K.C. Mead-Brewer

 

The hyena arrived with the moon.

“For the last time, Libby, there is no hyena.” Mark told her this again and again, but Libby knew the truth. As soon as she got home from work, shut the garage, and locked the door, she heard the animal’s trilling laugh, at once sharp and musical, as if it’d swallowed some poor dancer’s castanets. She well knew that all kinds of African animals could thrive on the Texas plains, all the space they could want, a kinder climate, and none of the major predators to contend with, save human beings. Why, it was only two counties over that a ranching couple owned a pair of zebras and three camels in addition to their cows and goats.

As a girl, she’d loved these exotic neighbors. And as a girl in rural Texas, so much had seemed exotic: the cute Jewish boy down the street, the new sci-fi section at the school library, the sushi joint that’d opened up in Peytonsville. The idea that someplace like Africa, someplace so different from where she was, so far away, might still be a little like home — it comforted her. It didn’t make her feel larger so much as less small. More whole. Her grandmother understood it, even if no one else did. Her grandmother was a woman who’d traveled. A woman who’d gone places.

Chasing that feeling, Libby had taken some of the more off-beat courses in college, ending up with a major in music education — what her mother so easily referred to as her M-R-S degree — and minors in just about everything else.

But even in a world so full, so whole, Libby knew the hyena was an exception. She knew it wasn’t a sign of the world being any larger or any less small. Its ragged smile. Its jutting neck. Its pointed ears and elbows. It was a sign of something else entirely. Her grandmother believed in signs, that everything happened for a reason, and she’d long taught Libby to believe so too.

“God, Libby, would you please let this drop?” Mark said, getting dressed, eating dinner, on the phone at work. “There’s nothing out there. I’m telling you.” And sometimes Libby really did wonder if he was right. After all, not even that nut-job Ralph Saint over Lubbock-way, not even him with his tiger and his bobcats would’ve tried caging a creature such as this. What’s more, Mark was the hunter, with six shooting trophies to prove it. So surely if it were real then he would’ve seen it, heard it, heard about it.

But that wasn’t right. Couldn’t be. She had heard its low cackling. She’d seen it moving in the grass. Yet still, it wasn’t until she woke up one morning to discover a chunk missing from her left thigh that she was absolutely certain.

“What do you mean you can’t see it?” she said, propping her leg up on the bed. The gap didn’t bleed or ooze or even hurt, it simply was. A piece of her, suddenly gone.

“I mean there’s nothing there to see, Libs — there’s no bite mark.” Mark scrubbed his hands over his face. Sighing, he leaned in and kissed her right where she pointed, right where there was nothing left to kiss. His mouth dipped down into her thigh, like kissing a chewed-up slice of melon rind.

Libby gaped at him as he stood back, everything normal, patted her arm, everything normal, and went back to the work of getting ready for work. Everything, everything normal, normal, normal.

 

Over the next three months Libby woke up first without a right ear, then without a right hip, then without a right breast, and then without a left hand. She didn’t feel the creature’s teeth when it came upon her in the night. It was always simply a matter of falling asleep and then waking up somehow minus something.

At least it’s summer now, she thought. The end of the schoolyear. The end of day after day of classes full of energetic, whole-bodied children, little voices singing so joyously-tauntingly-gratingly off-tune. The end of forcing out fake smiles and fake interest and fake answers to all the other teachers’ incessant interrogations:

How’s it going, Libby?

How’s Mark doing?

We sure missed you at church.

Isn’t this heat just blistering?

How’s your grandmother? I heard she’s sick. Cancer — God, that’s awful.

Hobbling about the house, Libby was amazed at how little pain she felt. That piecemeal emptiness . . . she was sure it must be what a long, long fall felt like. A growing weightlessness. A bizarrely comfortable sense of doom.

 

Libby used putty to cement in old chunks of brick where her hip used to be, just to give herself a bit of stability again as she limped along. For her breast, she stuffed an old pair of tube socks into her bra and hoped no one would notice the abrupt difference in its shape and size. She could decently cover her missing ear with her hair, the hollow of her leg with pants or a skirt, though summer shorts were now definitely out of the question. And while having only her right hand didn’t give her as many problems as she’d feared, it did throw off her balance a good deal and left her with a constant gnawing sensation that she’d forgotten something somewhere, that she’d been carrying something heavy just moments ago.

Of course, for her efforts, all Mark ever seemed to notice was that his wife was moving slower than usual. That a pair of his socks occasionally went missing. That the old bricks had finally been cleared out from the toolshed.

It was a strange thing, this absentmindedness. Mark used to be a man who noticed all the subtlest details of their lives. Sweet, sensitive Mark. He commented when she wore new clothes, reminded her that she could still be a student too, to practice her own music — the piano, the harmonica — and was always quick about fixing every leaking pipe, every creaking door. He saw flowers and spotted deer on their walks that she never would’ve seen on her own. He remembered birthdays and wrote beautiful letters each Sunday to her Nana, sick in bed.

It was part of what had made him such a successful hunter. This patience and total presence of mind. This awareness of the world and desire to see it so fully.

It was his talent for hunting, after all, that had made Libby brave enough to tell him about the hyena in the first place. But where she’d expected concern, perhaps even some disbelief, she’d never expected for him to start disappearing right along with everything else, disappearing like her body, her mind, her Libby-ness. Disappearing into the hunt. Because suddenly when he wasn’t working, wasn’t avoiding her at home, he was out in the trees, killing things.

Every free morning, it seemed, he was up and out before the sun, and every evening he came home sweating and filthy, eager for a shower before carting the day’s haul off to the taxidermist.

“No hyenas today either,” he’d say, and though she knew he didn’t mean it cruelly, she could hear the hyena’s laugh curling up in the words sharper and sharper each night.

No hyenas today either, Libby. Isn’t that great? Don’t you feel comforted? Don’t you feel safe?

And then he’d present her with yet another head.

Coyotes, javelinas, deer, badgers, cougars, rabbits — he filled their home with heads. Their black glass eyes gleamed down at her from every corner. It was as if he’d gone out less to hunt and more to recruit for himself this army of the dead that now stood awaiting orders, shoulder-to-butchered shoulder along their walls.

There was nowhere she could go to be alone anymore. Not with all those eyes staring and staring. It made her feel naked all the time and everywhere. Even their bathroom was hung with a pair of slim, stuffed, staring weasels.

They’re dead, Libby thought, and struggled not to cry as she trembled on the toilet before their sharp, tiny eyes. Struggled not to cry as she wondered if Mark had thought to preserve a bit of wall space for her as well. Right, she thought. As if she might ever be something so worthwhile as a trophy.

My house is full of death. Everything is full of death.

Her knees knocked together and she twisted her shirt in a clump beneath her remaining breast. She needed to pee, needed to pee, needed to pee, but couldn’t with those little eyes needling into her. Couldn’t with her puttied hip cracking and crumbling all over the tile.

 

“Please, Libby,” Mark said, leaning over a plate of boxed mashed potatoes and once-frozen chicken fingers. “Please. We’re having dinner here.” He closed his eyes and looked away as she pulled her t-shirt back down, covering up the holes and pockets and pits that he claimed he couldn’t see. “I’m sorry, Libs. I just can’t. I can’t hear any more about this hyena.”

“Why can’t you just admit that you see it?” she said. “Even if it’s only for me, why can’t you just say you see it?”

“If it was really out there, don’t you think I actually would’ve seen it by now? Don’t you think I’d have gotten it and hung it on our wall for you? Don’t you think I want this to fucking end?”

He shook his head. She knew he hadn’t meant to curse. He hated cursing at her. Sweet, sensitive Mark. She kept her eyes trained carefully down at her plate. The way the chicken fingers spooned together as if trying to hold one another. The way the mashed potatoes sat white and still, looking dead. Looking nothing at all like actual potatoes.

“You need a break,” he said, gentler. “So why not take one? You know — just get the hell outta Dodge for a while?”

Neatly, coldly, Libby pushed her plate away. “Did you have somewhere specific in mind?”

“Your mother called again,” he said. “Nana’s worse. Maybe you should go down to Florida and visit her. You used to love visiting her. Go to a beach. Take your harmonica — it’s been so long since you played.”

“Maybe I should go down there?” Libby said. “By myself?”

To see her grandmother. The woman who was sick. The woman who’d been lucky enough to have a problem like cancer. Guilt grated at Libby even as she couldn’t stop the thought: At least people believe you when you tell them you have tumors.

Mark ran his hands through his hair. “You know I’d go with you if I could, Libs, but I can’t. I can’t take off work for that long” — Can’t take off hunting for that long, she thought — “and she is your grandmother. Maybe it’ll do you some good,” he said, and she could tell by the pleading look in his eye that he meant it. He really wanted to believe it might do her some good.

But seeing Nana was the last thing Libby wanted and, as if to agree, the old woman up and died before she could even look up the cost of plane tickets.

And what would she have said to her anyway? Nana had lived into her nineties, delivered four healthy children, seen three oceans, and died slowly, visibly, surrounded by family. No hyenas had ever come for her, Libby was sure.

 

The laughter skittered out at Libby from between the walls and just the other side of the door. A clicking like claws. A grinding like teeth. The sounds followed her wherever she went.

How was it getting into the house? She made double-sure to lock all the doors each night. She kept the windows bolted.

Sometimes when she washed dishes — as best she could with only one hand — Libby was certain she could see something out the window. A spotted, hunched something that shuddered there in the tall grass.

The first time she saw it, she dropped a glass. But then, in the space of its shattering, the creature was gone.

The second time she saw it, she was careful to keep as still and silent as possible.

The creature shifted in the sunlight, in the burnt grass, teasing her with a glimpse of a rounded ear, a spotted shoulder, a toothy grin.

“What are you?” she whispered, and for the first time she considered the possibility that perhaps it was more than simply a monster.

As a student, she’d read about all kinds of myths and stories where the Angel of Death wasn’t simply a robe-wearing skeleton. There was Azrael, the winged mountain of swiveling eyes and lashing tongues; the Valkyries riding out on their winged horses; Meng Po brewing a fresh pot of her dark Oblivion Tea; but mostly Libby remembered the goddess Hekate, the one who led souls down to Hades — the one said to be heralded by the sound of howling dogs.

How different were hyenas from dogs anyway? And who was to say that an omen couldn’t get started eating before its guests arrived?

Libby blinked hard at the bud of a fresh headache, squinted out the kitchen window, but only tall, empty grass stared back at her.

She couldn’t remember the endings of these stories, but the one bell that tolled clearly for her was that of Appeasement. What all reapers lusted after and how she might give it to them. Because hadn’t Nana always said everything happens for a reason? Repent and ye shall be saved? Libby knew she had plenty to repent for, even if there was no hope of ever being saved. And there was still Mark to think of, after all. Sweet, sensitive Mark. She couldn’t leave him with this hyena skulking around. She couldn’t leave him at all, sweet, sensitive Mark, and struggled not to resent him for it. That he should still need her when she had so little of herself left to give. Hadn’t she lost enough already? — No, she thought, reminding herself. There’s never enough for an ungrateful person to give. Never enough to make up for everything she’d wasted, every opportunity she’d let slide, the money she’d blown, the friends and family she couldn’t muster the energy to call or write or see. She knew she should’ve tried harder, been happier, been a mother, a better daughter, a better wife, better-looking, a better student, happier, a better granddaughter, the kind that was there for a Nana in the hospital, happier, a better friend, a better Christian, happier, happier, a better neighbor, a better teacher, happier, happier, happier.

She should’ve known from the start that this was all her fault. That this was the price of taking up so much space. What right did she have to ever see Africa? — a place, her mother loved reminding her, where people knew what actual suffering was.

Suffering, Libby thought, reaching to scratch an ear that wasn’t there. Appeasement. Repentance. Sacrifice.

 

At first she tried placating the creature with offerings of raw meat that she left lying about the house: slabs of bacon in the parlor, chickens stuffed under the bed, even a full rack of lamb splayed out on their old wagon-wheel coffee table. But then Mark would return from the day’s hunting trip and storm through the house — following the stench of whatever offering she’d hidden that day — and collect it up as if it’d been meant for him.

The smell, she couldn’t argue, was dizzying. And the look of all that rancid meat soaking into the carpet was certainly revolting. But then, no matter what Mark said, it was worth it. Because the hyena kept its distance each time. So long as her sacrifices — these fresh, curated little pieces of life — were out and waiting, the creature didn’t come clawing at the bedroom door or chatter the kitchen cabinets like teeth whenever she walked by.

 

“Please,” Mark said, he always seemed to be saying, “please, Elizabeth.” He took her gently by the shoulders and looked at her as if she were still whole. “Please stop. Please listen to me: There — is — no — hyena.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but then he sighed brokenly and squeezed her tight.

“Where have you gone?” he whispered. “I miss you when you’re gone.” He held her close, careful and reverent, as if she were an urn. He rested his cheek on her unwashed hair. “I miss you, Libby. Come back. Please come back.”

 

She watched him from their bedroom window as he headed out to the truck. He hadn’t meant to shove her. She knew that. Mark had never been violent with her before. Sweet, sensitive Mark. She’d scared him. She’d scared him and he’d reacted badly, just like anyone might if they knew their world was suffering but couldn’t see why. She knew he didn’t understand why she’d draped the linked sausages over the mantelpiece, or why she’d fought against his attempts to throw them away. More than that, she knew he wanted to understand. But he never would. She knew then for certain that he never, never would.

Looking down at him, their porchlight yellow on his back, glinting off the truck, she saw the garbage bag slip in his hands. And she wondered, not for the first time, if he imagined the hyena or her each time he pulled the trigger.

“You’re stressed,” he’d tried telling her, telling himself. “You’re just stressed. You need to relax.”

She was almost sure she could see his hands shaking as he heaved the bag into the truck bed. He was taking her offering out to the main dump, just as he had every evening before.

“We can’t leave it rotting in our trash bins,” he’d told her, and she’d heard the struggle for calm in his voice. “We can’t have it attracting animals.”

 

There was an empty darkness outside and Libby realized she’d never before considered just how starkly alone each star was in the sky. Hung up in the black side-by-side, too far apart to hold each other, too close not to wish for more.

 

Mark was out. Out driving or kneeling in church or firing blindly into dark trees. Mark was out and now was her chance. This time her sacrifice would stick. She was sure. Because this time its pieces weren’t simply cut from random, general life; they were cut from her life. A lonely cigar box filled with all the most precious things she possessed. And she knew just where to leave this new offering, too.

The knowledge had come to her as in a dream: The dishwasher, a spectral voice had said. The place where eaten things go to be cleared away.

The dishwasher. Just one of the myriad other things she’d been cut off from in recent weeks.

There were no more evenings spent staring out the kitchen window across the plains. Not since Mark had resolved to do as much of the housekeeping as possible on top of his work, work, work, hunting, hunting, hunting. She knew he meant well. But there was something in the way he looked at her afterward, his dark eyes so sweet and triumphant — it killed her every time. Here! they said. I cleaned this for you! I did all of this for you! And now you don’t have to do anything.

Things were so easy for her now. That’s what her teacher-friends said anyway, whenever they actually managed to drop by.

Isn’t it great having such a thoughtful husband?

Isn’t it wonderful being so pampered and taken care of?

Libby shrank away from the black glares of Mark’s countless, wall-mounted heads. They knew as well as she did what those “friends” truly meant:

Why aren’t you happy?

Don’t you have everything you could possibly want?

Come on, Libby. It’s not like you have cancer.

But this offering, this sacrifice, would finally put an end to it; she was sure. She was sure.

She’d neatly packed the old cigar box with all the most cherished mementos of her past self (her pre-hyena self): the harmonica she’d stolen from her best friend growing up, the one that’d first sparked her love of music; the pirate’s treasure map she’d made years ago for the daughter she no longer hoped for; a ball of clay from the golem she’d built as a girl, playing with that cute boy down the street; the bird’s skull she’d discovered in the woods on the day her father died; and the plane ticket to Zimbabwe she’d bought and never used for her twenty-eighth birthday — a trip she’d planned back when she thought she might still be someone who went places.

She took each turn through the house cautiously, half certain the creature would be there, lurking just around the corner, waiting for her. But there was no amount of carefulness to prepare her for the sight of her dead-not-dead Nana sitting at the kitchen table. The cigar box slipped numbly from her remaining fingers.

The old woman’s shoulders were slumped and her head craned downward so that chemo-thinned hair curtained her face, hair as white and translucent as the moonlight that leaked through the window.

“Nana?” Libby said. Her vision blurred, a shaking breath. “Nana — I’m so sorry.”

Except she wasn’t. Her chest burned and her gaps itched and she hated that old woman for every single tumor and prayer and useless letter that Mark, sweet, sensitive Mark, had written for her. Libby imagined her dying all over again. Imagined Mark dying, a hunting accident maybe. She shuddered, furious with guilt; her clothes didn’t feel right, didn’t fit right; her muscles ached and felt numb simultaneously; the linoleum was an endless winter cold against her bare feet.

“Nana?” she said again, eyes hot, blinking. But it wasn’t her.

The hyena sat at the table, staring back at her with its impossibly bright black eyes. Its powerful shoulders were sloped as her grandmother’s had been, the moonlight slanting down across it like phantom hair.

Libby’s heart throbbed in her remaining hand, hip, thigh, breast. Her breath tangled up in her lungs and sweat pumped out of her until she was slick as one of Azrael’s billion tongues. The way the creature sat there, a gargoyle come to life. The way its power filled the room and emptied it both at once.

The hyena smiled up at her from its chair at the table, and Libby realized then that it had already seized a fresh slice of her without ever leaving its seat. She looked down to see what it’d taken, but didn’t find anything amiss.

Is it You? Are you the Angel? she wanted to ask, but couldn’t. Something was wrong with her throat, her voice. Reaching up to touch her chin, her fingers sailed through empty air and clear into the roof of her mouth. She felt around, her fingers brushing a slick row of teeth and a moist, ribbed wall that normally stood between her tongue and nose, except now there was no tongue. No bottom row of teeth. No bottom jaw at all.

The hyena ran its tongue over the stolen lower half of her face. It crunched her round, human teeth between its jagged, animal fangs. The hyena smiled again. Three rows of toothy smile.

A scream rose up in Libby, but only a wretched gurgling escaped. She fell to her knees, casting her remaining hand through the cigar box’s disparate items, searching for something — anything — that might fit over her face. Something that might second as a jaw, a tongue, a chin — The bird’s skull was too small. Too fragile. It crumbled like eggshell in her hand. The golem’s clay had long gone uselessly dry. The harmonica — She lifted it to her opened throat and, with her one good hand, held the instrument in place beneath her exposed soft palate. The metal flashed in the moonlight as she attempted a few wet, pathetic notes. But with no lips or tongue, all she had was a whistling throat. Wind pushing through a broken window.

She was never going to see Africa, she realized, letting the harmonica drop. She was never going to see The Smoke that Thunders or The Chimanimani Mountains. She was never going to go anywhere. She was always going to be exactly where she was.

A hysterical laugh burbled out of her. Nana had been wrong. There was no reason for this. No reason, no angel, no end. Always, she thought. The hyena would come for her always.

Her eyes drew back to the still-grinning creature. Her fingers trembled once more to her split-open head.

Her face ended at the upper lip, a dark cove for ships to sail into and never be heard from again.

Here be dragons, their map would say. Here be monsters.

 

 

KC MEAD-BREWER is a writer and editor living in beautiful Baltimore, MD. Her writing appears in a variety of publications, including Fiction Southeast (forthcoming), Cold Mountain Review, and Bartleby Snopes. She also serves as an editor with Cleaver Magazine and is a proud member of The Roving Writers, a small group of wild women artists who got their start together at Hedgebrook: Women Authoring Change. For more information, visit: kcmeadbrewer.com or follow her @meadwriter

Robert Roman

 

Fantastic Freddie was the only altar boy from the Red Brick Alley. He was always consecrating Ritz Crackers and trying to make us eat them like communion wafers. He light-fingered incense from the sacristy, and he blessed water from Old Lady Tully’s spigot and flicked it in our faces before we played Mutually Assured Destruction in the woods. When you asked if he wanted to become a priest when he grew up, he said no, he wanted to be a ninja. How stupid. He was way too big and fat to be a ninja. If anybody could get a job as a ninja, it was me, because I was small and compact, and I was the fastest, strongest, agilest sixth-grader on the North Side of Pittsburgh.

“Listen up, Ringer. You’d better hurry and sign up with the altar boys. The Apocalypse is due any day, and you need to work off some sins,” Fantastic Freddie said to me for the millionth billionth time.

I knew the stinking Soviets were itching to pick a nuclear war with us, and America’s new president, Ronald Reagan, wasn’t about to chicken out. I had nightmares about the end of the world all time. The nuns at Saint Augie’s were always talking about megatons, and radiation sickness, and places in Japan where people’s skin melted off and eyeballs exploded and shadows got deep-fried into walls. I worked on my fighting skills every day, and my little brother, Jaggerbush, had tons of supplies hidden all over, so we were ready for Armageddon. But I wasn’t much for joining things, especially the altar boys and their stupid costumes, and I didn’t admit it to anybody, but being up on the altar gave me the creeps. It made me feel transparent so everyone could see inside me and see all the things I’d done wrong and all the bad things I wanted to do. But after the nuclear bombs exploded and made mushroom clouds everywhere, knowing some altar boy magic tricks might come in handy against the Soviets since they didn’t believe in God.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to join your hocus-pocus boys,” Jaggerbush said. He looked like a crooked stick figure with his long skinny arms and legs, holding the metal handle of his red wagon, staring up at Fantastic Freddie’s fat head. Even his hair looked scribbled the way it stuck up all over the place.

“Shut up, Jaggerbush,” Fantastic Freddie said. “You’re just mad because Father Morgan excommunicated your butt.”

“Father Morgan the Organ made an escape goat out of me,” Jaggerbush said.

“Isn’t eleven too old to be riding around in a little red wagon?” Fantastic Freddie said.

“Isn’t twelve too old to be pulling your pants all the way down to your knees just to take a whiz?” Jaggerbush sat in his wagon, “Increase energy to the Wave Motion Engine.”

He drifted down the Red Brick Alley slower than one mile per hour. His squeaky wagon wheels sounded like a top-secret space alien radio signal beaming in from the galaxy next door. Fantastic Freddie stuck his fingers in his ears, the big fat baby.

Antonio came walking down the Red Brick Alley dribbling a red dodge ball with one hand and carrying a plastic gallon of purple juice in the other.

“Let’s play Murder Ball!” Fantastic Freddie said.

“I told Ding Dong I’d deliver his newspapers for him,” I said.

“Throw them down the sewer and tell him you got jumped,” Fantastic Freddie said.

I couldn’t do that to Ding Dong; I gave him my word. Plus, I needed the money, comic books were up to fifty cents apiece.

“Watch out, that’s Killard territory.” Antonio took a swig from his gallon of purple juice. “Even you ain’t bad enough to take them on, Ringer.”

From their scrawny old Grandma down to the newest one who ran the streets in nothing but a dirty diaper, the Killards were nastier than stepping on a rusty nail. You couldn’t keep track of how many there were since they all looked alike with their red hair and freckle-faces. They never played with anyone except each other, and they’d fight you for no reason at all. The girls were as bad as the boys. One of them had yanked a handful of hair right out of Antonio’s afro. She would’ve plucked him bald if I hadn’t been there to drill her in the eye with a football.

I climbed up Veteran Street with Ding Dong’s paper sack slung over my shoulder. It was steeper than Mount Olympus. Every house on the left side of the street was way up at the top of a long set of steps, and all the houses on the right side were way down at the bottom of their own sets of steps, and most of the yards had chain-link fences so you couldn’t even take a shortcut across the lawns.

“Hey, cuz, you collecting today?” Smoothie Spoony said.

I looked him dead in his spoon-shaped face to let him know he didn’t sneak up on me. He was a tall sucker, but he didn’t have any calf muscles at all. I was tempted to say yes just to see if he’d really try to jump me. I bet I could scoop him up and body slam him, even though he would’ve been in high school if he hadn’t flunked so many times. But I had a job to do, so I told him the same thing I told him every time he asked if I was collecting, “Nope, Ding Dong collected yesterday.”

After I climbed up and down a billion steps, I finally made it to the last loop of the paper route. We called it the Street That Time Forgot because it didn’t have a street sign and the asphalt was all tore up and the city never bothered to repave it and no kids lived there. The houses looked like they were about to lose their grip on the mountainside and slide down through the woods into the East Street Valley. I had one last paper to deliver before I could head back to the Red Brick Alley for some Murder Ball.

Roarrrrrrrrrrrrr!

A gargantuan dog sprang out from between two parked cars and made me jump so high I swear I would’ve been able to grab a basketball rim. I’d had run-ins with some vicious wild dogs before, but this was the biggest, meanest monster I’d ever seen. He wasn’t a Boxer or Great Dane or Rottweiler or Doberman or Pit Bull or Akita. I’d say he was a combination of wolf and radioactive fallout.

I stood my ground and barked right back at him. He stunk worse than a prehistoric creature from the bottom of the ocean. He lunged at my face. I swung my newspaper sack and caught him in the jaw. He tore the sack out of my hand and whipped it into the street. I stomped my foot at him. He snapped his teeth at me. They looked like broken forearm bones. I peeled the Hell out of there.

He took off after me. He was too quick to juke out. I dove headfirst over a wooden fence into somebody’s front yard. While I was in mid-air, he ripped one of my Pro-Keds right off. He leapfrogged the fence, too! The last thing I wanted was to be locked in a yard with that man-eater. I flipped myself back over the fence and punched the gas. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder for fear of losing speed until I made it to the top of the hill.

The monster stood in the middle of the street, snarling and barking with his acid slobber flying everywhere, daring me to come back. I picked up a rock and threw it over his head to scare him off so I could get my poor Pro-Ked and deliver Ding Dong’s last paper. He jumped in the air and caught it in his mouth like a Frisbee. The rock hit his teeth with a clonk that made me wince, but he didn’t seem to mind at all. He was some type of mutant, and not the good kind. I needed reinforcements.

I took off my tube sock so I wouldn’t ruin it and hopped all the way home on one foot.

Back in the Red Brick Alley I told Jaggerbush and Fantastic Freddie and Antonio what happened.

“Sounds supernatural. I’ll be right back,” Fantastic Freddie ran home.

“No way,” Antonio said. “You won’t catch me messing with any demon dog.” He took his red dodge ball and purple juice and ran home.

Fantastic Freddie came back with a black beaded rosary wrapped around his fist like brass knuckles and his book bag strapped to his back.

“Let’s see if this unholy creature can stand up to the power of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

“You plan on exorcising him?” I said.

“That’s right. I’m going to send this mongrel straight back to the pit of hell that spawned him.”

Jaggerbush laughed and knelt one boney knee inside his wagon and pushed with the other foot scooter-style toward Perrysville Avenue. His squeaky wheels beamed their loud radio signal up into space.

Fantastic Freddie hummed “Onward Christian Soldiers” as the two of us headed back up Veteran Street. If he could pull off a victory against the killer dog, it’d be a miracle. I’d ask Father Morgan the Organ to sign me up with the altar boys first thing at school tomorrow morning.

The Street That Time Forgot was dead quiet. No sign of life.

“There’s your high-top,” Fantastic Freddie said, pointing at my Pro-Ked sitting in the middle of the street like a hunk of cheese in a mousetrap.

“Go get it,” he said. “I’ll cover you.”

“With what?”

“The power of the Holy Spirit,” Fantastic Freddie said. “Reveal yourself, hell hound!”

The dog burst out from behind a car like he was waiting to ambush us. He looked even bigger than before. Some radiations were known to make you grow at ultrasonic speed.

“By the power vested in me by the Diocese of Pittsburgh, I command you to exit this canine,” Fantastic Freddie splashed holy spigot water in the sign of the cross at the dog. The beast didn’t slow down one bit. Fantastic Freddie threw his book bag in one direction and took off running in the other.

“Satan leave this pooch!” he did a second-base slide under a Dodge Omni then shimmied all the way underneath. I don’t know how he made his blubber fit. The dog jammed his snout under the car like a great white shark attacking an underwater cage.

“Demons begone!” Fantastic Freddie screamed.

I unzipped his book bag. It was full of stuff a priest would take on a house call. Crosses, vials of water and oil, stoles, a missal, one of those gold plates with a frying-pan handle they stuck under your chin when you received communion, and other stuff he swiped from Saint Augie’s.

Fantastic Freddie yelled from under the Omni, “The power of Christ compels you!”

I grabbed the ball-and-chain thingy Father Morgan the Organ waved around to stink up the church with incense. I swung it in circles over my head like Thor’s hammer and let it fly at the dog.

Ka-Thump!

It smacked him in the ribcage. It didn’t hurt him, but it distracted him from Fantastic Freddie. He stampeded toward me. I scampered up onto the roof of a beat-up old pick-up truck. The dog launched himself up the driver-side door snapping his teeth at the air then slid back down.

Fantastic Freddie poked his head out from under the Omni. The dog roar-barked at him. His head disappeared like a turtle’s.

“My God, my God,” he cried, “Why have you forsaken me?”

The beast ran circles around the pick-up truck like such a hellion he slid out of control as he rounded the corners, his claws scrapping and scratching the asphalt.

We were both trapped. The dog was too much for us. Ding Dong’s paper sack lay in the street with the last paper still inside. And I was still short one Pro-Ked. The bottom of my bare foot was black as tar. God had failed us. Or at least the Diocese of Pittsburgh had.

“Heavenly Father protect us!” Fantastic Freddie yelled from underneath the Omni.

A super loud squeak blasted through the sky. The dog slammed on the brakes and his pointy devil ears shot up in the air. Jaggerbush came torpedoing down the middle of the Street That Time Forgot in his trusty wagon. I stood up on the roof of the pick-up. The dog charged up the hill toward him barking and snarling. Jaggerbush and the dog plowed headlong toward one another, and neither of them looked like they were playing chicken.

A split second before impact, Jaggerbush threw two handfuls of dog biscuits up in the air, the kind that were shaped like little bones. The dog parked on his butt and took his good old time licking up the biscuits, and Jaggerbush rode his wagon all the way down the hill until he was out of sight.

I jumped down onto the pavement and scooped up my Pro-Ked and pulled it on my bare foot without tying it. I snatched Ding Dong’s paper sack and delivered the last newspaper. I grabbed Fantastic Freddie’s fat foot and yanked it with all my might. He popped out from under the Omni.

“I’m risen!” Fantastic Freddie said. “Thank you, Lord!”

A platoon of redheaded, freckle-faced kids with dirty, white undershirts came trudging out from between the trees down at the end the street. Killards!

“Hey,” the tallest one yelled. “Who said you could feed our little puppy?”

Me and Fantastic Freddie laid tire out of there.

I made it to the top of the hill in record time. The Killards were too busy petting their mutt and taste-testing the dog biscuits to chase us.

Fantastic Freddie said, “Rejoice Ringer. I’ll tell Father Morgan you helped me defeat that evil demon so he’ll let you join the altar boys.”

“Your stupid voodoo didn’t work one bit.”

“You have to join us. Your immortal soul is in danger.”

“Morgan the Organ already promised me I’d never make it to Heaven with my record.”

“Don’t forget about the altar boy summer picnic.”

“Why would I go to some dumb picnic?”

“It’s at the wave pool in South Park.”

Hmm, I always wanted to go to the wave pool.

 

 

ROBERT ROMAN was born in Pittsburgh, PA; taught incarcerated teenagers in Baltimore, MD; studied fiction writing at Johns Hopkins and UCLA; and currently writes America’s favorite Hangman puzzles. He’s had stories published in Six Three Whiskey, Eclectica Magazine, and The Nervous Breakdown.