedly in the early parts of the story stuck in my brain.

But remember that saying that one dog year is seven human years? Right. At the end of his sabbatical the professor goes back home with his young-but-not-scandalous 21 year old girlfriend. She slowly learns to navigate the nasty world of academic spouse politics.

He finds a vet who doesn't ask a whole lot of questions but who does suggest that there are people who would pay good money for pups out of his "dog." Nope.

Fast forward a year or two. The sex has mostly stopped. Instead of long walks in the woods she spends her dog days chained in the yard.

Then it happens -- he brings a younger prettier woman home. She hears him griping about how his girlfriend ran off and left him stuck with her dog.

(I think this is where she starts making plans to leave him, but it's tough without proper ID...)

The next month... He takes her to the vet for a check-up. Well, no. She hears him in the next room saying sadly to the vet that the dog bit his girlfriend and needs to be put down. She is terrified but unable to stop it.

(I seem to remember a blurb saying the story would leave you wondering just who was the monster.)

I'm pretty sure that the title of the story was the werewolf's full name, which could be broken into two short nicknames, one used for human and the other for dog/wolf. Perhaps the full name started with "Ges" and one of the short names was "Jess" or "Jessie".

I have checked all werewolf anthologies from that era, notably Otherwere (which I did read around the same time and do recommend based on fuzzy memory of enjoying it) but nothing I can find in reviews or listings seems like a match.

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    Please do not edit this post to remove direct quotes from the story and replace them with euphemisms, @johnp. I was not the only person to remember the exquisitely coined word "sportfucking" as a highlight of the story.
    – arp
    Commented May 18, 2018 at 21:47
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    If the term cannot be used on SE then I will edit the post to mention that there was a vivid term that cannot be used here, but putting quotes around a "milder" made up term that does not appear in the original story is completely unacceptable.
    – arp
    Commented May 18, 2018 at 21:50
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    I would have been happy to edit the answer but seeing myself credited with writing "the term 'sports sex' stuck in my brain" without even a hint that was not the original phrasing really rubbed me the wrong way. Just replacing the term with (crude term removed) would have worked a whole lot better.
    – arp
    Commented May 19, 2018 at 1:39
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    No need to include the answer in the question. It's also confusing to put in extra details once you know what the answer is - it actually makes the question look worse (or even look like it's asked in bad faith) to someone who doesn't check the revision history. "If you'd known all that detail in the beginning, how could you possibly not have known the correct answer?"
    – Rand al'Thor ♦
    Commented May 19, 2018 at 13:23
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    @arp Sorry for the confusion. Adding details as you remember them is good, yes, but what you were doing here is adding details after you'd found the book, at which point your question is already solved. And answers should point out where remembered details are wrong, yes, but edits to the question to fix such details would invalidate those parts of the answer. Maybe the confusion here is about the interaction between question and answer? You might just be overthinking it: you posted a question, got an answer, great, that's it :-)
    – Rand al'Thor ♦
    Commented May 19, 2018 at 14:29

1 Answer 1

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Gestella by Susan Palwick. I read it in Sisters of the Revolution by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

The story is exactly as you describe, and it's a chilling one. It ends:

The voice is sad, gentle, loving, and you want to follow it, but you fight every step, anyway, until Lily and her friend have to drag you past the cages of other dogs, who start barking and howling again, whose cries are pure terror, pure loss. You can hear cats grieving, somewhere else in the building, and you can smell the room at the end of the hall, the room to which you’re getting inexorably closer. You smell the man named Mark behind the door, and you smell medicine, and you smell the fear of the animals who’ve been taken to that room before you. But overpowering everything else is the worst smell, the smell that makes you bare your teeth in the muzzle and pull against the choke collar and scrabble again, helplessly, for a purchase you can’t get on the concrete floor: the pervasive, metallic stench of death.

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    Given the bibliography I didn't read it in 1995 but I do own at least one of the Starlight anthologies. I'm probably conflating it with the year I read Otherwere (which I can date pretty accurately via a social connection to one of the authors.) Accepted; I'll edit the question later.
    – arp
    Commented May 18, 2018 at 15:03
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    What prevented the werewolf from reverting back into a human?
    – RonJohn
    Commented May 18, 2018 at 16:50
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    Classic werewolves don't have control, they simply phase with the moon. And in this universe dead werewolves retain the form they died in.
    – arp
    Commented May 18, 2018 at 17:03
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    I just found this story on Google Books and read it. It's my new favorite piece of werewolf fiction. And @RonJohn in this story she has no control over her transformation, and is stuck in wolf form for about a week out of every month.
    – PlutoThePlanet
    Commented May 18, 2018 at 21:49
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    I assume that the unsympathetically portrayed human man is afraid of the consequences if the truth comes out. Alimony, immigration law, professional reputation... Tons of possible motives. And guys have been killing unwanted female companions for millennia, though not as often as they just kick them out. The original post did make it clear that she was in human form the majority of the time.
    – arp
    Commented May 18, 2018 at 23:01

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