Excerpt from History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When I was six or seven, my mom sat me down in the bath basin in my underwear. It was midmorning, midsummer. A shaft of light caught her face. She dribbled water on my head from a measuring cup. "I wish I believed in this shit," she told me.

"What's supposed to happen?" I shivered.

"Good question," she said. "You're a new pot of rice, baby. I'm starting you all over from scratch."


I didn't want to go home the night Mr. Grierson dropped me off. I thought—with pleasure, feeling a necklace of hooks in my throat as I swallowed—how I might break through the brittle lake ice and just go down. My parents wouldn't worry for a long time, maybe not till morning. My mother nodded off each night sewing quilts for prison inmates. My dad spent his evenings scavenging wood from the cleared property that was for sale across the lake. I never even knew for sure if they were my real parents, or if they were simply the people who stayed around after everyone else went back to college or office jobs in the Twin Cities. They were more like stepsiblings than parents, though they were good to me, always—which was worse than anything in a way. Worse than buying cereal with dimes and quarters, worse than accepting hand-me-downs from neighbors, worse than being called Commie, Freak. My dad hung a swing when I was ten from a giant cottonwood; my mom cut cockleburs from my hair. Even so, the night Mr. Grierson dropped me off, I kept thinking, viciously, waiting for my body to plunge through ice: There goes the rice, Mom. There goes the whole pot.

After I went to community college and dropped out, after I had been temping in the Cities for some time, I found a national database online into which you could type any sex offender's name and track them around the country. You can watch someone's little red trail on a map of each state as they go from city to city, as they go from Arkansas to Montana, as they search for bad apartments, as they enter prison and come out again. You can watch them try to give new names and get called out, a flurry of angry posts erupting online every time this happens. You can watch the moral indignation. You can watch them try again. You can follow them to southern Florida, to the marshes, where, among the mangroves, they set up a little out-of-the-way antique shop, selling whatever, selling junk. Hawking rusty lanterns and stuffed ducks, fake shark teeth, cheap gold earrings. You can see everything they sell because people update their posts and give all the details. There are so many people watching. People are updating all the time. "Should I buy a map from a convicted sex offender?" people write, and it seems an ethically ambiguous question. "Don't I have a constitutional right to tell him I don't want him here, selling his postcards at half price?" People write, "Don't I have a right to tell him to his fucking face?" People write, "Who does he think he is?"

Excerpted from History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund. Copyright © 2017 by Emily Fridlund. Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Monthly Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.