Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance

by Ruth Emmie Lang

  “Why not?”

  Weylyn tensed up. Boo must have sensed it because he ran to his side and stared me down, daring me to continue. “Roarke. We’ve been over this. Many times.”

  “Yeah, and it doesn’t make sense. You love her, right?”

  “Of course I do,” he snapped.

  “Then talk to her!”

  A deep growl resonated from Boo’s throat. “It’s not that simple,” Weylyn said, teeth clenched.

  “You won’t talk to her because you’re a coward,” I spat. Coward was the word Mom used when my dad wouldn’t tell Grandma to “mind her own goddamn business.” It had made him so angry once that he punched a hole in the living room wall.

  The word had the desired effect on Weylyn. His eyes narrowed, and a big, juicy vein popped out of his right temple. I had him where I wanted him. He just needed one final push. “I guess if you won’t talk to her, then I will.”

  Weylyn’s eyes flashed like someone had struck a match behind them. “No, you won’t!” he bellowed.

  A powerful gust of wind whipped through the front door and threw me flat on my back. From the floor, I watched the wind rip cobwebs off the ceiling, and all around me, things started falling: frying pans, toasters, shovels, shoes, books, the handlebars of a bike. Then I saw my knife—the one that had gotten stuck in the web weeks before—break loose and plummet toward me. I rolled under the kitchen table as the knife pierced the floorboards where my body had been a moment before.

  I poked my head out from under the table and witnessed a side of Weylyn I’d never seen before. He was no longer a silly man with sticks in his beard. He was the man from the stories, the one with the dark, wild hair and eyes of molten silver. Hurricane vanquisher; keeper of the light; wolf. He drew one deep breath and, as he exhaled, the wind subsided.

  “W-was that you?” I stammered. I was glad Ruby wasn’t here so she didn’t have to see the shine of unfallen tears in my eyes. I wasn’t sure if I was crying out of fear, because I had gotten a face full of cobwebs, or both, but either way, it was not one of my proudest moments.

  Weylyn rushed over to help me up. “Oh, Roarke. Are you okay?” he said, pulling me to my feet.

  I quickly wiped a tear from my cheek. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said casually. “I was just surprised, that’s all.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, it’s no big deal.”

  “Okay, then…” Weylyn’s words tapered off into silence. He sat down on a kitchen chair and buried his face in his hands. Boo emerged from the bathroom, where he had been hiding, and sat next to Weylyn. He whined softly and nuzzled into his neck. “Now you see why I can’t be around Mary,” he said, his voice muffled.

  I sat down next to him. “Yeah, I mean, the wind was pretty spooky. But you stopped it.”

  He lifted his head, and I noticed that his eyes were watering slightly. “It doesn’t matter. I still let it happen.”

  “So what? You had it under control in like five seconds. No harm, no foul. It was pretty awesome.”

  “You think so?”

  “I mean … it would have been cooler to see you stop a hurricane, but I’ll take it.”

  Weylyn laughed the way adults do after they’ve been sad (when their mouths realize they’re happy before their eyes do). “Next time, I’ll whip up something a little more interesting.”

  “Cool.”

  We settled into a comfortable silence while Weylyn’s brows slowly unknit themselves. When they had finally relaxed, he looked at me and said, “Tomorrow’s her birthday.”

  “Mary’s?”

  He nodded. “Matilda says she’s planning on celebrating alone.”

  “That sucks,” I said. “I’d be really mad if no one showed up to my birthday party.”

  “What if someone showed up that you hadn’t invited?”

  I shrugged. “That would be okay, I guess. It would mean he was a better friend than the ones who were invited and didn’t show.”

  “You’re probably right,” he said, bending over and yanking my knife out of the floorboards.

  “You’re not gonna let her have a crappy birthday, are you?”

  Weylyn hesitated.

  “I can go with you if you’re scared.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out.

  “Come on,” I said, playfully poking him in the arm. “I dare you.”

  Weylyn relaxed a little and smiled nervously. “Will you help me with something?”

  “Sure.”

  “I need you to pick me some flowers. Daffodils,” he said. Then almost to himself, “It has to be daffodils.”

  book 6

  OLD MAN SPIDER

  WILDWOOD FOREST, OREGON

  2017

  60

  WEYLYN GREY

  My name is Weylyn Grey, and I’m near-sighted, allergic to ragweed, and my feet are flat. I can’t cast spells, I don’t grant wishes, and I’m not sure if I can turn a frog into a prince, but I have no intention of finding out. Some people like to think I can affect the weather, but I’d still recommend a good, old-fashioned umbrella for keeping the rain off. It’s also been said that I can talk to animals, but if you want me to teach your dog to speak English, I’m sorry. You’re out of luck.

  When I was a boy, my kindergarten teacher asked the class to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up. The other kids drew pictures of astronauts, cowboys, and princesses. They wanted fame, fortune, adventure. I wanted none of those things, so I drew myself wearing a sensible suit and a briefcase.

  “What are you supposed to be, Weylyn?” my teacher asked.

  “A man with a job,” I said, satisfied.

  But the universe had other plans for me.

  I remember one of the boys in my class, Gregory, drew himself as a wizard fighting a dragon. I ran into him ten years ago at a Boise bus station. He now works for H&R Block.

  I’ve been called magic, but I wouldn’t use that term exactly. I like to think of myself as always being in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time. Very rarely am I simply in an acceptable place at a generally convenient time. That said, I find those rare occasions very pleasant, mostly because they give me time to work on my crosswords.

  Mary never called me the M-word. She was skeptical and practical and delightfully cynical. Despite her pragmatism, Mary had a big heart. One time, when Merlin had a dreadful cold, she sat with him all day, feeding him apples and singing sea shanties (Merlin loved sea shanties). She even let him sleep in her bed, which I’m sure afforded her very little sleep of her own—if you’ve ever heard a pig with a cold snoring, you’d understand. I pretended to also be sick so she would sing me sea shanties, too, but I couldn’t fool her. She sang to me, anyway.

  I have no doubt that Mary took excellent care of Merlin after I left. I wouldn’t have trusted him with anyone else.

  I searched for her for five years. It’s harder to find a person than you might think, especially when that person has a common name like Mary and has changed her last name. I never met her husband, although I saw him once, watering their garden and wearing a pair of lemon-yellow galoshes. He seemed like a respectable fellow, although respectability is hard to judge when you’re hiding in a tree.

  I wanted to make sure he was taking care of her, so I enlisted the help of my neighbors. In the mornings, my feathered friends checked up on her, singing songs outside her kitchen window while she and her husband ate breakfast. The squirrels and rabbits would take turns dropping in on them in the afternoons when they were most likely to be working on the garden together or reading on the back patio. And in the evenings, the raccoons would shuffle down their chimney like little burglars and watch Mary and her husband from behind the ceramic fireplace logs. They watched TV at night, but lately, the husband wasn’t there, the raccoons reported. He hadn’t watched TV in over three months.

  Or worked on the garden, according to the squirrels.

  Or eaten
breakfast, according to the birds.

  I asked my friends how Mary looked. Was she okay? Was she sad?

  They confirmed the latter.

  I had lived less than ten minutes from Mary Jane for over nine months, and I had left her alone. She had the man in the yellow galoshes. She didn’t need a fool like me with cobwebs in his hair and nothing to comb it with. At least that’s what I told myself.

  But if I’m being honest—which I almost always am—I was scared. What if she didn’t recognize me? Or worse—what if she didn’t want to see me? I certainly didn’t deserve her forgiveness. Then again, I never really thought I deserved her love, either. The man in the yellow galoshes probably deserved her love. I bet he never almost killed her with a snowstorm and ran off to live with wolves. Men who wear yellow galoshes don’t really get involved in that particular sort of mischief.

  But now the man, her husband, had left, and I couldn’t bear the thought of Mary being alone.

  Not again.

  * * *

  Roarke and I hid behind a crop of fir trees across the street from Mary’s. Hers was a little, square house; neat, like a perfectly wrapped package. The lawn was trimmed, and the brick path that led to the front door was lined with red flowers.

  “I still can’t believe Mary is the Wolf Lady,” said Roarke as he handed me the bouquet of daffodils he had picked earlier. “That’s so cool.” I imagined Mary holding a wolf pup up by the armpits for the children to see, like the baboon in that movie with the cartoon lions. Mary probably even showed the older kids her scar from when she got bit—Widow had felt very sorry about the whole thing. She’d had a bit of a temper.

  “So…” Roarke stared at me expectantly.

  “So, what?” I answered, knowing full well what he was referring to.

  “So, go!”

  “Sssh!” I hissed. “She’ll hear you.”

  “Hurry up and do it already,” he said, scratching his arm. “I’m getting a ton of mosquito bites out here.”

  “Fine! Just give me a second.” My stomach churned, and I was positive I was going to experience that morning’s breakfast in reverse all over Roarke’s father’s hand-me-downs.

  “How do I look?” I asked the boy, smoothing out the wrinkles in my shirt.

  “Good, I guess,” he said, shrugging.

  I wasn’t reassured. “Well. Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck. Tell Mary I say happy birthday.”

  “I will,” I said, then sucked in a deep breath and stepped out from behind the trees into the midmorning sun.

  Crossing the street was the easy part. The hard part came when my foot hit that brick path. My courage fizzled and doubt took over, hatching a dozen little spider eggs of fear in my mind. The spiders crawled around on the spongy surface of my brain, whispering things like: Go home. She doesn’t want to see you. She’ll never forgive you. I stopped dead in my tracks, like the bricks had magically come apart and built a wall in front of me.

  I would have married her. And I would have had kids if she had wanted them. Sometimes, I daydreamed about them riding Boo around the backyard like a horse and eating warm sponge cake that Mary had just made, their fat little faces sticky with raspberry syrup. I tried to limit my time spent in those fantasies. They had a tendency to make me sad afterward.

  By all accounts, I’ve led an extraordinary life, and I’m sure that is part of what drew Mary to me in the first place. But I like to think that I could have been Man with a Job and she would have loved me all the same. If I had been Man with a Job, Mary wouldn’t have been caught in that blizzard.

  I wondered if Mary the Wolf Lady could love Old Man Spider. I hoped she hadn’t heard the same ghastly stories that Roarke had heard about me. I wouldn’t expect her to believe them, but still, it wasn’t the first impression I wanted to make after all these years.

  “Hey!” I heard Roarke hiss from behind me. “Don’t stop!”

  Something whistled. I looked up to find a captive audience—the birds, squirrels, and raccoons—perched in the tree above, leaning forward on their branches in anticipation. I didn’t want to let my friends down, so I took another deep breath and continued.

  I made my way down the path, nearly crushing the bouquet of daffodils in my clenched fist. As I walked, the garden on either side of me began to change. The cropped grass grew and grew until it was long and shaggy and leaning. The flowers leaped out from their beds and spread across the brick like flames until the path was a long red carpet of petals. Other, wilder species of flowers burst from the ground, sending clumps of earth flying. Their stems grew taller than the grass, taller than me, and when they were done climbing, their buds fireworked into star-shaped blooms of every color imaginable.

  At the time, I barely noticed the transformation. All I could focus on was Mary’s front door getting closer and closer to me. Thick swaths of ivy crawled up the front of the house, and by the time I reached the stoop, the door was nearly hidden from view. I grabbed hold of the brass knocker just as a green tendril was wrapping itself around it.

  I knocked.

  I’d stared down tornadoes and hurricanes, and yet, I’d never been this uncertain in all my life. My heart fluttered like moth wings, and my knees trembled. I was sweaty, dry-mouthed, nauseous, and slightly faint. I considered leaping into the tall grass and hiding there until Mary went back inside to grab her Weedwacker.

  Thirty seconds had passed. Maybe she isn’t home, I thought.

  I had used up all my courage with the first knock. I didn’t have any left for a second, so I continued to wait.

  Sixty seconds. She’s not home, I thought. I glanced over at Roarke, who was peeking out from behind a tree. He looked almost as disappointed as I felt. We both knew I wasn’t brave enough to come back another day and try again.

  Then the door opened.

  Mary’s chestnut hair was pulled back into a graceful bun, save one silver tendril that curled over her right temple like a sweet birch leaf. Her eyes hadn’t dulled with age. They were still a bright, eager green, and the lines on her face didn’t look carved out by time, but rather like they had been drawn on with a fine lead pencil. But it wasn’t just her appearance that made her lovely. It was the tiny, wristwatch movements in her lips and chin. The gentle sighing of her breath. The lavender scent of her clothes.

  I thought she wouldn’t recognize me, but the moment she opened the door, she said, “Weylyn Grey,” like she’d been expecting me.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” I said, slightly disappointed.

  Mary glanced up at my friends in the tree, and they scattered. “I haven’t used my fireplace in over six months because there’s always a raccoon in it. I figured you probably had something to do with it.”

  She looked past me into the small jungle I’d accidentally grown for her. “I like what you’ve done with the garden.”

  “I’m sorry, Mary Jane. I didn’t—”

  But before I could finish apologizing, she wrapped her arms around me, and I wrapped mine around her in return.

  And there we stood until the years we’d spent apart felt like minutes.

  61

  MARY PENLORE

  “Somewhere warm,” Weylyn said when I asked him where he wanted to go. It was September, and we were sitting on the back porch, watching a skein of geese point the way south. It had been five months since Weylyn had shown up on my doorstep, and for five months we’d filled our days with long, lazy breakfasts, walks in the woods with Boo, and visits to the wolf sanctuary that I owned and still worked at part-time. It was a peaceful, unassuming life scored by birds in the morning and crickets in the evening, and because it was precious to us, we handled it with care. Some days, the sun would shine and on others it would rain, but Weylyn swore he had nothing to do with either. “I prefer to be surprised these days,” he said one afternoon as we watched a summer shower from the comfort of our bed.

  “Me, too,” I agreed, although I knew he wasn’t only talking about the weather. I had
noticed the far-off look in Weylyn’s eyes as we watched TV together, the way he looked past the screen and through the window at willow fronds that danced like wind chimes in the breeze. Once, I came home from work and found him on the back porch, pacing back and forth like a caged animal. When I asked him what was wrong, he said he was just walking off a cramp.

  Weylyn wasn’t the only one feeling restless. The need for adventure tugged at my tendons, and at night, I’d toss and turn, imagining Weylyn and me trekking through mossy rain forests and sandstone plateaus or floating down a river on a raft we’d built ourselves. Inevitably, we’d wander off course and discover we’d been walking in circles, but it didn’t matter. We weren’t really lost as long as we were together.

  So, on that cool September evening, as we sat watching the sun set one minute earlier than it had the night before, I said, “Somewhere warm sounds nice. I’ve always wanted to see the desert.”

  “The desert, huh?”

  “Yeah. We should go.”

  Weylyn’s silver eyes studied me, trying to figure out if I was serious or not. He knew how much I loved my little house with the fir trees in the front yard, and a desert was the furthest thing from it. “Are you sure?”

  “Not for good,” I was quick to add. “Just until we feel like we’ve seen what we need to see.”

  Weylyn flashed me one of his wraparound smiles, then watched the last of the geese vanish behind the tree line. “When do we leave?”

  * * *

  The next morning, we packed up the car with a few essentials and hit the road. Weylyn asked that we drive west first until we hit the coast, then south toward California. “It’s about time we saw the ocean again,” he said, eagerly unfolding the road map and tracing his finger down the red line that denoted the 101.

  Weylyn’s face was glued to the window as we snaked along the Pacific Coast Highway. On our left towered ancient redwood forests, and on our right, azure waves tumbled and crashed into craggy cliff faces. Weylyn pointed to an exit for a nearby beach. “Let’s stop and stretch our legs.”