SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“ She ?” said Jackson with raised eyebrows. Dash started to laugh again. Eric smacked him silent.

Princess Zelda passed by, looking straight at Nate. And Nate looked straight at Eric. Nobody did any impressions.

Instead Eric said, “What’d you say this thing was called, a…?”

“Griffin.”

“And you said the thing…. this giant fucking lion-bird thing lives at your house? Just lives there?”

“Yeah. In these woods in my yard.”

The wire-thin smile that Eric more or less always wore spread itself a little thinner. “Bullshit.”

“I swear. To God.”

“Total bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit. I swear to God.”

The older boy paused, blinked, stuck out his chin “What do you feed it? Her?”

“She hunts. Moles and rats and possums and birds, and things. She ate a dog, once.”

“A dog? Nah-uh. Nothing eats dogs,” declared Jackson suddenly, with aggression. Nate ignored him.

“And I bring her steak, sometimes.”

“You cook her steak?” said Eric. His eyes had narrowed to go with the smile.

“No. Bloody. Raw, I mean. She won’t eat cooked stuff.”

Another pause “Ever ride her?” he asked.

“What…?”

“She’s got wings, right? She can fly around? You ever ride her?”

Dash piped in, gave an exaggerated pelvis thrust. “Yeah, Nate, you ever…riiide herrr?”

Jackson deadened his friend’s arm, and laughed. But Eric waited for Nate’s answer.

“No,” said Nate firmly, “No.”

“Why not?”

Nate blinked. What a strange, what a meaningless question “You don’t ride griffins. That’s not what they’re for,” he said.

“What are they for, then?”

“They guard things. Treasure.”

“What kind of treasure she guarding?” asked Jackson. He talked almost more than anything else about being the only kid in his family who knew how to use his uncle’s metal detector.

“I didn’t say she was guarding anything. She’s not guarding anything. She just hangs around in the woods behind my house.”

“I’ll bet you could ride her if you tried.” said Eric. He was suddenly wearing the same expression he wore whenever he thwacked Nate on the back to congratulate him for doing something he had never actually done. “I bet you could make her give us a ride if you worked her a little.”

Sniggers.

“No, I couldn’t.” said Nate, “not even close.”

“Why? What would she do?”

“She…just wouldn’t come near. She’d hide.”

“Then we’ll hunt her down and surround her, right? She can’t go anywhere without us if she’s surrounded.”

“Except ‘up’.”

“Right. Well, you hold her, and we’ll all jump on.”

More sniggers. Nate licked his lips. Eric licked his, his eyes incredulous and shiny. “So, what about it, Safari Man? When do we go hunting?”

“I don’t…it’s not…”

“Tomorrow?”

“Maybe. If she’s not asleep. She sleeps in the afternoons, I don’t know where…”

“We’ll go at lunch, or we’ll cut last period.” Eric’s smile went wide, like a disbelieving Jack-O-lantern. “You and me. We’ll hunt her down and shake her awake.”

Nate didn’t wait for the return bus. He ran all the way home with the acidy taste of puke in his mouth, drops of sweat running cold off his nose. He ran straight through the house and out to where the trees grew closest, and crookedest. There, he wandered, and waited until she appeared.

She was never graceful when landing on the ground. She was never exactly ungraceful, but her bird-grace and her cat-grace always seemed to be working against each other, to make the landing sudden and hard. There was always the surprisingly hard clap of padded paws against the dirt, and the scuffling scrape of claws as she slowed herself, and the wild flap before she settled her wings down on her back. She was always stranger and wilder than Nate ever expected her to be, though he saw her almost every day.

Some days, she was coy, making him come to her, or stretching her white head around to preen with her black beak before she bothered to look at him. But not today. Today she landed close to him, stretching her neck out with extra expectancy, her gold eyes extra wide. She had no idea what he’d done to her. “You should be more careful,” Nate said to her. “You shouldn’t come running every time you hear somebody.”

The gold eyes did not blink. She made a kind of throaty cooing noise, like a dove, cocking her head invitingly. “I don’t have any food for you right now,” he said. But he reached out a heavy, shaking hand, and stroked her neck, all the way down into her thick white fur. Her black wings gave another lazy twitch, her white tail softly swatted an imaginary fly, but her powerful back muscles did not even tense with a big cat’s ordinary alertness. Nate might have done anything to her. Might’ve let anyone do anything. “Stop,” her betrayer said, kicking a little dirt in her direction, “stop.”

She backed away a couple paces, made a deeper cooing sound that had much more of a growl in it. But she did not fly away. Would she fly away, if it came to that? If other things came tromping into her woods with their metal detectors and their loud laughs and their cigarette butts, would she know to fly away?

She ventured toward him again, twisting her head, stretching her neck. “I don’t have any food for you right now!” Nate picked up a clod of dirt and chucked it at her, hard. She flapped backward, gave an irritable scream. “Piss off,” he said, “go back to your nest.”

Nate lied on top of the blankets all night, listening to her hunt. He felt every swoop, every wingbeat like she was right at his window, giving the pane an angry rattle. Go away, he telegraphed to her. Go away. Go the hell away. Only in the times when her shadow flitted across the moon, or he heard the scream of some bird in her beak, did Nate remember she was high in the sky somewhere, a white and black and moon-streaked blur, swallowing her dinner whole and not thinking of him at all.

Nate rolled over, smashed his face into his pillow. Of course she didn’t get angry, or know things. Those gold eyes only made you think she did. In reality, everything was a complete surprise to her.

They would make it a party, Eric and Jackson and Dash and whoever came with them. They’d come in a screaming caravan with jokes and wine coolers and whatever raw meat they could get, ready to thrash around in the woods looking for a thing they didn’t expect to find. And it would be fun. That was the thing. Even for Nate, it would be fun. It would be noisy and funny, and easy, like going to find a good place to set off a bunch of fireworks. It was the part after that, the part where they actually found her, or she found them, that Nate didn’t know what to do about.

He had only ever seen her in pain once, when she’d landed hard in the wrong tree, and a sharp branch behind her had gone straight through her wing. She’d screamed like nothing Nate had ever heard, a pain scream and a fear scream and a pleading scream, and a wild, wild anger scream all at once.

He’d climbed the tree in one crazy jump, but once he was up there, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to pull the branch out (was he afraid of the blood, or of making it worse, or of what she might do to him, a wild animal after all?) In the end, she’d reached back with a frenzied flapping and torn at it herself, bit by bit, with her own curved beak until it was gone, or mostly gone, and she was free. The wound had got infected for a while after that.

Nate smashed his face into his pillow until it hurt, then rolled over again to stare at the ceiling-shadows. He listened to her make another far-away swoop at something, gleeful and quick. Probably an owl. She always went after brown owls when she could find them. It was a vivid picture to him, her dropping free out of the air to snatch things into her claws or beak, But so was the frenzied screaming picture of her being held down while Eric or Jackson took handfuls of feathers, or took a ride, and Dash laughed and threw clods of dirt and wine cooler bottles, and Nate did nothing.