Lee Klein: Jrzdvlz

“Will we share it?” I said.

“Save me a foot for good luck.”

I tore the animal from its chain. I pulled a long, meatless legbone from my mouth and snapped it at the ankle.

“I’ll set it out to dry and clean, thank you,” he said. “Quite a sight. You devoured an animal in seconds that took much longer to fatten.”

“Your time was worth it,” I said, breathless and bloodied around the jowls.

He offered his blanket. I used it to wipe fur from my mouth. He then invited me inside for tea.

“I have never tried it.”

“A relaxing stimulant.”

A world was opening. I stepped uneasily inside the house.

The house in which I had been born could have fit in the main room here. Daniel Leeds’s house could have fit in one of the unfurnished rooms I saw down the hall. Larner held a hand lantern. For now, all I saw in the windows were reflections of man and beast, each the same size in body, though my horns and wings made the man seem smaller. I did not know how my height rose and fell with each step. So much spring in these legs. My body around the middle was as full as Larner’s, but his skin was wrinkled and soft. Cheeks as round as the lenses of his glasses, each circle of flesh drooped like some viscous substance that had settled over time.

His gait was slow and even and considered, as though his natural state were horizontal, not vertical. Hat now off, his forehead was slanted like a steep hill, lined with gullies, freckles, and spots.

I had only been indoors twice before. This time I would only attack if tricked to trust this man who then unleashed a trap.

He made his way to a desk toward the rear of the room. I raised myself off the ground, stretched out my neck, and lifted my snout to sniff potential lurkers: dust, mothballs, candle wax, mildew, cobwebs, lantern oil, the husks of rabbits I had devoured. Any saboteurs had disguised their scent against my most developed talent.

He lit a candelabrum. The room revealed portraits and landscapes, oils in heavy frames, old dusty books on shelves from ceiling to floor. I’d like to see him reach for one of those high volumes. I hadn’t yet laughed in my life but I’d heard these pleasurable barks. Maybe it was something I needed to practice, just as it took so long to control my voice. Since stepping into this cavernous estate I felt something like mirth arise inside me, maybe related to having what might be a friend lighting a candelabrum and offering a seat.

“Sit?” I said. The chair seemed comfortable for a man with a traditional rump more than a ten-foot tail.

“Yes. Please do. Sit. Perch? Make yourself comfortable.”

I approached the chair. I stood on its seat. I crouched, leaned back, wings folded, tail coiled. “I have never sat,” I said.

“I’ll teach you whatever you would like.”

“Much to learn,” I said.

“All these books are yours to study. In them, you will discover commonalities more than differences, especially in the epics and myths you seem to have stepped from as naturally as you entered my home. Does this interest you? Or have I overshot my hope? I did not expect for this night to begin as such. I expected it to end much earlier, and terribly.”

“But you had no weapon?”

“Let me show you the letter I wrote before nightfall.”

He held up a sheet and pointed to his signature.

“Our studies may as well commence with the letters of my name. It is Vance Larner, see it here. If I read this to you, you will know why I sat and waited for you, ready to be struck down, but hoping for a happier end.”

He leaned on his desk, the pages close to the flames, nearly enough to set his writing alight. As he read, I emphasized his pauses with huffs and snorts.

“These may be the last words, an affirmation of years alone on this estate. My mind is as clear as ever—I am sure of this—free of missteps in the travel of thoughts. Yet what follows is an account of a beast believed in only by the young, the deluded, and the old seeking to scare the young. My visitor is the long-standing threat of these lands. I saw it alive last night. Tonight I will attempt to contact the beast. If it destroys me, it shall be months before a traveler finds my remains and this note. It is a peculiar endeavor to write of one’s imminent manslaughter, but I am unafraid. If the beast I have seen is unreal, I am physically safe yet doomed to an uncertain mental future. If it is real and greets me with violence, such an end will prove my cogency. No one of sound mind would befriend this beast, of course. Anyone who valued life would barricade doors or escape in daylight and only return with armed witnesses. Instead, I will contact this being who I believe may be a relative. Such coordination of movement among its composite parts, wings and tail and snout, claws and hooves, an unfamiliar torso of short golden hair. So unlike any man, so unlike my father or mother, whose own father I believe was the son of the beast’s father’s first wife. My mother passed the story to me of a family descended into madness and neglect and lore after my great-grandmother fled the colonial Jersey coast. The thirteenth son of my great-grandmother’s first husband’s second wife, now known as the Leeds Devil, is not my blood relation, but the focus of enough shared history to make me think of beastly features in myself. I am man in form but in spaces concealed we are otherwise similar. Such exaggeration derives from gratuitous introspection. Whoever languishes in thoughtful reenactment of the past falls prey to cruel beasts. Memory is louder when alone. No roar shall match the one inside me untamed by healthful solitude. If tonight I meet my end, I am willing. And if an end does not come, if this remarkable beast and I protect one another from sorrow, tonight will redeem me. I am responsible for my actions, past and future. Now I only hope that the present hours pass so I may once more engage the world, even if it costs me my life.”

I asked if he could prove the link between us.

“The last Genuine Leeds Almanack was never published for wide distribution,” he said. “All copies are believed lost long ago. But this one remains, long declared a hoax in attempt to quiet an uprising of rumor. It mentions the disappearance of William Leeds, whose wife and two sons had left him, whereupon he engendered a dozen children with another woman before leaving his family shortly before the horrors they experienced. A look at the pages he published in early almanacs reveals an unhinged mind. But if one proceeds from an acceptance of the man’s sanity, if read in terms of the initial stages of the struggle for independence, the words change shape. Courage and meaning emerge. I trust my great-grandfather was sane, for a thread of him runs through me. And I trust I too am sane. Your presence here confirms it.”

I snorted. Sanity based on my presence. Was this what it felt like to laugh?

“Glad to be of service,” I said.

Larner smiled. I felt a surging unknown when still. Soaring, yes, I knew that feeling. All I wanted now was to see this smile again.

But then the suns of his eyes seemed overcast. A depressive front steamed from his brow and descended across his vision.

“My god,” Larner said. “If my wife and children could see me now. Years of hard work, steady earning, homelife disappointment, all led to this night.”

Once upon a time, he said, he had been someone who had more than he needed, who could no longer endure the demands of Manhattan, including wife and children who rebelled at every turn and unnaturally aged him. His wife, their two sons and three daughters, and all their spouses and children—the immediate family was like some multi-headed dragon. Disrespectful was not the word for how they had treated him. Disgraceful was better. They expected luxury as one relies on the daily rising sun. If he had been more volatile and blasted them, or if he had been more a miser and withheld affection and praise, or positioned himself miles above them and condescended like a midsummer thunderstorm, it may have been different.