There was once a wolf named Chima, who was born under a great name and into a small body, and never managed to get the two to agree.
His great-great-great-grandfather was Isaac Greaves, called the Bellows, and everybody knew that name, though nobody had met him. Isaac had gone to three houses in one afternoon and blown two of them flat, and for this he had been written into a book that children read before sleeping. There are nine editions of it now. Chima had seen them on a single shelf at the library, ninety years of them side by side — the flat gouache one from the fifties, the lift-the-flap, the one with the rounded lettering they sell at the checkout — and in every single illustration his great-great-great-grandfather is enormous.
In the book he is not given a childhood. He is not given a reason. He arrives at the door already hungry, and the story requires nothing else of him.
Chima had grown up beneath that book the way a sapling grows beneath a barn.
In the fall the school did a unit on local folklore, and they put it on the big screen in the gymnasium, four meters wide, the wolf at the door with his cheeks full. Chima looked at the seat in front of him. Some of the ones behind him laughed, and some of them went very quiet, and he could never decide which was worse.
Walking home from work in the mornings he would see somebody on the path ahead of him slow her step to let him pass, so that she would not have to have him behind her. This happened to him at five foot four and a hundred and twenty pounds, in a cream fleece one-piece that came down over his hands, with a little bell at his throat. It did not seem to matter what she was actually looking at. And he understood her, and he hated that he understood her, and he crossed the road anyway, every time, for the rest of his life.
That is the first thing to know about Chima. He was not accused of anything. He was simply expected, and there is no way to prove an expectation wrong — least of all at sixteen, and least of all when you could not blow out the candles on your own cake in one go.