Hark!
The sharp, golden catch of a sturdy, good latch, now
Caroling! Clicking! Clinking!
The snick of the lock, brass tick of the clock, in
Sweet-toned Silence Sinking!
The hours have dragged, as you boasted and bragged, with
Tittering! Tottering! Tinking!
The door caught your heel, you slippery eel, I’m
Jumping! Jigging! Jinking!
O! freedom is mine, you long-winded kine, we’re
Dancing!
Daddling!
Drinking!
Hark!
She’s coming on back, right up our own track! Quick!
Hurrying! Hiding! Hinking*!
*as in, running for the hills
You’re beautiful, with your creamy, freckled skin, your red-gold hair spilling like a flame across the pillow, your eyelashes curling and thick against your cheeks, rosy with sleep. I try not to wake you as I slip out of the sheets, gather up my pillow and a quilt before treading softly to the door. I turn back, gazing on a vision of perfection, reluctant to leave. Your rosy mouth, parted slightly, is so kissable, curving in a faint, crooked smile, brought on by some pleasant dream. I hesitate on the threshold, my whole being swelling, brimming with adoration and love, and awe. Awe that you’re mine— my wife, my love, my soul. Then the parted lips twitch, and the room fills with the rasp of a thousand creaking saws as you inhale deeply, still lost in the deep blue currents of slumber. With a chuckle, I withdraw, gently closing the door behind me with a click as I pad to the couch to sleep until, in a few hours time, our kids come and pounce on me, demanding what, on this fine morning, their dad will make them for breakfast. Because mum’s still snoring.
There was another thud and a muffled grunt from the wall. Cedric. Hopefully, I wouldn’t have to patch another hole in the wall. The little weasel. Correction: Giant weasel.
My name is Jenny, and my best friend is roughly 6’9”, rather furry, but good natured, and, if you don’t mind his inclination to shred the cushions to make himself a cozy burrow in the linen closet, he’s… nearly the perfect tenant. Minus the necessity for wall-patch kits.
Apparently, werewolves are the ones who get all the credit, but they aren’t the only branch of the family: Magna Mustela Sapiens are their cousins. Wereferrets for short. Yes, I laughed, to Cedric’s mild hurt and chagrin. They were less teen-angst, egotistical-alpha, and more…. make you a cup of tea, and tell you, from the living room sofa that the milk in your fridge was spoiled, after gossiping pleasantly about all of his (many) near relatives. Cedric could smell the milk. From 20 feet away. It made me rather self-conscious about my deodorant scent option, along with other various life choices. I had decided, against my better judgement, to try something other than the usual ambiguous “fresh scent” I had been buying for the last 8 years, and try vanilla peach this time. Be brave. Go out of my comfort zone. It was not a good choice. But, I had reasoned, after many inner wrestlings with myself, (and staring gloomily at the little twist container for far longer than the decision should have taken), overly sugared, vanilla frosting, vodka-tinted fruit smell is better than B. O., right? No. It’s not. Cedric, like the gentleman he was, didn’t comment. But every time I would pass, his whiskers would twitch, while he choked down a cough that sounded suspiciously like a chortle. The brat.
I hadn’t known there was anything unusual about Cedric when he’d come as a potential applicant. He looked like your average, non-threatening, good-natured guy. He was fairly handsome, despite his slightly pointy nose, with dark hair, black-brown eyes, ringed by a thick fringe of eyelashes a girl could be jealous of. The only noticeably different features, were his hair brushing the door jamb when he ducked through, and the thick, strangely symmetrical band of dark freckles across his nose and cheeks, and down either side of his neck. He was funny, down-to earth, and his stable normalcy was like a life saver thrown to me while I was drowning in the midst of eel-infested waters.
You see, I’d had other applicants for my spare room.
The first interview had gone fairly well, until the girl (Frieda, if you were curious) asked me if I cared about the furniture, and would my freezer hold half of a 300 lb. frozen boar she had killed. She would need it to feed her wolves.
Plural.
She had five of them waiting for her in the very beat-up Volkswagen idling down on the street.
Windows cracked, of course.
Calmly and politely, I told her no. I was very proud of my self-restraint.
The next several applicants were each more bizarre than the last, and I was getting fairly alarmed and discouraged. I really needed the rent to help with the bills, and the water heater needed repairs. A girl’s gotta eat, and hot water is non-negotiable.
One memorable applicant had smelled like wet rust, wearing a long brown robe to match his long, filthy nails. The man never took off his hood, and only spoke blunt, monosyllabic sentences in harsh whispers. That was a definite nope.
The next was a frog-like, and faintly luminous, green-tinted girl, with coiling, wet-looking hair. Every few minutes, during our entire conversation, the girl (Chloe, she said) would gasp and mist herself with a spray bottle, all the while beadily eyeing a fly in the windowsill. Her main concern wasn’t the size of my freezer, but rather my bathtub. I cheerfully informed her I only had a shower stall. I looked for her gills as she stormed out, but couldn’t see past the faintly wriggling hair.
And then there was Cedric. Handsome, nice, and completely normal.
Ha.
We hit it off immediately, and, everything arranged, I helped him move in the next day.
He was the perfect roommate. No killer pets, or serial-killer vibes, no gills.
He washed his dishes, good-naturedly picked up things I needed while on runs to the store, enjoyed the same ridiculously improbable action movies as I did.
He was considerately silent when I needed peaceful quiet after a hard day at work, or would offer witty, companionable conversation when I needed company. He went to bed early, and didn’t disturb me, aside from the occasional odd clunk from next door.
I thought I’d hit the jackpot.
The illusion of normalcy wasn’t shattered for three blissful months. And, man. Did. It. Shatter.
I can tell you, it’s a little disconcerting to shuffle groggily into the kitchen at two in the morning for a reading snack, and ram into something solid you weren’t expecting there.
Something solid, and tall, and rather hairy.
If you can imagine a quaint, properly upright, real-life Beatrix Potter-esque ferret in his dapper tweed suit, drinking tea in a gentelmanly manner while wearing a monocle, that’s the vibe Cedric put off.
Only he was wearing a white T-shirt and boxers.
Boxers with a blunt, bushy tail poking out of them.
And instead of a teacup and saucer, he was clutching a large cereal bowl to his chest, (the contents of which now adorned his shirt), looking at me with wide-eyed horror, mouth clamped tightly shut, frozen to his full, stiff height, ears pricked upright with alarm.
He looked even taller as a ferret.
The weird freckle markings suddenly made a lot more sense.
I screamed, at the exact moment he said, “Jen, I can explain!”
Another fist-sized meteor of flames scorched overhead, making it necessary for Wren to drop behind a barrier and pancake herself against the floor again.
The floor, she had discovered, was cement. Cement is hard— a fact she’d always known, but never fully appreciated until now.
She had realized, from distant memories of childhood splats off her bike, that cement isn’t necessarily good natured.
But kids bounce.
Adults….really don’t.
She felt like a brittle wooden plane model that a child has attempted to fly, against their mother’s cautions, in a tiled room.
Her palms ached, and her knees were going to be every shade of sherbet she never liked. Probably the purple kind. She hated purple.
Rolling over with a groan, she shifted to a sitting position while shrieks and shouts and car alarms blared and echoed off the pocked (and now black streaked) walls of the parking garage. The muted roar of flames thrummed merrily along in a background accompaniment to the chaos, as another arc of flame splattered against an adjacent wall like a molotov water balloon, dripping liquid fire and dancing orange light onto the floor.
Wren shook her head slowly, gripping the bridge of her nose.
Smoke tickled her throat, delicate strands of the stuff curling lazily along the piped ceiling, inching its way closer to the ramp, as she probably should have been.
Urgh. Now her perfume was smothered in stale carpark and barbecue gone wrong.
Wren shifted stiffly, the cold, hard floor numbing her derrière, grit digging into the skin of her palms.
Her knees WERE purple.
She could see them.
Through the new holes.
In her new jeans.
Several smaller burn holes speckled across her thighs like tiny, smoking constellations, cheerfully branding a wasted 40 dollars she couldn’t afford.
Her nostrils flared, her eyebrows raising dangerously.
That. Was. It.
The last straw.
She’d had it.
With a flare of temper, and a rising growl in her throat, she heaved herself off the ground and spun to face the source of all the mayhem.
“COURTNEY!!” She howled, voice rasping from all the smoke.
A teen girl, rather beautiful, and hovering rather conspicuously above the ground, twisted in the air to face her, while the other harassed people in the garage took the opportunity to scurry away through distant exits or duck behind cars.
Wren didn’t seem to notice the scuttling bystanders. Or the hovering. Or the glowing eyes (very similar to her own), or the flaming, writhing tendrils of hair.
She didn’t seem even slightly discomfited by the blaze that seemed to swallow the girl’s arms past the elbow.
Wren. Had. Had. It.
She bellowed.
She bellowed gustily.
“DANG IT, COURTNEY! You ruined my JEANS! Do you know how EXPENSIVE clothes are?!! I have GROCERIES to buy!!” she hollered, wide-legged, arms gesticulating violently, like their Italian grandmama when she was cussing.
She raved on. “You are acting like a TWO year old! If you don’t KNOCK it off RIGHT now, I’m going to use a fire extinguisher!” she threatened, “After I throw it at you stupid HEAD!
IT WAS JUST A CUPCAKE! And yes! I ate yours! With relish!! Get over it!!”
Sarah could have kissed the little demon. As a tantrum went, it was earsplitting, repugnant, infuriating. As a distraction, it was sheer, unadulterated genius. Inspired, really. Every face in the lobby turned to the crescendoing storm of hideous shrieks with identical looks of horror, and she could see the gleam of phantasm spankings in some of their eyes. His tiny arms lashed every direction, like the branches of a tree whipped to a frenzy by the passing storm of emotion. Little booted feet clumped and danced across the marble tiles like Fred Astair, beating out a rapid, intricate rhythm to a song only he could hear. His poor mother began fluttering and wringing her hands helplessly, entreating with useless platitudes that did nothing to stem the tide of raucous sound. He had hit his stride, and nothing was going to stop him now! No one even noticed Sarah tranq the security guard and slip through a door that very clearly read: “RESTRICTED ACCESS” She was in.
“I was gone for what, five, six minutes?! What happened here??” Dorcas wailed. Large, luminous yellow eyes looked at her meltingly over the sharp fangs currently embedded in a splintered chair leg. The REST of the chair was strewn in the chandelier, which was swaying ponderously above their heads, casting a giddy light over what looked, at first glance, to be a massacre. Smatterings of crushed porcelain glittered among the remains of her dinner, currently adorning the floor like a Jackson Pollock, while hunks of eviscerated roast and bits of the table swirled in a thick tomato stew, making everything look like it was smeared in bloody roadkill. Sparkly, bloody roadkill. And swimming luxuriously through it all, leathery tail working like a windshield wiper to spread the apocalypse that once was dinner even further, was the culprit, who, roughly 5 minutes ago had been a hot little egg wrapped in a frayed gypsy shawl nested snugly in her messenger bag. The Once-Was-An-Egg grinned dotingly at her around the chair leg, which finally gave out with a slivery “CRACK!”, and fell to either side of its narrow little face, as the small creature began stumbling toward her, uttering unearthly shrieks of welcome, flapping stubby wings in an attempt to propel itself faster into her sphere. Apparently, she was the first person it had seen. And apparently, she’d been adopted. She was now, based on its reaction, and if the books were to be believed, (unfortunately, they were) a surrogate mother to a crumpled-looking fledgling of a notably cantankerous, and ridiculously tenacious and grudge-holding species. You couldn’t simply drop it at the fire station. It would find you. And it would be mad. The tiny tomato-crusted dragon reached her boots and nudged them before winding its way like a vine up and around her legs, leaving a red snail-trail of stew all over her clean black trousers. She looked down helplessly, meeting its half-closed, blissful little eyes. Then it began to purr, sending shivery vibrations through her bones. “WYATT!!” she hollered. There was a crash and an oath from the oak boards above her head, then a tentative creak on the stairs, heralding the approach of the useless inkeeper, who had repeatedly assured her all would be fine while she was gone. A curly brown crop of hair poked around the paneled wall at the base of the staircase, followed by the rest of the fellow, and an apologetic, “Well, now, Dorc–“ She threw a handy pot at his face. The chair fell out of the chandelier with a crash.
Everything was covered in dust. Dropping her duffel with a muted thud on the carpet, Gene ran her finger along the dark wood surface of the hall table, leaving a shiny track in the matte film. The whole house felt muffled and still, greeting her like a stranger.
Everything was silent.
A loneliness she thought she had wrestled down and escaped in her travels seemed to pounce on her from the quiet shadows of the room, making her inhale sharply.
A rolling carousel-world of color and sound, spices and strange faces passing by every day for the last year had, she thought, numbed, and eventually buried her grief. But her first footfall over the threshold had raised the same specters in her mind, in her breast.
Jim was still gone. Nothing could bring him back.
She would never hear his low voice, full of humor, or whispered caresses, never feel his touch, the warmth of him at her back in the small hours of the morning.
He was gone.
She was more alone than ever, with a year of silenced calls between her and her family yawning like a chasm that was difficult to bridge. What would she say?
It would all be the same platitudes, empty words of comfort, the same remonstrances, questions of where she had been, why she hadn’t responded. But she just…. couldn’t.
She hadn’t had it in her.
She didn’t know if, even now, she had it in her.
As if a sadistic, or, depending on how you looked at it, loving angel of fate had heard the thought and decided to test her, the phone in her pocket vibrated softly against her leg.
Soft light reflected off her taut face as she slid it out, reading the brief message.
Her throat tightened, her eyes burning as tears blurred the screen.
Mom: “Baby, I love you. Come home. We’ve got you.”