Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

Now what should I do? A beast damned to indecision. Surely I was invented by Franklin, his humor showing through, my wings and teeth and general external beastliness juxtaposed with crisscrossing undulations of internal rumination.

Something must have stopped her as she ran. She turned to see that it had all been real. I had appeared to her at the river and protected her once. My presence now proved she had not been mad. She had seen me again, unlike her father. Not seeing me twice perhaps caused her father’s descent, or so she may have thought. Imagining the beliefs of others differentiated humans from ram, bat, kangaroo, or crane.

I took to the air and descended to the rut through the snow Stearns and December had made as they ran from me. December’s expression became all rounded eyes and open mouth. I slipped but regained my balance to greet her with a polite hello.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said.

“Welcome is always a good start,” I said, with a deep bow, flourishing a wing like a cape.

I had looked forward to this encounter for as long as she had. She weighed her response as though she’d spoken to me many times when alone but now was surprised to have no control over what I said.

“Welcome then, Sir. It has been quite some time since last we met.”

“Your circumstances have changed for the better I presume?”

“Blessed yet not without trials.”

“I hope I didn’t cause too much trouble this morning.”

“Your arrival was unexpected.”

“I apologize for the intrusion. I rarely call on dignitaries such as your husband.”

“What brings you here? I ask but am aware of the likelihood of your answer.”

I began to explain that it was more than just the hoax, more even than the possession of my territory and Wharton’s dream of pure water, when Stearns emerged from whatever structure he had entered. He now made his way toward us, aglow with the sort of bravery that had damned men like him throughout time. He leapt across tracks in the snow he had made in retreat, following his steps toward the mother of his children. Stearns yelled something as he approached and, with a long pistol drawn, indicated that December should move away from me. He slipped and fell to his knees, keeping the pistol in the air. As he rose, with his spare hand he took a mouthful of fresh snow as though it might energize him through this confrontation with what? What could he imagine I was? As he rumbled through the snow, I saw that he had a small scythe at his side, prepared for intimate battle if the pistol did not end me.

We watched him approach.

“I won’t let him hurt you,” she said.

“I’m not concerned.”

“He will not stop until you are flayed.”

“I had heard he was diplomatic,” I said.

“I doubt he considers these circumstances negotiable.”

She raised her arms and shouted for him to stop, but he did not stop until he was ten paces from us. December stood in front of me as though willing to sacrifice herself.

“He is no trouble,” she said.

“His presence is trouble enough,” Stearns said.

Closer now, I recognized the man in the flesh from descriptions I had heard when in the pines and the portraits. No longer rendered in oil on canvas, he was older and more unkempt, clearly not in possession of his famous composure.

“I am here to dissuade you more than ensure your demise,” I said.

His reaction to my speech was expected. It wasn’t the first time such articulation impressed an assailant. But he shook it off and recommitted to whatever survival instinct now held him.

“December, step aside,” he said. “Step aside so I can dispatch this devil, display its form, prove legend true, and end this era of terror.”

“I have hardly terrorized anyone other than your family, and for this—”

“Step aside,” he shouted. His voice forced its way across the space between us.

“You mustn’t,” she said, “it will do no good.”

“Step aside,” I whispered. “Let him do his worst.”

She ceded the spot between us.

It was now a sort of duel. Stearns took aim to end me. I spread my legs and threw out my chest, opened my wings, and raised my snout at a proud angle, maximizing his target. The sting of the pistol’s ball would be nothing compared to the sorrow he wished to inflict on so many innocents.

Something about my posture—wings open and held behind me as though in mid-soar, yellow pelt over the muscular lobes of my chest, the thick trunk of my neck and sinews of my throat— required my life to end in service of something beyond itself. It was a moment of martyrdom. My chest offered to the enemy, I sacrificed myself for the dream of pure water. A blast and rise of smoke and before it cleared I would be splayed in the snow, no longer an earthly form, my spirit dispersed into its essential shape: legend proved true.

I raised my eyes to the snowfall and then closed them in anticipation of the shot. But he would not shoot, so I coaxed him: “Let’s get this over with.”

I said this, knowing there was no way he could make an actual martyr out of me and parade my corpse through the streets, considered a dragon slayer.

He inhaled and released a stream of exhaust. I knew that at the end of that exhalation when the air inside him merged with the unreal morning atmosphere he would fire. There was a violent explosion of thicker smoke, and either the cold of morning and the excitement of the day combined into an efficacious anesthesia or Stearns had missed. He stared at the pistol, disgusted.

“If you are thinking about trying again,” I said, “I doubt even a blast between my eyes would end me.”

He reloaded, too aggravated to hear my words as December lifted herself from the snow, having flung herself for cover. She blew on her hands, more a spectator to this duel than anyone’s second.

“Give it up,” she urged. “He means no harm.”

“The ultimate quarry. I dare not miss.”

“I fear he will kill himself for you,” she said, “so considerate he has been in response to your aggression.”

Stearns seemed lost in the logistics of preparing another attempt to dispatch me into legend.

I retracted my wings to express impatience with his execution. “I am humoring you,” I said. “If you’d like to transfer this dispute to a realm better suited to your diplomatic skills, it would be a pleasure. Otherwise, you are outmatched with pistol and scythe or even an army at your service. In an instant I can elevate out of sight or if so moved, although contrary to my preference, I could, in less time than it would take for you to plead mercy or say a final word to your wife, provide you with a unique look at your heart as it beats for the last time in my fist before I devour it and you expire.”

The pistol was loaded but he lowered it. Sense entered his panicked skull. Reckless courage gave way to sanity now that I displayed the same fingers of horn that December had surely told him had haunted her father.

“So what is your preference?” he said.

“Waste that round and we will discuss what I have in mind.”

He blasted a divot in the snow. I anticipated a deployment of words meant to sway and manipulate, and, as Braddock and Vermeule had said, twist reality until only Stearns seemed upright.

“To the barn,” said December. “Let’s spare the children, considering your effect on my father, on me, and on my husband most likely for years to come.”

“Assuming there are years to come,” said Stearns. It was clear his smile had eased his ascent. Intelligent, confident, off-kilter, it helped me understand how December had accepted him.

The barn sat at the top of an easy rise. It could have hidden a brigade set to fling sturdy nets atop me before removing limbs from torso and tail from core.