EBRUARY

Love, Stella Randolph thinks, lying in her narrow virgin's bed, and through her window streams the cold blue light of a St. Valentine's Day full moon.

Oh love love love, love would be like

This year Stella Randolph, who runs the Tarker's Mills Set 'n Sew, has received twenty Valentines - one from Paul Newman, one from Robert Redford, one from John Travolta ... even one from Ace Frehley of the rock group Kiss. They stand open on the bureau across the room from her, illuminated in the moon's cold blue light. She sent them all to herself, this year as every year.

Love would be like a kiss at dawn ... or the last kiss, the real one, at the end of the Harlequin romance stories ... love would be like roses in twilight ...

They laugh at her in Tarker's Mills, yes, you bet. Small boys joke and snigger at her from behind their hands (and sometimes, if they are safe across the street and Constable Neary isn't around, they will chant Fatty-Fatty-Two-By-Four in their sweet, high mocking sopranos), but she knows about love, and about the moon. Her store is failing by inches, and she weighs too much, but now, on this night of dreams with the moon a bitter blue flood through frost-traced windows, it seems to her that love is still a possibility, love and the scent of summer as he comes ...

Love would be like the rough feel of a man's cheek, that rub and scratch

And suddenly there is a scratching at the window.

She starts up on her elbows, the coverlet falling away from her ample bosom. The moonlight has been blocked out by a dark shape-amorphous but clearly masculine, and she thinks: I am dreaming ... and in my dreams, I will let him come ... in my dreams I will let myself come. They use the word dirty, but the word is clean, the word is right; love would be like coming.

She rises, convinced that this is a dream, because there is a man crouched out there, a man she knows, a man she passes on the street nearly everyday. It is

(love love is coming, love has come)

But as her pudgy fingers fall on the cold sash of the window she sees it is not a man at all; it is an animal out there, a huge, shaggy wolf, his forepaws on the outer sill, his rear legs buried up to the haunches in the snowdrift which crouches against the west side of her house, here on the outskirts of town.

But it's Valentine's day and there will be love, she thinks; her eyes have deceived her even in her dream. It is a man, that man, and he is so wickedly handsome.

(wickedness yes love would be like wickedness)

and he has come this moon-decked night and he will take her. He will

She throws the window up and it is the blast of cold air billowing her filmy blue nightgown out behind that tells her that this is no dream. The man is gone and with a sensation like swooning she realizes he was never there. She takes a shuddering, groping step backward and the wolf leaps smoothly into her room and shakes itself, spraying a dreamy sugarpuff of snow in the darkness.

But love! Love is like ... is like ... like a scream

Too late she remembers Arnie Westrum, torn apart in the railroad shack to the west of town only a month before. Too late ...

The wolf pads toward her, yellow eyes gleaming with cool lust. Stella Randolph backs slowly toward her narrow virgin's bed until the back of her pudgy knees strike the frame and she collapses upon it.

Moonlight parts the beast's shaggy fur in a silvery streak.

On the bureau the Valentine cards shiver minutely in the breeze from the open window; one of them falls and seesaws lazily to the floor, cutting the air in big silent arcs.

The wolf puts its paw up on the bed, one on either side of her, and she can smell its breath ... hot, but somehow not unpleasant. Its yellow eyes stare into her.

"Lover," she whispers, and closes her eyes.

It falls upon her.

Love is like dying.