“I thought you wanted me to make friends. Remember the homeschool girls?”
In order to stave off social isolation, all of us homeschooled kids got corralled together once a month. We’d emerge blinking into the light to stand awkwardly in the corner of parks and unfamiliar homes. Because our moms were friends I was always forced to mingle with these two sisters. They liked to play dress-up and dangle Christmas ornaments from my horns. It wasn’t all bad, though. In the summertime they had a homemade Slip ’n Slide made from a black plastic tarp and a garden hose (initial hose-blast hot, standing water summer-baked inside) and that shit was tons of fun.
Dad stares at me over the tops of his bifocals. “You’ve changed, son.”
“Nope.” I tap my horns. “Still a Minotaur.”
That night I walk back to the park. It’s deserted except for Jenna, looking lonely on the swings.
“What’s up?”
“Same old, same old.” Jenna looks away. “Waiting for Dave.”
“Have you and Dave been dating long?”
“Seems like forever.” Jenna’s hair blows backwards. She pushes a few stray brown strands away from her face. “Do you ever think about the future?”
I tell her that I think about it a lot. Where will I be in ten, twenty, thirty years? A crazy recluse on the hill, bull-fur growing grey by a crackling fire? Or will I be quivering on a cliff-edge surrounded by torch-waving villagers? Deep down I know it’s not going to end well.
Jenna dangles from the swing and drags the toe of her Doc Martens through the dirt. “You don’t really think that.”
I shrug. “Why not? It’s not all fun and games being a Minotaur.”
Jenna scowls, suddenly fierce. “You think you’re the only one with problems?”
She leaps from the swing and storms away.
I stand there like an idiot and then I run after her.
In the parking lot a black Camaro rolls past me and I get ready for the inevitable splattering of soda but then the driver’s side window rolls down and there’s Dave grinning behind the wheel. ”What’s shaking?”
I point to Jenna’s retreating back. “Jenna—”
“I’ll handle it.”
Dave guns the engine and rolls out. I watch him go and think, maybe I should buy a leather jacket.
That night I have that dream again. The one with the villagers and the pitchforks. My head on a wall. Caged behind bars. Shot ‘by mistake’ in the forest. I’m so tired of being afraid.
The next day at school Coach calls me down to his office.
“You must be the Minotaur.”
“What gave me away?”
Coach ignores my sass and I grin because I can guess what’s coming.
“Mitch, have you ever seen the movie Teen Wolf? And to a lesser extent, Teen Wolf Too?”
Oh hell yes. I can see me now, strutting down the hallway in my varsity jacket, cheerleaders with short flapping skirts running toward me, Jenna smiling as I push them aside and take her in my arms.
Coach keeps talking. “I know things are different. You’re a Minotaur, not a Werewolf. We’re talkin’ football, not basketball. Middleton has a strong football tradition. We were district champs back in 1972. Remember?”
“I was negative ten.”
“Anyway, Mitch, we want to rename the team. The Middleton Minotaurs! How does that grab you?”
I grin. That grabs me just fine. “One problem, Coach. It might be tough getting a helmet my size.”
“What?”
“You know, my horns. We’ll have to keep ’em under wraps.”
Coach shakes his head. “No, no. You won’t be playing.” Coach points over to the corner where two halves of a ratty bull costume lean against the cinder block wall. “You like it? I got it second hand from the Brownstown Bulls. The assistant coaches and I think, uh, it’ll make the fans feel more comfortable.” Coach pats my shoulder. “Don’t worry. You can be the head.”
“I don’t want to be the head.”
Coach frowns. “You want to be the butt? Frankly, Mitch, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“I don’t want to be the butt, either.”
When I was a kid I dreamed about going to Chicago. Somehow I’d get there—hitchhiking, winning a free flight, climbing aboard a billionaire’s private railcar—and then I’d become the mascot for the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan and I would ride around in the Chicago Bulls bus solving mysteries.
Really, what other jobs are out there for a teenage Minotaur? Or for that matter, a middle-aged Minotaur? Minotaur middle management. An ol’ paunchy Minotaur waddlin’ after the morning paper before heaving himself into the front seat of his second-hand Toyota with a custom-built ‘sun roof’ so he has someplace to cram his fat bald head.
What else? Door to door salesman. No, that’s out. You look through your peephole and see a giant man with a bull’s head—are you going to open your door? No.
Restaurant spokesperson. I’ve thought about it a lot. Basically I’d go into a partnership with a dude who owned a barbecue joint. Then I’d stand out front to meet the people and be all like, Hey man, this BBQ is pretty good, and they’d be like, Well all right, let’s eat! But really that’s just me being a different kind of mascot and anyway Pop says the restaurant business is tough. Four out of every five fail in the first year, or something like that. I think it’s because being in the restaurant business is seen as glamorous. Four out of every five MRI clinics don’t fail because people don’t up and open an MRI clinic on a romantic whim. Oh, Richard! Let’s open our own MRI Clinic like the one we saw in Tuscany!
What else? Scary rodeo clown. Carnival freak. Undercover work’s out. I’m not exactly incognito. The dealers would catch wise pretty damn quick—Yo, don’t sell to the Minotaur.
Coach smiles. “So what do you say?”
“I’ll think about it.”
That Friday, Jenna and Dave and I go camping. On our way out of town, we pass grey-faced men outside the soup kitchen, weeds struggling up through sidewalk cracks. What would it be like to be mayor of this town? Come for the drag racing, stay for the meth. Prostitutes? Shuttered factories? Empty warehouses with busted-out windows? Hey, we’ve got ’em!
We roll into the campsite. Bonfire and beer, orange and red sparks rising into the night. Dave rummages through the cooler, pulls out three beers and then drinks them.
“What’s eating you, Mitch?”
“Coach wants me to be a mascot.”
“Oh yeah?”
“He says it could really help lift the town’s spirits.”
“What did you say?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
Jenna snorts. “It’s going to take a lot more than some stupid football game to save this town.”
I follow Jenna down to the water.
“Are you okay?”
“Dave and I broke up.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It happens.”
“I’m still sorry.”
Jenna goes off to gather more firewood. Dave and I watch her go.
“She likes you, man.”
“Yeah, right. ‘Beauty and the Beast.’”
“She doesn’t care about that.” Dave smiles wryly. “She dated me, didn’t she?”
Jenna returns and sits down beside me. Dave passes out, legs tucked beneath his oversized sweatshirt like he’s ten years old.
We watch the moonlight bounce off the surface of the lake.
Jenna stands up. “Let’s go swimming.”
“I didn’t bring my suit.”
Jenna smiles. “Neither did I.”
Sand crunches beneath our feet. Skin and sand and waves and wind. Why live in fear? Sure, I could end up a mounted head on a plaque in an oak panelled living room that smells like stale cigars. Or I could be a half-assed mascot for some crappy small town football team. Or I could
own my own factory, glistening bottles of Minotaur Brand Hot Sauce rolling down the production line, crowds of happy workers heading off to cash their paycheques. Hell, anything could happen.
She smiles as she swims, cutting through moonlight.
weep for day
INDRAPRAMIT DAS
I was eight years old the first time I saw a real, living Nightmare. My parents took my brother and I on a trip from the City-of-Long-Shadows to the hills at Evening’s edge, where one of my father’s clients had a manse. Father was a railway contractor. He hired out labour and resources to the privateers extending the frontiers of civilization towards the frozen wilderness of the dark Behind-the-Sun. Aptly, we took a train up to the foothills of the great Penumbral Mountains.
It was the first time my brother and I had been on a train, though we’d seen them tumble through the city with their cacophonic engines, cumulous tails of smoke and steam billowing like blood over the rooftops when the red light of our sun caught them. It was also the first time we had been anywhere close to Night—Behind-the-Sun—where the Nightmares lived. Just a decade before we took that trip, it would have been impossible to go as far into Evening as we were doing with such casual comfort and ease.
Father had prodded the new glass of the train windows, pointing to the power-lines crisscrossing the sky in tandem with the gleaming lines of metal railroads silvering the hazy landscape of progress. He sat between my brother Velag and I, our heads propped against the bulk of his belly, which bulged against his rough crimson waistcoat. I clutched that coat and breathed in the sweet smell of chemlis gall that hung over him. Mother watched with a smile as she peeled indigos for us with her fingers, laying them in the lap of her skirt.
“Look at that. We’ve got no more reason to be afraid of the dark, do we, my tykes?” said Father, his belly humming with the sound of his booming voice.
Dutifully, Velag and I agreed there wasn’t.
“Why not?” he asked us, expectant.
“Because of the Industrialization, which brings the light of Day to the darkness of Night,” we chimed, a line learned both in school and home (inaccurate, as we’d never set foot in Night itself). Father laughed. I always slowed down on the word ‘industrialization,’ which caused Velag and I to say it at different times. He was just over a year older than me, though.
“And what is your father, children?” Mother asked.
“A knight of Industry and Technology, bringer of light under Church and Monarchy.”
I didn’t like reciting that part, because it had more than one long “y” word, and felt like a struggle to say. Father was actually a knight, though not a knight-errant for a while. He had been too big by then to fit into a suit of plate-armour or heft a heavy sword around, and knights had stopped doing that for many years anyway. The Industrialization had swiftly made the pageantry of adventure obsolete.
Father wheezed as we reminded him of his knighthood, as if ashamed. He put his hammy hands in our hair and rubbed. I winced through it, as usual, because he always forgot about the pins in my long hair, something my brother didn’t have to worry about. Mother gave us the peeled indigos, her hands perfumed with the citrus. She was the one who taught me how to place the pins in my hair, both of us in front of the mirror looking like different sized versions of each other.
I looked out the windows of our cabin, fascinated by how everything outside slowly became bluer and darker as we moved away from the City-of-Long-Shadows, which lies between the two hemispheres of Day and Night. Condensation crawled across the corners of the double-glazed panes as the train took us further east. Being a studious girl even at that age, I deduced from school lessons that the air outside was becoming rapidly colder as we neared Night’s hemisphere, which has never seen a single ray of our sun and is theorized to be entirely frozen. The train, of course, was kept warm by the same steam and machinery that powered its tireless wheels and kept its lamps and twinkling chandeliers aglow.
“Are you excited to see the Nightmare? It was one of the first to be captured and tamed. The gentleman we’re visiting is very proud to be its captor,” said Father.
“Yes!” screamed Velag. “Does it still have teeth? And claws?” he asked, his eyes wide.
“I would think so,” Father nodded.
“Is it going to be in chains?”
“I hope so, Velag. Otherwise it might get loose and—” he paused for dramatic effect. I froze in fear. Velag looked eagerly at him. “Eat you both up!” he bellowed, tickling us with his huge hands. It took all my willpower not to scream. I looked at Velag’s delighted expression to keep me calm, reminding myself that these were just Father’s hands jabbing my sides.
“Careful!” Mother said sharply, to my relief. “They’ll get the fruit all over.” The indigo segments were still in our laps, on the napkins Mother had handed to us. Father stopped tickling us, still grinning.
“Do you remember what they look like?” Velag asked, as if trying to see how many questions he could ask in as little time as possible. He had asked this one before, of course. Father had fought Nightmares, and even killed some, when he was a knight-errant.
“We never really saw them, son,” said Father. He touched the window. “Out there, it’s so cold you can barely feel your own fingers, even in armour.”
We could see the impenetrable walls of the forests pass us by—shaggy, snarled mare-pines, their leaves black as coals and branches supposedly twisted into knots by the Nightmares to tangle the path of intruders. The high, hoary tops of the trees shimmered ever so slightly in the scarce light sneaking over the horizon, which they sucked in so hungrily. The moon was brighter here than in the City, but at its jagged crescent, a broken gemstone behind the scudding clouds. We were still in Evening, but had encroached onto the Nightmares’ outer territories, marked by the forests that extended to the foothills. After the foothills, there was no more forest, because there was no more light. Inside our cabin, under bright electric lamps, sitting on velvet-lined bunks, it was hard to believe that we were actually in the land of Nightmares. I wondered if they were in the trees right now, watching our windows as we looked out.
“It’s hard to see them, or anything, when you’re that cold, and,” Father breathed deeply, gazing at the windows. “They’re very hard to see.” It made me uneasy, hearing him say the same thing over and over. We were passing the very forests he travelled through as a knight-errant, escorting pioneers.
“Father’s told you about this many times, dear,” Mother interjected, peering at Father with worried eyes. I watched. Father smiled at her and shook his head.
“That’s alright, I like telling my little tykes about my adventures. I guess you’ll see what a Nightmare looks like tomorrow, eh? Out in the open. Are you excited?” he asked, perhaps forgetting that he’d already asked. Velag shouted in the affirmative again.
Father looked down at me, raising his bushy eyebrows. “What about you, Valyzia?”
I nodded and smiled.
I wasn’t excited. Truth be told, I didn’t want to see it at all. The idea of capturing and keeping a Nightmare seemed somehow disrespectful in my heart, though I didn’t know the word then. It made me feel weak and confused, because I was and always had been so afraid of them, and had been taught to be.
I wondered if Velag had noticed that Father had once again refused to actually describe a Nightmare. Even in his most excitable retellings of his brushes with them, he never described them as more than walking shadows. There was a grainy sepia-toned photograph of him during his younger vigils as a knight-errant above the mantle of our living-room fireplace. It showed him mounted on a horse, dressed in his plate-armour and fur-lined surcoat, raising his longsword to the skies (the blade was cropped from the picture by its white border). Clutched in his other plated hand was something that looked like a blot of black, as if the chemicals of the photograph had congealed into a spot, attracted by some mystery or heat. The sha
pe appeared to bleed back into the black background.
It was, I had been told, the head of a Nightmare Father had slain. It was too dark a thing to be properly caught by whatever early photographic engine had captured his victory. The blot had no distinguishing features apart from two vague points emerging from the rest of it, like horns or ears. That head earned him a large part of the fortune he later used to start up his contracting business. We never saw it, because Nightmares’ heads and bodies were burned or gibbeted by knights-errant, who didn’t want to bring them into the City for fear of attracting their horde. The photograph had been a source of dizzying pride for my young self, because it meant that my father was one of the bravest people I knew. At other times, it just made me wonder why he couldn’t describe something he had once beheaded, and held in his hand as a trophy.
My indigo finished, Mother took the napkin and wiped my hands with it. My brother still picked at his. A waiter brought us a silver platter filled with sugar-dusted pastries, their centres soft with warm fudge and grünberry jam. We’d already finished off supper, brought under silver domes that gushed steam when the waiters raised them with their white-gloved hands, revealing chopped fungus, meat dumplings, sour cream and fermented salad. Mother told Velag to finish the indigo before he touched the pastries. Father ate them with as much gusto as I did. I watched him lick his powdered fingers, that had once held the severed head of a Nightmare.
When it was time for respite, the cabin lights were shut off and the ones in the corridor were dimmed. I was relieved my parents left the curtains of the windows open as we retired, because I didn’t want it to be completely dark. It was dim enough outside that we could fall asleep. It felt unusual to go to bed with windows uncovered for once.
I couldn’t help imagine, as I was wont to do, that as our train moved through Evening’s forested fringes, the Nightmares would find a way to get on board. I wondered if they were already on the train. But the presence of my family, all softly snoring in their bunks (Velag above me, my parents opposite us); the periodic, soothing flash of way-station lights passing by outside; the sigh of the sliding doors at the end of the carriage opening and closing as porters, waiters, and passengers moved through the corridors; the sweet smell of the fresh sheets and pillow on my bunk—these things lulled me into a sleep free of bad dreams, despite my fear of seeing the creature we’d named bad dreams after, face-to-face, the next vigil.
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