The Howl by Hana Rehman

The Howl 

V 

Okay. Let’s try this out. 

One: The dark wood texture of the tall-backed waiting room bench that wraps around the wall. I’m alone on this side, but there’s a twin bench on the far wall with two older women in it, huddled close. They could be friends, or lovers, or sisters, I’m not sure. They talk in hushed voices that I politely try not to make out. In their large, black parkas, they blend together to form one dark mass. 

Two: The melted snow from my boots, now a little puddle on the tile floor. How long has it been? I check my phone and ignore the nine new texts from Bee. 10 am. I’ve been sitting here for two hours with no news. But I’m getting off track. I’m supposed to list five things I can see. 

Three: The fake candle on the receptionist’s desk. A sign behind it reads: IF THIS CANDLE IS LIT, SOMEONE IS SAYING GOODBYE TO THEIR BELOVED PET. PLEASE SPEAK SOFTLY AND WITH RESPECT DURING THIS TIME. THANK YOU FOR YOUR KINDNESS AND COMPASSION. A tall woman emerges from The Back, her face pale. She shuffles to the receptionist’s desk, where the receptionist talks at her in a hushed, practiced tone, and switches on the fake candle. The tall woman seems to come out of a daze and starts to quietly sob. The receptionist holds out her hand, and between sobs, the tall woman hands over her credit card. 

Four: An old Chihuahua on the end of a leash, plopped down on the middle of the floor. He belongs to one of the huddled parka women, but it’s hard to say which woman the leash is connected to. The Chihuahua breathes in labored heaves and his eyes bulge in my direction, but I can’t tell if anything is actually wrong with him. 

Five: Pumpkin’s bright blue leash sitting limp in my hands. It’s made of a heavy-duty braided polyester rope. One of Bee’s many parting gifts for my move to Chicago. None of which I deserve. The vet tech told me to keep it before they took Pumpkin to The Back. There it is again: my heart swelling, chest corkscrewing tight. It’s hard to breathe. He’s going to be okay, I tell myself but don’t believe. I feel worse than when I started. I’m not entirely sure if I’m doing this right. 

IV 

I struggle to remember which list is next: four things you can hear or four things you can feel. I want to at least give it a shot and do the exercise how David told me to. I decide to go with four things I can hear, because the noise is getting hard to ignore. This list will be the easiest. The waiting room is full of howls. 

One: The first is a dog’s howl echoing from somewhere in The Back. My mind has already run wild imagining all the possible horrors or banalities that could be happening to Pumpkin behind that door. In these two hours, I have already planned his funeral and celebrated his return, each a hundred times over. The cry is long, panicked, and pained, and has been going on for nearly thirty minutes. 

But—is it really pained, or am I imagining that? I don’t think the sound is Pumpkin, but I can’t be sure. He’s only a year old. I’ve never heard him howl before. With each passing minute, it gets harder to stay calm. It feels like one of those rollercoaster chest harnesses has locked down too tight over me and my lungs don’t have room to fill with air. Hey, I tell myself. You don’t know how much longer you have to sit here and wait, so get it together. You’re supposed to be getting grounded. Come on. Let’s get back on track. 

Two. Okay. Two. The second howl is the blizzard. A white void rages against the door. Every so often, someone forces the door open to pick up a medication or drop off a cat carrier with a disgruntled passenger inside, letting in bone-cold wind and snow dust that barges through as if the storm’s entire goal is to get into this one room. Routinely, the receptionist grabs hold of her wildly flapping papers, and the huddling women in the corner press closer until the door falls shut and the storm protests against the walls of the veterinary clinic once again. It’s gotten bad since I got here. A weatherman on the low-volume TV perched in the corner says something like poor visibility—dangerous travel—intensity picking up.

Three. After she signs a receipt, the tall woman at reception stops sobbing. Then she starts to howl, too. 

All my muscles tense. It seems impossible, the amount of noise that’s coming from her. Her sobs are long, unbreaking, one blending into the next—heart-crunching, thought-annihilating. It’s a million times worse than the dog’s. She’s unleashing her own storm from inside her body. The huddling women in the corner turn to look. The receptionist’s face falls into sincere but well-used worry lines. Even the dog in The Back falls silent. Still crying, the woman drags herself to the door, lets the snow blow inside, and melts out into the storm. Something about the silence she leaves behind is even more gut-wrenching than her wails. 

If they call me into a room, at any minute, and tell me Pumpkin is gone, will I sound like that? Am I even capable? 

Bee made a sound like a howl once, the morning Grandad didn’t wake up. Just one short, punctuated cry. After, we fell into a shared, silent shock for what felt like months. We couldn’t comprehend that it would just be the two of us from now on. There were suddenly things I could not tell her. Like how all the energy left my body in my last year of college. How the grades plummeted and I couldn’t bring myself to care. How I didn’t get the software engineering degree or walk at graduation but bought the cap and gown for photos anyway, unable to bear her finding out. And how the small tech firm that hired me in Chicago hadn’t done enough due diligence to check. 

Another reason I couldn’t tell her: I knew she was suffering more than she let on, because that’s when her bad feelings, her “predictions,” started. 

At first, I am filled with rage for the sobbing woman. How could they have let her dog—or cat, I suppose—die? Then I turn to despair. Is this even a good vet? I didn’t have time to look up reviews as I usually would. After Pumpkin vomited for the sixth time in a row this morning and I thought I saw flecks of blood, I rushed to the closest clinic open for emergencies on a Sunday morning. There weren’t a lot of options. Oh God… No. I’m getting off track again. I’m so bad at this. 

Four. This one isn’t a howl. It’s my ringtone. 

“Gena? Have you started preparing for the blizzard?” As usual, my grandmother’s voice is near breaking. “I’ve been watching the news all day, and I’ve had a horrible feeling about it. I think it’s going to be bad. Real bad.” 

I have not told her about Pumpkin or where I am right now. “I live right next to Jewel-Osco, Bee. I’ll be fine.”

“Start stockpiling,” she says. “Toilet paper and canned food. Water, especially. Load up on water. You don’t know how long you’ll be snowed in. Oh, I have a bad feeling about it.” 

“You just saw the forecast on TV, Bee.” 

“I’m never wrong about these things.”

“It’s not like in the South,” I say. “People here are used to blizzards.” 

“Whatever you do, don’t drive. Oh, I’m predicting it’s going to be bad.” 

Though I try not to show it over the phone, the mention of driving makes my breath hitch again. I hadn’t even thought about getting home. My car will be buried by now. So will the highway. And there it is again, but worse. Breath coming quicker. Heart threatening to break out of my chest. Maybe I tell her where I am, about Pumpkin. Or the diploma that she helped pay for me not to get. Bee is still talking, but I hang up. 

III 

David said my anxiety makes me constantly live in possible futures. I haven’t told him about the diploma, but I did tell him about the sweaty trembling that makes the monitor blur out of focus at my new job. At our first session, he taught me how to make the lists to bring me back to my body in the current moment. 54321. But I don’t think this is working. 

I never considered therapy before I moved north. I was leaving Bee, who raised me, whom I didn’t know life without. I knew no one in this strange new snow-veiled city. But I thought I’d be fine because I wasn’t alone. I had Pumpkin. 

Okay. Okay. Get back on track. At least try. Three things I can feel. 

One: The gummy, gnawed edges of Pumpkin’s leash as I rub it between my fingers. Does that count? I already used the leash for the first list. Pumpkin chewed on everything when I first got him. The polite-looking lab mix in the shelter turned out to be a whirlwind of teeth and energy at home. That was back when I was still in Georgia and snowstorms were just things we flipped past on TV. Bee would give me a skeptical look each time Pumpkin tore a new leash in two. “I told you a puppy is too much to handle,” she said. “And right before you drive all the way up there…are you sure you don’t want to stay until he’s more manageable? Another job offer will come around. I predict it will.” 

But probably one that would check whether I had officially graduated with the bachelor’s required for the position. 

I nestled Pumpkin in the back of my car and drove two days north. I do all the puppy research, buy him expensive organic food, walk him in the snow, and give him three hours of playtime when I get home from work. Every night, we collapse on the couch in my tiny apartment, worn out, surrounded by half-emptied moving boxes, Pumpkin’s scruffy orange head on my lap with his tongue lolling to the side. My heart melts for him. But at the same time, ever since the move, Bee’s words have weighed on me. I’ve been haunted by the thought that she was right, that I can’t handle him, that something terrible is going to happen because I thought I could. 

Scratching Pumpkin’s ears, I scour the internet for stories of people who have gotten away with what I’d done. On bad days, I find accounts from people who are hired with fake degrees only to be found out several weeks into the job and fired. On those days I am certain that before my probationary period is up, I will be caught. I brace myself for having to go back to Bee, facing her worries and disappointment tenfold. On good days, I find stories of people who are never found out and live their whole lives with no one ever knowing. Those days, I figure the bachelor’s is just a piece of paper anyway. Maybe I can finish the degree on my own time. For now, I can get away with it. I’m still slow and shaky and my code is sloppy, but I’m getting better. If I do a fine enough job for long enough, the lie will cease to matter. 

Friday was a good day. My manager, sensing my persistent baseline nervousness, had been encouraging me to do something for my mental health. After work, instead of going straight home to let out Pumpkin, I met my coworkers at a bar and had three more drinks than I meant to. I thought Pumpkin would be okay for one night without me. 

I stumbled home late to the explosion of an open pantry, torn chip bags, ripped pillows, and chewed blankets. When I woke to a pounding head and Pumpkin’s retches the next morning, the dread fell over me like a familiar, jasmine-scented blanket. When the vomiting continued into Saturday night, it felt like a terrible prophecy coming true. 

The invisible harness tightens over my chest again. You should have gone straight home. Should have, should have. Pumpkin wouldn’t be in here if you did. Shouldn’t have gotten a dog in the first place. You don’t know what you’re doing. He’d be better off with someone else. Your fault. Your fault. You should not have taken this job. You should have come clean about the diploma. You should not have hung up on Bee. 

Enough. I grit my teeth. Get back to the list. 

Two. A tiny weight on my boot. A little paw—it’s the Chihuahua. He’s waddled up to me with the end of his leash trailing on the floor behind him. The huddling parka women are so absorbed in their conversation that they’ve dropped his leash and haven’t noticed. I give him a good head scratch, and it feels nice, his little triangle ears like pieces of felt between my fingers. 

I tune in to the huddling women, wondering how they haven’t noticed their Chihuahua has wandered across the room. They look like they’re both around sixty. I realize they are not huddling as if against the cold like I thought. It’s more like they’re cuddling up on a couch, swaddled in their parkas. Like they meet here every Sunday. A cup of hot cocoa in each hand wouldn’t be out of place. Then they tremble, and I think for a moment they are crying, perhaps in solidarity with the departed howling woman—but no. They’re laughing. It’s some private joke, nothing to do with her. I let myself stare. 

What am I on, three? I don’t know what I feel anymore. I feel the opposite of grounded. I’m untethered in some strange space I can’t define. Crying and laughter don’t make sense to me so close together. I do not know what energy to participate in. Everything feels absurd. Forget the exercise. I want to yell at David that it’s impossible to be grounded in a place like this. The blizzard rattles against the door. 

“My mom loved that terrier, but he kept killing her chickens,” one of the old women says cheerfully, pulling her foot up on the bench to get comfier. “It was an endless cycle. She’d yell at him for killing the chicken and then she’d cry over the chicken and then she’d cry because she yelled at him for killing the chicken.” The other one laughs. “He was a great dog though. It was just his chicken-killing instinct. That’s the only thing.” 

I take a deep breath. 

At our first session, David had asked what my anxiety feels like. 

“It feels like I am doomed to mess up,” I said. It was true. Every decision I make is a pressed detonator, and I’m just waiting for each bomb to go off. Pumpkin. Lying about the degree. Going out for the night. Taking a job I’m unqualified for on the other side of the country. Leaving Bee alone by herself. Driving home in a blizzard. 

I get up, grab the Chihuahua’s leash, and cross the room to the cuddling women.

“Oh! Thank you.” One of them takes the leash from me. “We’re just waiting on his test results. They told us to go home, but we stayed to wait out the storm. Doesn’t look like that’s going to happen though.” She nods at the Chihuahua. “They keep us on their toes, don’t they?” 

“My new puppy’s going to give me a heart attack,” I blurt out. “I’m convinced he’s about to keel over at any moment.” 

Bee would probably never speak to these women. She would also think it gauche to joke about death in any sort of hospital. 

The women laugh. I wonder if they are amused by the slight drawl in my voice. “You’ll stop worrying after a while,” one of them tells me. “I like to pretend I’m somewhere else entirely. What if you were waiting for your pup at a train station?” She points to the door leading to The Back. “What if you were waiting for him to get off the elevator and meet you in the lobby of a fancy hotel?” 

I am not sure what to say to this. I smile at her politely. When it seems like she isn’t going to say anything else, I return to my seat on the other side of the room. Strangely, I feel somewhat better. I’ve done the opposite of what Bee would have done. It’s energizing. 

Alright, okay. Maybe I can do this. What’s the next one? Smell. 

II 

One. Dog pee, definitely. Emitting from somewhere in The Back. Hundreds of dogs must have peed back there, the stench mixed with so many years’ worth of blood and shit and slobber and pus that no amount of cleaning could ever make this place smell normal again. When I first got Pumpkin, he peed everywhere. He absolutely refused to be potty trained. Each accident was accompanied by a “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Oh, I just have a bad feeling about this,” as I scrubbed deep into the fibers of Bee’s old carpet. 

Two. The scarf Bee knitted me still smells like my entire life up until the move. Her jasmine perfume. The scarf was another parting gift. She was so worried I wouldn’t have enough warm clothes. “People freeze to death up there. I don’t know what you’re going to do with that little dog when it’s snowing. I just have a bad feeling about this,” she said. “You moving. Something awful is going to happen. I’m predicting it. I’m never wrong.” 

Bee should probably also be in therapy. 

A smile tugs at my face. They are like two worlds that I cannot see colliding, Bee and therapy. She would never, in a million years, entertain the idea. The thought of Bee going through grounding exercises with David is so obviously serious yet so painfully improbable that I can’t help myself. I laugh. 

Both the cuddling women and the receptionist give me a look. I must look crazy, bursting out in laughter at nothing. I can’t help it. The huddling women are on to something. It feels good to laugh. It feels wrong, and painful, and necessary, and absurd. Maybe I am losing it. 

The cuddling women are called to reception, and they receive some papers and a little plastic bag with pawprints on it, and they leave. “We’re gonna chance it,” they tell me, winking into the storm. 

Just me now. It’s extremely quiet. I think, what if this isn’t a waiting room full of chaotic energy but a little ecosystem? Dogs filtering in and out of The Back, some to die, some to be saved. People filtering in and out, a coin toss whether you’ll emerge laughing or wailing. I begin to think of this as an unchangeable fact of this room, not anything I could have prevented or predicted or controlled. In and out, the wailing, the blizzard, the laughing, the dogs, it’s all blending into one big howl now, a white noise that is, in its own way, soothing. A vet tech materializes from The Back. “Gena? For Pumpkin?” 

I 

One more. One thing I can taste. I think I’ve failed the grounding exercise, or maybe it’s outlived its purpose, but I feel the need to see it through. I follow the vet tech into The Back, which turns out to be a hallway. On the way in, I pass the candle on the reception desk. I pay attention to the dim light, still switched on, not the words behind it. I watch how it fake-flickers in the imitation of a flame. 

I close my eyes. One thing I can taste. This question is really just what did you eat last and how long ago did you brush your teeth? The inside of my mouth is like plastic. I didn’t eat or brush my teeth before we rushed out of the apartment this morning. That feels like a hundred years ago. 

The vet tech brings me into another room, and then she brings me Pumpkin. His tail wags and his tongue lolls to the side and I collapse into him, clinging so tight I could break him. The vet appears and says things like pancreatitis, we think and just happens sometimes and special low-fat diet. Then she says, in perfect clarity, “He’s going to be alright,” and I squeeze Pumpkin’s big, dumb face even tighter. He looks like he has no idea anything was wrong, like The Back was actually a pretty good time. I sign some papers and clasp his leash back on and together, we emerge into the storm. 

The whole world outside is white. There’s no delineation between road and parking lot, ground and sky. It all bleeds together.

I scrape snow off the car and lift Pumpkin into the back seat. I crank up the heat as he pants excitedly. We breathe clouds and fog up the windows and look at the lack of a world outside. Georgia could only dream of losing itself like this. I squint to make out cars pulled over on the side of the road, cars sliding across what used to be lanes. My gloved hands shake on the wheel. I do not know if I can get us safely out of this parking lot. I do not know how to make it to work tomorrow. Faint lights flash through all the white and I think, maybe, it’s a snowplow approaching on the distant highway. But before I do anything, I take out my phone. “Hey Bee. Sorry I hung up earlier. Yes, everything’s okay. Yes, I’m at the grocery store. No, I’m not worried about getting home.”

Hana Rehman is a writer from Georgia living in Richmond, Virginia. She received her MFA in fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Fellow, helping administer an annual prize for debut novelists. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Blue Mesa Review and Moon City Review.

26 June 2026