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Liv was tired. Goddam bone-tired.
Another day on the lines and her eyes were aching like sagging balloons, ready to burst from the strain required to just stay employed at that dump. She laced her fingers together and pushed her arms above her head as she came to the end of her daily slog to the bus stop. The movement rewarded her with a series of satisfying pops along her cramped joints.
The bench at the bus stop was hard and damp, mildew curled around the edges. But, her aching legs demanded rest.
She pictured a plump, squashy recliner as she lowered herself onto the cold planks. It was a comforting thought, an escape? one of many for Liv.
Like everything else in her world, the bus didn't run on her schedule. She settled in to wait, and closed her eyes, searching for respite in the quiet corners of her mind.
***
The air shimmered as she trailed her fingers through motes of starlight. It fell from the sky, softly banking across the tree branches and swept like dust into glittering piles across the grove.
It was a place Liv visited often, a peaceful place of solitude where dreams were born and the stress of the day burned away in the glimmering light.
A trilling laugh came from behind her and she turned. Her mouth popped open on a soft o. She hadn't been thinking of anyone. This was no figment. Had she fallen asleep?
An odd woman with cool, pale skin was watching her raptly with eyes like wet cobalt? no pupils, just a deep, dark blue.
She was standing in an oily pool formed by drops that fell languidly from the tendrils of her hair, her thin fingertips, hips, and breasts. The starlight died in her wake as she approached
?Hello, Olivia?
Her voice rang, as if echoing through a great space. Liv thought of the resounding tones of melancholy hymns in church, a memory of the time her grandmother had dragged her there. Those great bells whose clanging billowed against cold stone and stained glass.
The woman smiled. Full lips parted to reveal a row of dark teeth.
?Who are you??
The woman's grin split wide. Her gums seeped a warm red.
?Oh, nothing but a dream, delicious girl.?
She was close now. The sweet jasmine air turned foul? copper and rot.
?Such a beautiful mind you have, Olivia? said the woman, reaching up to sweep the stardust from a branch. Ash fell to the ground.
?Do you know who I am?? she said.
Images rose in Liv's mind, unbidden.
Razor-thin cracks exploding across the surface of the moon. Gentle hands guiding her off the cliff. Screeching shadows chasing her in the dark. Madness. Nightmare.
Liv gasped. She pinched her arms. Slapped her face. She had to wake up. Now.
?Tch- now, don't spoil yourself. I want you tender, sweet?
A slick, thin hand grabbed her arm like frozen steel, biting and unyielding. A dripping talon caressed her forearm like a scalpel? a butcher's cut.
Liv swayed and the nightmare hissed, spraying black between clenched teeth. She closed her eyes against the onslaught and fell.
***
Liv hit the pavement hard, bracing herself with her arms.
?Oh! Oh my, I'm sorry, so sorry!?
Small, wrinkled hands fluttered about her as she opened her eyes. She was splayed against the sidewalk beside the bus stop, breathing hard and ragged. Her lungs burned, but the exhaust and filth of the city had never smelled so fresh.
?The bus is here, you see. I only meant to wiggle you a little, just to wake you?
Large eyes magnified through thick glass swayed in front of her, thin lips pinched in concern. Liv had the distinct impression of a mole, blind and snuffling.
She thanked the man and accepted a frail hand up.
?Oh, dear. You've hurt yourself.? the man fussed about her arm with knotted fingers.
A thin line ran from wrist to elbow, weeping bright red.
***
Liv finally cracked open her apartment door, nearly four hours after the end of her shift. She had stopped at the clinic, the nurse had bandaged her up and sent her on her way with a handful of ?helpful literature' and a concerned frown, obviously not believing her story of falling off the bench. No pavement cut with such surgical precision.
The single room apartment was dark; with fumbling, frantic fingers, she turned on every light in the place, sweeping brightness into every dingy corner. She lamented the fact that she didn't have a great, big dog to guard her door. Not that she could afford to feed one. She could barely afford to feed herself.
With the darkness banished to the streets outside her windows, Liv went about the task of staying awake. The kettle whistled? she flinched.
Finally, with a cup of coffee strong enough to chew in hand, she settled onto the lumpy futon to wait out the night.
The minutes stretched by and Liv felt as if she was being stretched as well, like nylons pulled to a translucent film? she was going to break.
Minutes stacked on minutes until she was ticking off hours instead.
Nothing happened.
Liv let a thin hope into her mind, cradled it gently. Perhaps, it was just a dream.
She closed her eyes and loosed a deep breath. Tension leaked away, her face unpinched, hands unclenched.
?Olivia? the voice was small, an echo.
Liv's eyes snapped open. The room was empty.
Just my imagination, she thought, she prayed.
The first thing she noticed was the darkness. The shadows she had swept out of the room were there again, in the corners. She looked behind her, every corner and edge the same. When she looked back, they had grown and she could see the line of demarcation, the shadow front, moving towards her.
She needed to move, to run, but she found she couldn't. She struggled and bucked as her body filled with the molasses of nightmares and kept her firmly in place. She didn't move an inch.
No, she was moving. Moving so slowly she barely perceived it. It wasn't enough.
She closed her eyes.
?There's no one to wake you now, sweet girl. Succulent girl.?
The voice was close now. She felt it against her cheek.
Copper and rot flooded her nose.
?Don't fight. I want you, slowly.?
Liv sucked in a foul breath as something cool and thin slid across her throat. The world seemed unsteady, fading. Sounds, and senses dimmed. Pressure built against her skull as if someone was tamping her very consciousness, removing all the space where her thoughts found their breath.
She was almost gone. No thought. No name. No dreams.
***
The mug shattered. Spilling black coffee across the carpet, soaking and creeping.
Liv choked, her body wracked and gasping for air like she had been pulled from the ocean moments before drowning. Her chest burned.
The cat sniffed at the mess and walked away with an irritated twitch of his tail, unimpressed. He jumped into her lap and she scooped him up gratefully.
?Oh, you beautiful creature. You don't know how close that was.? she laughed in relief and held him close, stroking him soothingly from head to tail. He pushed into her hand, his purring cracking the tension she had been holding. She melted back against the futon? and froze.
?Whose cat are you??
The cat nudged her hand and turned to face her, cobalt eyes flashing in the low light.
It turns out that his name is Evan and he's a med student, originally from Nebraska where his kind are few and far between, where all kinds are few and far between. He is also very lonely, something I have gathered from nights spent observing the way he hunches over his books and notes as the light of the moon inches across his hardwood floors. He makes himself coffee - obsesses over it really, collecting latte machines and espresso drips and French presses and three different models of old-fashioned coffee makers that take turns occupying the 3-socket outlet in his kitchen by his fridge. He knows how to do tricks with a spoon to make the foam into lovely things, and I watched him teach himself this very skill as he sat cross-legged on his battered brown couch one night, watching youtube tutorials.
Evan is beautiful. He wears his lemon-blond hair long, around his shoulders in soft waves, because it's the one tiny rebellion he's allowed as a young man otherwise bound by the confines and social mores of medical school. He's going to be a cardiologist, I think - some kind of heart doctor, sometimes at night he'll lie on his bed back-flat with his stethoscope eartips tucked into his ears and the diaphragm of the thing pressed to his slim chest as he inhales and exhales deeply, slowly, soothing himself with his own heartbeat.
No one ever comes to visit him, and on the rare occasions when one of his parents calls, he leaves them on speakerphone and wanders around picking at his fingernails because they sound so very distracted and uninterested in whatever he says. He usually just falls silent and says nothing until they realize the silence in the air between them and mumble, ?Yeah?okay well, I'm walking the dog honey, I'll talk to you later,? snatching at the earliest possible excuse to hang up on him, their parental duty to check in satisfied until next week. These calls hurt him more than they help. Evan's parents have never understood him, and they've never cared enough to try.
He has green-tea eyes, soft and honest, that go red with allergies in the summer sometimes. I've been watching him for months now, sometimes as he sleeps, wondering what he'd think of me. Of my moon-gray skin that reflects starlight and melts invisibly into the urban concrete here in the city, of the leathery wings that extend out from my back and are covered in a thin layer of dark feathers dappled with white at the tips, of the fangs tucked neatly over my lower lip and my jewel-black eyes, solid and gleaming. I was born here, my claws and wings and fangs and enormous pigeon feet belong to this city, the historically significant library where I was born and I rest every night, but as I watch and perch on the roof of his apartment building on some mornings, hidden behind a vent stack, I have become Evan's too. I steal a pair of his scissors to cut my long black hair like ink one night, in the hopes of becoming something even slightly more human, but then I remember his long hair and the way he runs his fingers through it as he studies, and I think maybe if he knew me, Evan might like me the way I am. He knows what it is to be ostracized, I think
He comes to my library one night upset, pacing back and forth through the medical history stacks but unable to return to the looming silence of his tidy little apartment - the way he dusts and sweeps every weekend is incredibly endearing. My kind know better, we understand that the clutter and crush of the city can be a sacred thing. It feeds our cousins, the trash left lying around, our rats and pigeons and gargoyles detaching themselves from looming churches in the night to hunt those fat scurrying things made tasty by the urban debris. Evan though, he is depressed and desperately trying to clear out his own mental clutter by getting rid of every speck of dirt in his space, so I start helping him by plucking up the discarded fast food wrappers and empty syringes around the building, depositing them into the trash when no one is looking. One night, I find a pretty little thing, someone's dropped gold stud earring, and I creep in when he's asleep and coo gently as I drop it onto his nightstand.
He wakes up in the morning after his bad night to touch the little earring, blinking in confusion. He does not have a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, which is a profound relief to me because frankly, no one is good enough for him. He's tried tinder, but rejected and deleted it after his first date ghosted him. That's what people call it anyway, they don't understand that there are real ghosts in this city, and they probably have no interest in booty calls. I wonder if that date was a boy, or a girl. It was highly unlikely that it was any kind of half-pigeon city spirit, borne of urban energy, a postmodern gargoyle. If it had been, I might have tried my luck, but instead I watch He makes it easy, with the way he lingers for hours in my library on so many nights.
I consider myself to be largely male - obvious differences aside, my anatomy matches Evan's more than his neighbor next door who cries over car insurance ads and makes her own jewelry. I wonder if she might not be a good friend for my Evan, she is lonely too and she always smiles shyly at him in the mail room. Maybe I will steal one of her homemade bracelets and leave it in front of his door right before he's about to leave, in the hopes that they'll bump into each other and start talking. I just want him to be happy, since it won't be me who gets him there. I'm not deluded, I know what I am and I know what he'd do if he could see me. I take his things, little things - a page of notes from one of his classes in his elegantly slanted handwriting, defiantly cursive. One of his coffee mugs, a pair of socks. I hoard these things on the library roof in little piles, and getting away with it so often must have made me reckless because one night I'm perched and cooing over his notebook doodles in between bone structure diagrams when he makes his way through the library's roof entrance in his fleece-lined jacket and a t-shirt with an illustration of an anatomically correct human heart wearing a stethoscope on it. The moon is a sliver and the air is damp, cool.
The library has closed for the evening, my Evan's gentle presence left unnoticed by the staff and world alike. Our tiny world is quiet now, still, nothing left to distract either of us from each other.
It's too late to hide the piles, to disguise myself, and Evan's breath catches in his throat. I'm cloaked in the shadows and have no intention of changing this, but he's approaching, closer now. Clouds pass over the moon as if she too, wants us to know each other, to see each other, and I chitter anxiously. Evan leans in, hands at his sides, silent, and at this point there's no turning back. I step into the light.
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