St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

The titular story in the collection is narrated by Claudette, who is the daughter of a pair of werewolves. She and her siblings are human, as lycanthropy skips a generation.

A group of nuns, who want to civilize the girls, take Claudette and her sisters to St. Lucy’s. When they first arrive, they act like wolves, destroying their rooms and marking the shared bedroom with urine. The pack of 15 sisters is “hirsute and sinewy and mostly brunette. We had terrible posture. We went knuckling along the wooden floor on the calloused pads of our fists, baring row after row of tiny, wood-rotted teeth” (226).

Sister Josephine, the head nun, advises Sister Maria de la Guardia to be patient, as the girls at St. Lucy’s are wilder than at other homes.

Claudette explains that, as werewolves, humans and wolves alike ostracized her parents, so they lived in caves near the forest’s edge. They had eagerly accepted the nuns’ offer to civilize their children and make them bilingual. However, neither the parents nor the children realized this would be a permanent move.

On their first day, the nuns allow the pack to run around the grounds, acting wolfish. This is Stage 1 of the process.