Predatory

A wolf ate my hands. It should have been a Bengal tiger but was colored and sleek like a pit bull.
I later felt a stirring for the man responsible and only realized who he was in a flash upon recognizing we shared scars crisscrossing our wrists—mine interrupted, his flowering into solid, square fingers.
The metal mesh of the cage I was trapped in heated in the explosion of the helicopter that was sent for a suicide mission to assuage those wolfheaded pit tigers I had gone to teach tenderness. It was sent to ‘save me’ but left heats, debris, vicious sacks of fur leaking, viscous.
In another version, I left a brief blood trail on the way to the cage from an amputated toe that never healed. I had sacrificed it to save the heart of the baby I was carrying as a surrogate. When I did the man I loved knew I loved too much and shook his head as he walked away.