By Lindsay Lennox
The Beast was tired, and he was cranky.
Most of all, he was hungry, and humans aren’t the only creatures who get a bit moody when they’re hungry. He turned the corner near the playground.
Yes, wonderful: cobblestones, thought the Beast. He hated cobblestones. The uneven ground made it awfully hard to lurk with any proper spirit, and they also hurt his feet.
The street went uphill, of course. The Beast had powerful lower limbs that coiled like springs, as if designed especially for leaping upon things. Even sprinting up silently behind things was possible, with concentration. But his body did not lend itself gracefully to this slow, cautious uphill trudge over the stones.
To Smell by Donald Patten
It was a summer night, a Saturday, and many of the houses were dark. Lifting his face and sniffing, the Beast could pick up traces of morning departures. They were rich with anticipation, pregnant with the snappish arguments of road trips, the disappointing arrivals at places which, after all, weren’t different enough from home to matter. There was, already, the resigned dread of Sunday evenings after a weekend filled with busyness. The Beast could survive on such fumes, like a fruit fly, but he wouldn’t say it was much of a life.
Walking—trudging—a little further up the street brought the discovery that one of these houses wasn’t empty after all. It was absolutely overflowing with light, and noise: well, with Joy, thought the Beast, wrinkling his muzzle. Ordinarily he’d pass this house by without a thought. Not that there weren’t possibilities—there were always possibilities—but usually there were better options for an evening than braving this stench.
To Taste by Donald Patten
Even as his body began churning with nausea and anxiety, his hunger brought him closer to the house. Joy wasn’t necessarily dangerous to a healthy, fully-grown adult of his species, but that didn’t stop his nostrils from clamping shut, or his thick, pungent blood from moving faster. He counted to ten, pushing his brain to filter out the distractingly unpleasant smell and instead focus on what else he could detect.
Back to basics, the Beast coached himself. How many are they, what are their ages, what are their fears?
Commanding his muscles to relax, he took a single deep breath through his nose. The house held both adults and children, six of each. Sniffing again, he decided the adults were married couples, and the children were true children, no teenagers, although a couple of them were on the cusp. Possibilities—yes.
A geyser of laughter erupted from what seemed to be a small sunroom on one side of the house, pushing the Beast back a few steps and making him stumble on the cobblestones. The adults were all in the sunroom, he realized, playing a card game that seemed to involve quite a bit of good-natured arguing.
The Beast crept closer to the sunroom. It was screened but open to the night air on three sides. A screen door allowed the passage of children between the backyard and the sunroom, door bouncing noisily every time one came inside to seek its parents. He moved up underneath the windows facing the front, where he was concealed by the slightly unkempt shrubbery and could stay well clear of any wandering children.
Children’s minds were difficult to predict; sometimes they could walk right by him without turning a hair, and sometimes they knew his presence almost before he had arrived and steadfastly refused to go near him, taking no notice of their parents’ threats or cajoleries. The Beast found it humorous how often parents referred to these episodes of flawless, unreasoning insight as tantrums or sulking.
From his position by the large front windows, now that he’d gotten used to the always-present odor, the Beast began to learn more about the adults. Yes, they were definitely three married couples, and marriage—well, there was no richer source of what the Beast ate. One of the couples owned this house, had purchased it when their first child was expected. The others were visitors, but visitors who had been to this house so many times that their affection clung to it, their knowledge of which stair creaked, which cabinet held their favorite coffee mugs, mugs that had themselves survived multiple kitchen purges on the strength of these visits.
Closing his eyes, he could taste intricate flavors in the humid midwestern air. Love certainly, between the couples tonight, the lines connecting those who were married expanded into a kind of net, painfully bright and humming with power. But love was no use to the Beast, and he focused his senses on the other interesting scents dancing under that glowing surface. Oh yes—there was the memory of arguments, things said that could be both forgiven and forgotten but which stayed there nonetheless, sending out their tendrils of quiet rot. There were worries, of course—the children, the money, the illnesses, the promotion—but these worries were so often products of love and thus were not the Beast’s preferred sustenance.
Deliciously, there were echoes of the future, things awaiting these people that they themselves already guessed at: there was divorce, there was addiction, there was grief for harm that would come to some of the children, and worse, guilt for those harms. If he concentrated, he could even sense tragedies for the children who weren’t even born yet, the ones who would be created by some of the children even now passing him by in the dark as they tracked fireflies.
He could eat all these things, of course. From where he stood now, he could fill his belly and leave behind—well, nothing very dramatic, just a shared feeling that these evenings, once so looked forward to, were somehow not the same anymore.
But it would be hard. Even with all their private sorrows, tonight these people were sheltered by their gathering together, much more than they knew. What the Beast longed for right now was some nice, simple uncomplicated despair. Surely someone, in one of these houses, was tipping over the edge, was ripe for emptiness, was craving it, even. Maybe even now, he’d be better off just moving along up the street—but he was, still, very hungry. He wavered.
Just then, the bushes separating him from the front yard shook violently. They parted to let a child through. It was a girl, one of those who was almost, but not quite, past childhood. She didn’t seem to be aware of his presence, although she was standing nearly on top of him.
To See by Donald Patten
The girl child held her breath as several other younger children dashed in front of the bushes, their erratic flashlights and noisy chatter fading as they turned the corner toward the back of house. The Beast assumed she would leave the way she’d arrived, now that the front of the house was quiet and dark again. Instead, she sat down on the mulch that surrounded the base of the bushes. The Beast had to back up quickly to prevent her from actually sitting on his hoof-like feet.
He was accustomed to being ignored by children, but he’d never been quite this close to one without getting some kind of reaction, if only in the form of a sudden impulse on the part of the child to be somewhere else. The girl child, however, gave every sign of staying put right here. In fact, she pulled out a small book, flipped through the pages until she found her place, then began to read in the bright light that spilled from the sunroom windows.
Now what?
He was still uncertain about the adults inside, and he also wasn’t completely sure he could get out of the shrubbery without alerting the girl. The girl who, he belatedly realized, he was a bit afraid of; his pulse had quickened again, and that rolling nausea had returned, making it impossible to decide what to do.
The problem with the girl was that she was terribly, terribly happy.
She didn’t live in this house, the Beast knew. She was visiting with her parents, and as he hunched awkwardly above her, he was assaulted by the joys — they were many, and recent — that this place held for her.
To Feel by Donald Patten
Standing this close, her pleasures were vivid: there was the family’s arrival two days ago, leaping from the station wagon (filled with the debris of eight hours of driving) to scale the low wall that bordered the driveway. Yes, there it was, the semi-wild backyard, the evergreen tree with branches hanging all the way to the ground, a natural haven for a quiet, bookish child. Then there was carrying her suitcase up, up, up, past the bedrooms on the second floor, the younger children’s rooms filled with bright, educational toys.
Up to the third floor, which was really an attic, tall enough in the middle to stand up, but with a roof that sloped down to meet the walls, which were covered in books. Nearly every surface in the single large attic room was packed with books. The smell of the attic library was the single most powerful sense memory the girl had of the house, and the Beast reeled from its intensity, barely noticing that the same scent rose from the book the girl held open as she read by the window light.
She was terribly happy, but she was also eleven years old, and that was an age rich in loss, the Beast knew. Already, she was just a little too old for the game unfolding around her, a shifting amalgam of hide-and-seek tag Marco Polo that would keep going for hours still. Already she was feeling the blind safety of childhood slipping away, even here, in the house of the people who’d been there when she was born, a magic she couldn’t have articulated, much less understood.
It wouldn’t take much, he knew. He knew how to find those tiny negative spaces of loss, how to breathe on one with great gentleness until it became an uncrossable missingness that was the end of childhood with its savage birthrights and protections, the beginning of despair.
Time passed.
The Beast waffled. He shifted his weight.
Time passed.
Jennifer stood, closing her book after committing the page number to memory. She brushed off the backs of her thighs where bits of mulch had stuck to them. Using one arm as a shield, she pushed through the wall of bushes that had hidden her from the younger kids. The parents had spilled out of the sunroom onto the front lawn now, calling to their offspring with great noise and hilarity.
She passed the hiding spot of the two kids whose parents were ready to leave: the two brothers were shushing each other underneath the huge tree whose branches came down all the way to the ground. Jennifer herself was staying here tonight and was more than ready to settle into her sleeping spot on the sofa in the family room.
She missed sleeping in the attic with her parents, in a sleeping bag with her face turned toward the low shelves packed with books arranged first vertically, then stacked horizontally on top of the tightly packed spines wherever space permitted. The books were varied; there were textbooks, mysteries, nonfiction hardcovers, dog-eared romance novels.
But as the older sibling she had been displaced to the living room several years ago, and the living room had its own treasures. The built-in bookcase held books more prestigious than those stored upstairs—large-format art books, academic works authored by colleagues of these friends of her parents — but arranged in much the same way. The shelves also held a fascinating selection of other objects: sculptures, small paintings, framed numbered prints which were continued onto the walls in larger pieces.
Jennifer loved the living room, so different from the neatly ordered living room in her own house, as she loved the attic and the dining room with its heavy, formal dining set covered in perilously high stacks of papers (guarded by a cat with the dark gray fur that adults insisted was called blue). As she loved the sunroom where the floor vibrated when you ran through it on the way to the backyard, making the card table sway so that the parents grabbed up their glasses, slick with condensation from the humid evening, and shouted laughing reminders not to let the door slam (reminders which no child ever heard, what with the door slamming all the time).
Sometimes she stayed up late after her parents tucked her into her sofa spot, watching the lights from occasional cars pass over the room, listening to the muted quarter-hour chimes from the cuckoo clock in the entryway. Jennifer liked sleeping, especially now as she was approaching adolescence, but the feeling of this house was always strongest at night, and it was nice to fall asleep slowly, letting her gangling limbs melt into its warmth, its books and clutter, its fullness.
This evening, though, she’d been up very late already, alternately playing with and evading the younger children, and she wasn’t awake long enough to hear even one of the clock’s chimes.
As she sank into sleep she heard, for a moment, an odd clopping sound. She thought it sounded like hooves, fumbling unevenly over the cobblestones, but that didn’t make sense; Jennifer didn’t always pay close attention to everything around her, but she had certainly never heard of horses being on Wendover Street.
The sound, seeming to make up its mind at last, moved further and further away, in the direction of the dark houses further up the road. As the sound faded Jennifer drifted into one of those golden, twilit dreams that only children really have, and by morning she didn’t remember hearing it at all.
To Hear by Donald Patten
About the Author
Lindsay Lennox is a queer, non-binary writer living in Colorado. In addition to a few (more mainstream) published pieces, they are currently revising a novel using sci-fi themes to explore gender identity, as well as working on a magical realist retelling of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
About the Artist
Donald Patten is an artist and cartoonist from Belfast, Maine. He produces oil paintings, illustrations, ceramic pieces and graphic novels. His art has been exhibited in galleries across Maine. His online portfolio can be found here.
