The German Shepherd was right behind me. I was pushing my legs with everything I had, but the already drawn out game of tag was weighing on my straining lungs. The dog barked once. It barked again, even closer now. I could hear it panting, deeper and heavier than my own labored breaths. My jeans stretched. The cut on my knee was cold.
Another bark, and then a new yip, this time a high-pitched, pained sound. I looked behind me — the dog had leapt into the air — contorting into a mid-jump ball as it hit the electric fence. I wanted to stop, to allow the stitch on my side to ease for even a second. But the small victory did not equal the ultimate one, and I pushed myself through the previously guarded area into new and strange backyards.
I could only catch glimpses of the creature. Its brown and gray skin only stood out for seconds at a time as it leapt from behind trees and over bushes. The form took a sudden right behind a patch of shrubs and vanished from sight entirely. Suddenly, a gurgling cry rose from behind the brush — a wet, deeply unhappy sound.
Wheezing, I rounded the corner and found myself for a second time face to face with the monster. The scene was wrong though, discomfort and faint nausea wiping out anything close to triumph. When the hero confronts the villain, they are always ready. They have to square off to make it a fair fight. This monster was not ready, nor was he standing. As I cleared the underbrush, pricking my finger on a thorny vine, the monster wasn’t even looking at me. Its thin arms, made of fragile-looking skin pulled over knobby bones, were holding its leg tentatively. The delicate leg was bent at an unnatural angle — crooked at the knee the way smaller children sat. The monster was breathing heavily from its gash-like mouth, chewing on my father’s tie. I followed its gaze and felt my own stomach flip as I realized that among the trash of the undiscovered brush, the monster had caught its foot on a rotted board. A single nail, now caked with some muscus-like black substance jutted from the center of the creature’s foot.
I noticed that the creature hand had only three fingers, each with webbing between the digits that poked tenderly at its foot. I could not speak, instead watching as the creature lost its strength in the battle to shift the lopsided board. The monster began to cry. Not grown-up tears like I had seen at grandma’s funeral. Those had been stony-faced tears as parents and uncles and aunts hugged one another. They had cried with half-hearted smiles on their faces. These were child tears — the kind that came spilling out no matter how little you wanted anyone else to see.
A leaf crunched under my sneaker. The creature jolted upwards at the sound of my footstep, not sensing my presence until that moment. I wasn’t afraid anymore, but looking down at the struggling monster, I didn’t feel like a hero either.
“Please…” The word belonged to the monster. The sound came from its off-center mouth, muffled by the tie, and choked through sobbing tears.
“You got hurt,” I said. The question sounded as confused as I felt. They weren’t the words of a hero at all.
“It got my foot. I ran. Please…”
The same please again. The creature spoke awkwardly, like I did in Spanish class trying to spin the few vocabulary words I knew into sentences during speaking tests. I took another tentative step into the clearing, crunching a shard of glass beneath my sneaker. Littered in the bushes were all shapes and colors of trash, bits and pieces of peoples’ homes they did not want anymore, or did not want to be seen. Several empty bottles lined a ledge behind the monster who now had its full attention on me.
“I’m sorry. I ran. I won’t anymore. Please help…”
The expression of the monster was shifting in inhuman ways that made it difficult to read. It had eyes, but they were all black with pupils that took up the whole eyeball. It was completely hairless, without even eyebrows to show if it was angry like my sister or scared like I was.
“You have to promise you won’t hurt me.” I was trying to make my voice sound deep by pushing my chest outward.
“And you,” said the monster.
“I’m not the monster,” I responded. “You’re the monster. You’re the one that scares people.”
“You jumped. Scared me. Made me run,” said the creature.
I scared a monster? Heroes didn’t jump out and scare people. Only bad guys did that. I thought about the creature’s surprised face when I leapt from the tree, only now realizing it had run away out of fear. A warm rush of guilt washed through me at this sudden shift in the scene. The creature before me now was unhappy and in pain — it was no longer any more a monster than a mouse caught in a trap.
What do you call a monster who doesn’t want to hurt you?
I didn’t think there was a page in any book for that.
“You’re right,” I said, taking another step closer to the creature. “I’m sorry about that, but you were hurting my Dad.”
The creature didn’t respond, and would no longer meet my eyes. I wondered if it felt guilty.
“Wasn’t hurting,” it said.
The creature shifted, pain shooting through its leg. A fresh well of tears leaked from its eyes, and it began shivering. It was only then I realized the creature was naked. Not in the way that animals were naked, but in the personal way that left people feeling uncomfortable. He looked alone and cold.
“Hold still, I’m going to take the nail out.”
The creature tensed, watching as I put one hand around the wooden board. I placed another hand on its ankle. The skin was cooler than my own and had a clammy texture despite the warm day. It reminded me of petting sting rays at the aquarium, my father’s hand guiding mine beneath the water to feel the smooth skin of the flapping fish.
“This is going to hurt. I’m sorry,” I said. I realized as I spoke that the fear going through me was no longer for myself.
“I’m going to count to three,” I said to the creature. It looked at me as though not understanding.
“One. Two,” I was bracing myself. “Three!” I pulled as hard as I could. The nail slid from the creature’s foot with a dull squish like Play-doh squeezed between fingers. The creature gave a short wail and raised both hands to cover its mouth.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I repeated desperately. I had felt the gritty friction of nail against bone and the pain became too palpable. The creature writhed, its slippery skin slipping from my grasp. Free, he curled into a ball on the forest floor, the picture of defeat.
“Are… are you okay?” I asked, unsure how to continue.
It took a few moments, still huddled in the mud, for the creature to respond. It nodded, keeping its face hidden beneath scrawny arms.
I thought about what to do. Today had not gone at all as planned, and I wasn’t sure what type of story this had turned into. The bad guy hadn’t turned out to be what I’d been ready for, leaving me adrift in an unfamiliar plot-line.
What would Dad do right now?
He’d protect anyone who got hurt, thought the younger me.
That’s dumb. You don’t even know what this thing is. It was attacking your Dad only last night, retorted my older self.
But it said that it wasn’t.
And you believe it? You know what you saw.
I don’t know what I’m seeing now.
I looked hard at the creature, still sniffling on the ground. It wouldn’t be able to leave the underbrush, not after what it had been through. I didn’t think it would have Band-Aids to keep out infection either. The older me in my head wasn’t wrong, but that didn’t mean it had to be right either.
I got down on my hands and knees next to the creature, trying to meet it at eye level.
“You can’t stay here,” I said. “We have to fix your foot.”
The creature sniffed again, wiping tears from its misshapen face.
It looked at me, all pupils. “Have to go.”
“Where do you have to go?”
The creature looked confused, shaking its head without an answer.
“You can come with me then.”
“Where?
<
br /> “To my house.”
“Don’t like your house. Lonely.”
This didn’t make any sense. My house was full of people. This creature was the one all alone.
“No it’s not. My whole family lives there. I’ll have to keep you hidden though. I don’t think they’ll be okay with you staying.” I thought about my sister, eyebrows turned downwards at the hurt creature. She wouldn’t understand.
“That’s not what he thinks,” said the creature.
“Who?”
“In the bed, whose dreams I ate.”
Chapter Five
The creature hoisted one cold arm over my shoulder to hobble alongside me through the backyards. The dog that had chased the two of us did not bark this time, resigned to follow our progress along the edge of the property with its beady eyes.
“We have to be careful that no one sees us when we go in the house,” I said, trying to keep our walk at a distance from the windows looking onto the backyard.
“Won't see us,” said the creature. Its breathing was shallow, and I could feel a shiver go throughout its body as it put weight on its hurt foot.
The creature turned out to be right. Just as we passed beneath the tree line, I saw Mom’s face through the kitchen window. I was certain she would see the two of us, but her face turned back into the house without a further glance. The light of the sun felt dimmer somehow. It may have been my own exhaustion from the events, or perhaps the early evenings of Fall were setting in sooner than expected.
My new creature stumbled up the stairs beside me, letting out defeated whimpers as its wounded foot caught the hard wood on every other step. Its bare feet seemed poorly-made for walking as a human would. If it had come from the ocean, that would explain part of its odd features, though I wondered why it didn’t have visible fins or gills.
Maybe it’s closer to a frog? I wondered. That would make the most sense.
I closed and locked the door to my room behind us. The creature limped to my bed and sat down, a sigh of relief escaping its mouth. My father’s tie was now tangled in its clenched three-fingered fist. He caught me looking at the mangled stripes, and offered me the tie in its outstretched hand.
“No, it’s okay,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t think he even wants it anymore.”
The creature lowered its arm, both of us uncomfortable in the silence. I wondered if it could feel guilty. Instead of talking, the creature looked back at the hole in its foot. The inky blood had formed a crust over both sides, like a spot of dirt he was smart enough not to clean. Still, he poked at the wound tenderly, the same way I knew I was going to every day for the next week over my skinned knee.
That reminds me.
“Wait here,” I said, pointing one finger at the floor of my room. “I’m going to get Band-Aids. You don’t want to get an infection.”
The creature nodded, attention still fixed on his foot.
Back down the stairs, I darted past Mom, who was still in the kitchen washing some mixture of vegetables in the sink. I opened the door to the basement and hurried down to the tin shelves that held all the extra groceries Mom bought with coupons at one time or another. I remembered coming back from a particularly heavy trip and putting a roll of bandages on one of the lower shelves. Groceries had always been one of the worst chores to be stuck with with around the house. If I took too many bags at once, my arms hurt and I couldn’t lift them onto the kitchen counter. If I took too few, I would end up taking more trips than I needed to, which was even worse.
“Silas?” Mom’s voice came from above me. “What are you looking for?”
“Just a Band-Aid,” I said, attempting a casual tone.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
I looked down at my knee, thankful for the perfect excuse, “I fell out of a tree on my knee.”
“Silas!” Mom’s voice was shrill. I realized too late that changing jumping to falling made the small pricks of red seem a lot worse than they actually were. Before I could explain my story, however, Mom was down the stairs and holding my shoulders.
“That is a serious scrape, Silas. You’re going to need disinfectant.”
Oh no.
Her undeniable grip pulled me back up the stairs.
Christopher stared with mild interest as Mom uncapped a bottle of something clear from beneath the sink before pouring a dose onto a washrag. I knew what was going to come next, but there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“You need to learn to be more careful,” my mother chided as the washrag pressed against my raw skin. The spasm of pain was instantly worse than any infection the natural world could concoct. I jerked back, but Mom was ready. She caught my leg and held the flaming rag to the searing remnants of what had once been a functioning knee.
“Hold still. If we don’t take care of this now it’ll get infected, and then we’ll have to take you to Dr. Longshore. He’ll make you take all kinds of shots, and they’ll have to drain it with needles. You don’t want that, do you?”
At this moment, I was willing to let Dr. Longshore do anything he wanted as long as it meant Mom would take away the scorching chemical. She rubbed my knee once over with the disinfectant, taking the last of my skin with it. I looked down, half expecting the bone to be exposed, but no. The scatter of red lines had turned a fresh-looking pink, wiped clean of the resulting mud and blood from my afternoon chase.
“You tore your jeans,” said Mom, the scolding tone still in her voice. I wondered if there was something that happened to adults, maybe during the teenage years, that made them alright with torture.
“It’s okay,” I said, speeding away the moment Mom let go of my leg. I was back downstairs, pocketing the beige Band-Aids next to the Cocoa Pebbles before she could use some other agent under the misdirection of “disinfectant.”
“I’m going to put the bandage on myself,” I said, taking the steps back upstairs two at a time. That had been awful, and my creature waiting for me in my room had better be grateful for my sacrifice. As I turned the knob to my bedroom door, the thought crossed my mind that there may well not be anyone waiting for me on the other side. If I found myself trapped by the enemy, what would I do? I wanted to think that I would keep a brave face — that I would stand up to the nefarious forces beyond my control. But I knew that running was likely to be the more realistic outcome. I was surprised, therefore, by the wave of relief I felt upon returning, finding that my creature had only moved himself to a sitting position at the foot of my bed. He held the copy of One Piece I’d been reading last night between his webbed fingers, eyes darting this way and that across the pages.
“Do you know how to read?” I asked.
“I know how to read through peoples’ memories,” he said. The garbling of his words had smoothed out in the few minutes I had been gone. He was no longer shivering, despite still being naked. I knew the floorboards must be cold against his skin.
“You said something about that earlier. You eat peoples’ dreams?” I asked, bringing out the bandages.
“Drink is the better word,” he said. “Memories and dreams are close together, I don’t keep those, I only taste them. I drink what you call hope.”
I thought about my father this morning. His face had sagged, like a balloon with too much of the air let out.
“You shouldn’t do that,” I said, tearing one of the Band-Aids from its wrapping. “It made my Dad upset, and he wasn’t nice to me this morning because of you.”
The creature seemed to ponder this. I handed him the sticky Band-aid, which he layered over the crusting scab.
“He won’t stay that way. Hope is like water. You can drink and drink, but it always finds a way to come back.”
It was reassuring that my father would not be trapped in this melancholy, but the creature’s words failed to put me entirely at ease.
“It’s still not a nice thing to do. It makes people sad. You should find something else to drink.”
“You’re one to talk,” said
the creature. I was amazed by how easily we were communicating now. He seemed to be learning the language as quickly as the words could form in his lopsided mouth.
“What do you mean? I don’t drink hope or whatever it is you do.”
The creature held up the comic book. In the central panel a pirate held up a massive cut of meat on a bone.
“You eat the skin and bones of animals. I don’t get a choice about what I’m thirsty for, but I think my way is still better.”
“Those aren’t people we’re eating,” I said, looking at the pirate.
“Neither am I,” said the creature.
“What are you?” I asked. The rush of the chase was wearing off, exhaustion replacing the twitchy energy in my muscles.
The creature was looking at me again, weighing how to answer my question.
“I’m from a different place.” He said the word different oddly, as though uncertain whether it had been the right word to use or not.
“Then why did you come here?” I asked.
“I didn’t get to choose,” he said, repositioning on the hard wood. “Someone called me here, someone like me. I was alone, and then I washed up here.”
He is from the ocean then. I could feel a new well of excitement rising in me. There is another chapter after all.
I had so many questions to ask: what it was like at the bottom of the ocean, how he could survive the change in pressure, why he was able to speak even though he lived underwater? I hadn’t put my thoughts in a straight line before my mother’s voice called me downstairs to remind me it was laundry night. The creature looked at me. Even though he still fell short of anything human, it seemed to be mimicking my facial expressions — the look of concern apparent despite not having eyebrows to crease or lips to squeeze.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, getting to my feet.
“I don’t like being alone.”
It wasn’t until this display of unexpected vulnerability that I realized the creature could be a kid like me. He was small enough, and the quiver in his voice was something I had heard in myself. I heard it last when I’d become lost in a shopping mall. Maggie was supposed to be holding my hand, but for one reason or another I had found myself alone in the maze of clothing, all sense of direction gone. That time, too, the uncomfortable fear had come bubbling up that because I couldn’t find my family they wouldn’t be able to find me ever again. The creature looking at me now had that same desperation, the same dread that the walls of the unfamiliar world would close in on him at any moment.
Deep, Deep Ocean Page 5
