A story by Stanton Fink
Image: Untitled by Stanton Fink
Last updated: 4/29/2026
Project Qimaera
He had returned. After all those pained wishes, and salvaged promises, he finally returned home, his home. Enzo stood proudly there in that forest, his forest, wearing only that awful, awfully breezy hospital gown. The teenaged beanpole clutched that offensively diaphanous, polka dotted fabric with a spidery, freckled hand, and finally husked himself of that hated gown. A deliciously frigid gust snatched the shredded robe out of the boy’s pale, taloned fingers.
Enzo stood there proudly in that forest, his forest, not really naked as rust colored fur bloomed across his once-peach skinned body in big, red, puffy patches. He dug his long, taloned fingers deep into his copper chest fur to dig out his father’s tiger fang necklace. Tiger boy took to his hairy heels, bolting through the forest, his forest. Emerald, lime, teal, jade, apple green, Enzo, let loose a whooping roar as he charged through the never-ending paint splash plants, the cool, humid undergrowth air beating wondrously against his freckled, exertion-pinked face. Chartreuse, azure, carmine, umber, fuchsia, the endless riot of color undergrowth came to an abrupt end at the abrupt edge of a perilously high cliff. Enzo leapt.
Bloody quills erupted from his great chest, his shaggy back, his furred loins. Ruby spines shot out from his mighty hero’s arms, unfurling into scarlet feathers. In Enzo’s forest, the Tiger boy could be anything he wanted, and Enzo wanted to be a phoenix. Enzo the thousand-mile peng bird soared high above his forest, his thousand-mile wings of vermilion and copper lazily buoyed on a warm breeze of crayon dust. Enzo found himself mooing at the clouds again, wordlessly calling for that nameless friend he still needed. With his mighty eagle’s eye of jade, Enzo pierced through the gloomy forest canopy below him to see Enzo the pathetic teenaged loser, pacing around the bench of the Transit Bus Stop Eighty-Two.
Enzo paced around the bench, the flopping clopping of his sneakers marking time’s passage. Dad was late again. Again. Dad was supposed to pick him up from school, but knowing that noble, chivalrous paladin of punctuality, Dad was either passed out on the floor of yet another hooker’s flat, or hungover inside a cage at the county animal shelter again. Again. Enzo pulled his big, hairy spidery hands out of his beige and purple letterman jacket pockets to play with his zipper again. It was his own fault for trusting his father. Had he just walked home, the teen would have been home by now.
The burly boy with tarantula hands was engulfed in a lake of blinding light. There was an engine screaming, tires yelling, and Enzo was hurled into a familiar abyss of pain. And laughter. Over the cadenza of his bones breaking, and the calliope tooting of his organs rupturing, Enzo could hear his school teammates laughing at him again. Again.
The dark abyss brightened into a cornflower blue haze. Enzo knew this color intimately, but from where? It was hard to think while wallowing in this aurora of morphine. Wait, he was in the county hospital again. Again. With that piece of memory in place, the off white and cornflower blue walls of his hospital room snapped back into focus. He could hear the monitors beeping in time with his heart. The pathetic loser tried clenching his hero’s jaw and found himself weakly teething on corrugated plastic. Oh, this was from when he was intubated for two weeks. Fun times.
The fog of opiates drained from Enzo’s big, tigery ears, clearing enough for him to let him hear more clearly the terrified screams of the hospital staff. Dad was coming to take him home. Enzo thought to move, to escape the impending flood of red fur and awesome death, but, as usual, his corpse-like body betrayed him.
Dad was coming.
Urgh.
The hospital room shook, the furniture shook, the monitors shook themselves to pieces, Enzo’s bed shook, his big, hairy body convulsed and grew bigger. The sleeves and shoulders of his awful, awfully diaphanous hospital gown tore as that sheet of hate filled, polka-dotted fabric unmoored itself from Enzo’s spasming, mutating body. He raised a big tiger’s paw high, then placed it on his great heaving chest, clasping Dad’s fang necklace for dear life. Enzo remembered a big blurry wave of red and white fur bearing down on him like a tiger-striped snail demolishing a rotten strawberry. Enzo remembered choking on his breathing tube trying to shout. The big glob of tiger fur, his father, was licking off his left pectoralis muscle. Enzo summoned enough of his mighty power through that bleak fog of morphine and terror to make and raise a bony fist, only for a paw to pin his right arm back down hard enough to break it like a fleshy, moist twig. Enzo’s fingers disappeared in a second single lick, along with the rest of his shattered arm in another lick. Enzo’s pale freckled face vanished in a fourth, indolent rasp, and then the tiger-furred glob finished lapping up the broken boy, leaving nothing behind beyond bloody bedsheets and some stray wisps of cat hair.
And then that red and white mass of slimy tiger fur rose up on his shaggy hindlegs, adjusting his old, black swim trunks. And then Enzo’s cadaverous father stood insufferably proud there in his swim trunks and his thick, copper and cream body hair, and his ridiculous muscle shirt that hung so loosely around his bony hips like some third-rate redneck mumu. That hairy bastard was exactly as Enzo remembered him; a towering scarecrow so shaggy, so woolly with chest hair slowly bleaching silver, and wearing that craggy, leering, jack-o’-lantern face haggard from decades of cancer. Enzo’s father smiled, flashing those awful, pointedly sharp, impossibly perfect, tobacco-yellowed teeth of his.
Enzo’s father spread his long, red and graying legs as he began to pose again. Again. That wretched, godawful goofball always loved to pose, like some big wire sculpture rusting over with mold. Then the withered, wizened, former wrestler’s long, long, bony legs miraculously became meaty again. Again. Woolly thighs growing thunderously succulent, calves violently swelling into rapid bulls, his ratty, tattered black swim trunks sloughing off of his no-longer bony hips. And then he flexed his fleshy arms, oh God how he loved to flex and his thin arms grew and grew and grew and grew, growing and growing into mighty tree branches bleeding mossy, blood-red fur.
That monstrous, blood-furred scarecrow flexed his bloody-furred tree branch arms again, and spread his big, bloody-furred tree trunk hindlegs. He inhaled so deeply, his fluffy, once rail-thin chest filled out so massively, stretching his precious muscle shirt taut like a yellow sail in a stiff, blood-red breeze. And then that precious favorite muscle shirt popped off of Enzo’s monstrous, monstrously swelling torso. And there, Enzo proudly stood, wherever the hell “there” was, immured in a cyclopean wall of bloody fur and writhing, herculean muscles. The growing boy stretched his mouth wide to scream, but choked as a slobber-soaked, slobbering tiger’s snout thrust past his lips. Enzo managed to place his big tiger’s paw back onto his father’s tiger fang necklace just as his mighty, shaggy chest started splitting open.
***
“Next stop Pahayoke!”
A snoring, rust-haired teenaged boy asleep in a bus seat shuddered awake at that proclamation. As the teenage boy regained his bearings, Enzo Rudolfo Lancio Klamath Junior realized he was, for the second time in his miserable life, sincerely glad to be back in the hellish podunk that was Pahayoke, if only this time to escape. Enzo put both of his big, spidery hands to his freckle-speckled face and rubbed vigorously.
“I’m Leo now,” he reminded himself. “No going back, okay?”
Leo looked down at his rail thin chest and realized he was drooling on his beige and purple letterman jacket again. He rubbed his drowsy, jade green eyes with his jacket cuff, then fished out a dollar-store journal from his black canvas backpack. He rolled up his sleeve to peek at his wristwatch, and saw that his wrist, normally a peached lard with caramel freckles lightly dusted with peach fuzz, was now already thoroughly encrusted with a still-thickening layer of thick, downy, copper hair. Leo stared as that mat of copper hair crept down the backs of his hands, carpeting his knuckles as his fingers became bony, rust-haired caterpillars with sharp nails. He rolled down his jacket sleeve as he fought both the urge to just rip his suddenly unbearably suffocating clothes off before mauling everyone else on board, and the urge to just sit there focusing on the hair already fast growing all over the hidden reaches of his lanky body.
“Urgh,” the rust-haired scarecrow muttered as he fished out a ballpoint pen. “Nine twenty-six am,” he wrote in his journal. “Coming earlier this month, the rate of growth suggests it started at eight am, maybe seven thirty am.” He dropped his journal and pen back into his backpack, then zipped his letterman jacket up to his suddenly very downy throat. He needed to buy another journal soon. As much as he hated sweating, Leo preferred to dress snuggly in the fiery warmth of summer than have to deal with judgmental people gawking at a sixteen-year-old runaway growing thirty, forty pounds of chest hair right in front of their disapprovingly incredulous eyes again.
Bad dreams aside, Leo hated, no, Leo loathed that podunk of Pahayoke with a sacred passion that made the glowing furnace inside of his thin chest underneath his father’s sweat soaked tank top grow fierce and bright. A failed suburb with nothing to see or do beyond getting hassled by an inbred clan of rent-a-cops. No fun, no coffee, no candy, no singing, not even skipping, and run by that fun-hating cartoon villain, Marshal Stu Annal. Anyhow, Leo hoped he could reach Troia before he drowned in his own musky sweat.
“Pahayoke!” the bus driver bellowed.
A powder-blue wigged quintet of bridge biddies in powder-pink sweater coats climbed aboard the bus. Leo collected his thoughts, and his backpack, graciously offering his seat to the quintet as he moved to the very back of the bus. Now alone again, Leo ran his red-hairy spider fingers through his floppy hair in the hopes of restoring it back into that neo-young Elvis pompadour crest he was so fond of. He puffed his freckled cheeks and pursed his lips, reshaping his reflection in the bus window into a passable imitation of a fountain. If there was one thing in the Pandora’s junk drawer of weird and annoying traits he inherited from his incompetent, shaggy boob of a father that he was proud of, besides being strong as a water buffalo, having reflexes like a rottweiler, or the stamina of a senior frat boy, it was being able to grow the most luxurious set of side burns one month after his eleventh birthday.
“Next stop” the bus driver bellowed.
A sewer maintenance worker by the stench of things climbed aboard the bus. Leo paused his preening for a moment to zip up his backpack in his lap. The sewer maintenance worker stomped down the bus aisle to plop her sewage-defiled, coveralled self-down next to the boy in a letterman jacket. Leo ignored the worker; he had smelled far worse, like when his father’s beloved tiger went fishing for dead raccoons in the Zafari’s septic tank. The maintenance worker pried off her egg yolk yellow helmet, freeing her long, smoky black hair. She made a rasping chuckle as she studied the preening scarecrow sitting next to her.
“You’re a baby, and you already have five o’clock shadow,” the worker commented in a surprisingly sultry voice. Leo dug his pointed fingertips deep into his lovely muttonchops, suddenly thinking of a forest witch in a gingerbread house. He turned to look at her work-worn face.
“I take after my father and a childhood full of steroids, ma’am,” Leo joked. The maintenance worker cackled loudly, startling the quintet.
“You’re a funny little cupid, kid,” the worker commented. “Such a kind face, you look exactly like my bouvier, Worcestershire, if she was a baby like you.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” Leo looked out of the window to gawk at blighted apartment complexes up for rent no one wanted. The maintenance worker sighed thoughtfully now.
“Tell me, kid,” she asked. “What brings you to Pahayoke?”
Leo inhaled deeply. His tiger-fang necklace hidden deep underneath his soggy tank top audibly clacked as his sternum crackled. He stifled another urge to rip his clothes off again.
“I have business to attend to at Enzo Klamath’s Zafari,” the rusting-haired teen truthfully stated. The sewer maintenance worker exploded into a one-woman riot of screaming laughter, her long hair shaking vigorously like a smoky black pom-pom as she waved her head up and down. Leo’s upper lip curled in a silent, toothy snarl even as he just barely caught the bus driver’s bellowing about the next stop somewhere just above the sewer witch’s hilarious din. The cackling maintenance worker almost stumbled over her own head as she laughingly chased after her clattering helmet bouncing down the aisle. The quintet all got up, too, joining the laughing sewer witch in exiting the bus.
Leo growling to himself, his ego smarting so badly. It was his own fault, he thought as an abandoned supermarket flew past his view in the bus window. Next time, he’d keep his big, fat mouth shut. There was that ruined, half-finished building from five years ago that would have become a movie theater or a duplex. Or, he’d at least remember to shut his mouth on the throat of the next buttinsky yenta.
“End of the line!” the bus driver hollered as he shut off the engine. The other passengers stood up and casually filed out of the bus doors. “Hey, mister comedian! End of the line!”
“I thought the Calostoma Three Twenty-Seven goes to Troia.” Leo scratched his stubble-darkening chin.
“Not anymore, mister comedian. Nowya gotta transfer.”
“When’s the next one?” Leo asked. The bus driver held up his bare, tanned, overly well-fed wrist to look at his brass watch.
“In five minutes.”
Blast it all.
The six-foot-tall, rust-maned teenager threw on his backpack and flounced off the bus in an aggravated huff. Leo pumped his red tarantula fists as he jogged down the street. So he was marooned in the hellhole of Pahayoke for four minutes and eighteen seconds, so what?
“It’s easy to survive in this cesspool,” Leo lied to himself. “All I have to do is keep my fluffy head down, not eat any chocolate, not consume any coffee, and most importantly, don’t-”
“Hey you! Punk!” It was Deputy Annal’s son, Beau Annal.
Great. Two minutes, a new world record.
“Get over here! I’m talking to you, punk scum!” Leo sarcastically froze in place.
“Heya, Deputy Beau Annal, how’ya doin’?” He could hear the youthful deputy’s jowls flushing.
“Don’t disrespect me, scumpunk!”
Leo’s stubbly face soured with exasperation.
“Listen, Beau, I’m just passing though. I don’t want any trouble,” the Leo calmly pleaded. “I even said ‘hello.’”
“Don’t disrespect me, scumpunk!” Leo sniffed the air as he remembered Beau was on a script. The deputy clamped his pudgy hand onto Leo’s bony, jacketed shoulder. “You’re a stranger here, scumpunk. What’ya doin’ in my town?”
Ol’ Beau, poor ol’ Beau Annal clearly forgot about our last dance and rumble from three years ago.
Fine, then. Leo was going to follow his Father’s orders about giving querulous people like the kind deputy the courtesy of a count to fifteen before he’d allow himself the pleasure of beating that middle school drop out like a Christmas drum kit. Leo reshaped his expression into a diplomatically stern scowl.
“I am only walking to the bus stop, Deputy Annal. I said I don’t want trouble.”
Four.
“I don’t even want lunch.”
Six.
“I just want to get onto the Panus Transit Number Nine Twenty-Three Bus to Troia Metro Station.”
Nine.
“Then y’won’t mind if I check yer scumpunk backp-”
Fifteen.
Rusty-haired fingers wrapped themselves around Deputy Beau Annal’s wrists, and for a good, blissfully long one second, Ol’ Beau remembered what it was like to fly. Leo scowled as he heard a bus, the Panus Nine Twenty-Three arriving one minute early. Leo walked past the prone, unconscious deputy. On second thought, he would have lunch here after all.
Fantastic.
On a street corner stood a white stucco building, the Happy Owl Diner, one of Pahayoke’s two surviving restaurants. Or three restaurants if one counted Uncle Oglethorpe’s Possum Hibachi, but Leo wasn’t in the mood for possum. The rust-maned boy scratched his damp and scruffy neck with his stout, almond-shaped nails. He figured that that ridiculous, three-story cartoon owl out in front must use half of the town’s power whenever it was allowed to light up.
Whatever.
Scruffy Leo ambled into the crummy diner, silently hoping no one would notice his red, minute old goatee bleaching white.
The inside of the Happy Owl was exactly as Leo remembered since the last hilarious time his goonish father brought him here for lunch four years ago. Perpetually freshly repainted off-white walls, there were plastic owl lamps on every table. Even the exact same swarm of inebriated barflies clustered around the grill. And under the cash register’s counter, the exact same, untouched display of archaic tablet chewing gum candies made by a now-forgotten candy company that apparently went out of business before Leo’s mysterious grandfather Vale was born.
There was a lonely, empty corner table by the front window. Leo parked himself and his backpack there. With much sincere trepidation, Leo picked up the laminated menu laying at his table’s owl’s feet. Same tempting garbage since nineteen eighty-two, but with twenty-first century repricing. The fearsome boy was startled by the sudden setting of a glass of ice water onto his table. The moment Leo set his menu back down, the owlish brush-mustached owner popped into his view like a leprechaun. Beakish nose sniffled, smiling lips pulsing, then parting to reveal beakish teeth.
“Why,” Otus said. “Hello there, Mr. Klamath!” The owner of the Happy Owl Diner radiated. “It's so grand seeing you again! How have you been doing these days? Don't tell me it's true that you have to shutter your Zafari for good? I mean, we don't want to confirm backbiting gossip, after all.” Leo looked away, focusing instead, on the owl lamp's sightless gaze as he began fiddling with his spoon. “Would you like your usual, Mr. Klamath? Salami sandwich?”
“I, um…” Leo took an anxious breath before taking a dainty swig from his waterglass. “My Dad passed away last year.” The owner’s cheer visibly dimmed as he placed his petite, owl’s claw hand on Leo’s big, red paw. “He was taken, was taken by The Sick really bad,” Leo half-lied.
“Oh, my deepest, deepest apologies, sir.”
“I, um, I would like my Dad’s usual, though,” Leo said as he began piecing his stoicism back together.
“Absolutely, sir!” the owner said, nodding eagerly, “On the house!” The owlish man beamed, his cheer obviously renewed.
The owner then snatched the menu out of Leo’s red hands and scurried back into the kitchen. Leo smiled. He finally did it, he finally talked about his Father out loud for the first time in a year without retching or yelling. Or crying. He raised his plastic waterglass high in a proud, but silent toast. As Leo took a congratulatory gulp, the swarm of barflies at the grill all got off their barstools to scamper out the door. Leo suddenly found himself sweating bullets. His pounding heart caught on fire as his hunger pangs flared up again stronger. Leo began tinkering with his jacket zipper but stopped when he realized that there were four gun barrels lined on his shiny forehead.
Just fantastic.
“Well, well, well, if it ain’t the town freak,” lawman Stu rumbled. Bloody-faced Beau had gone off to summon the cavalry; daddy sheriff, Marshal Stu Annal, and Beau’s thuggish elder sisters Lu Ann and Drew Ann. Leo stayed calm even as his glittering brow continued dripping. Lawman Stu continued aiming his pistol on Leo’s nose bridge, making his caterpillar mustache wriggle as his pistol’s hammer clicked ominously. “I’m surprised y’d be coming ba-”
“Git your scumpunker hands up, punky punk!” Beau shouted. Stu slowly turned his pockmarked head towards his paunchy, bloody-faced son, lowered his prescription sunglasses, and shot a dagger straight between Beau’s manic, piggish eyes. That done, the Marshal returned his withering focus back onto Leo, who had just started putting his redhaired hands slowly up.
“So, freak, since I’m feelin’ sentimental, I’ll give you exactly one minute to explain yourself before I lock you up for assaulting an officer,” Marshal Stu said. Drew Ann and Lu Ann both glowered sternly in earnest imitation as they both slowly cocked their pistols, too.
Leo inhaled.
“Marshal Stu, I-”
“You lying piece of rancid scumpunk. I’ll kill you dead.” Beau squealed as he emptied an entire clip of bullets into the wall behind his hated nemesis. Stu and his daughters lined their pistols on Beau’s plump chest, calming his angry hysteria with a healthy dose of fear.
“Beau,” Marshal Stu coldly ordered, “buddy, please wait outside.”
“But, Dad! He-”
“Beau, wait outside like I just asked, or I’ll shoot you dead like I shot your mother and your idiot brother, Lou.” Thus tamed, Beau obediently, dejectedly shuffled over to the other side of the diner’s entrance to pout. “I never should’a popped Lou. At least that moron was never loud ’bout his sass.” The Marshal and his competent children returned their deadly focus on Beau’s assailant. “Now, freak, y’were sayin’?”
“Your son,” Leo finally matter-of-factly stated, “over there, tried to mug me, and I defended myself.” The lawman’s caterpillar made a frenetic spasm upon hearing this.
“Stu Annal!” the diner owner screeched from behind his now-deserted grill. “What the heck are you doing back in my diner? What did you do to all of my customers?”
“This doesn’t concern you, Otus,” Drew Ann hissed. Otus skittered over to the unwanted drama currently unfolding at the far corner table.
“Yes, this does concern me, you stupid gun bunny! You two dumb goons and your tin star Dad are back, shootin’ up my diner again, and screwin’ up my insurance premiums in the process again!”
“Otus, please don’t talk to m’girls like that.”
“Shove it, Annal! I am sick to death of you always lording over everyone in town as this insufferable tin star tyrant, always terrorizing my customers without so much as a sorry out of your dumb mouth!”
“Donchu talk to m’daddy like that!” Lu Ann ordered, carelessly bringing her pistol’s muzzle perilously closer to Leo’s sweating temple.
“I’ll talk to Marshal Annal however I please, ya’dumb cluck!” Otus snapped. Stu’s angry caterpillar sagged with his scowling frown.
“Now listen here, Otus-”
“No, you listen, Annal!” the owlish little man shrieked. “You and your pet gun bunnies leave this fine boy alone, and you never darken my diner’s doorstep forever-”
“Calm down, Otus-”
“Never! Leave, or I’ll leave town for good this time! For good, y’hear me? And then you can tell your precious mayor mommy how you made me drive a stake through Pahayoke’s fiscal heart!”
Enzo tapped the sharpening point of his teardrop-shaped fingernail on Lu Ann’s gun barrel.
“Can I make a suggestion?” Leo asked. Leo’s hidden tank top soaked further as eight angry eyes returned focus on him. He inhaled. “How ’bout you nice folks pay me back the two hundred smackers taken out of my bag, and then I can leave town to never darken anyone’s delightful doorstep ever again?” He hoped and silently prayed to God almost, that no one here noticed his voice beginning to break and deepen ever so slightly. “Hmmm?”
“That’s so stupid, I ought to shoot-”
“Pay him!” the owlishly furious leprechaun yodeled at the finally humbled Marshal. The humbled Annals obediently whipped out their wallets, reluctantly offering up one portrait of Benjamin Franklin, twenty-three crumpled portraits of Abraham Lincoln, and eleven portraits of George Washington. Leo gleefully accepted this partial sacrifice, honestly shocked that his spur of the moment con was really working.
“Hey, Beau!” Stu called. “Git yer butt back over here!” The prodigal paunch came bouncing back into the diner’s dining room, already wallowing in what he imagined was a big, heaping helping of hot, buttered mashed potatoes, forgiveness and praise.
“Yessir, Daddy?” Beau piped, so eager to receive his praise.
“How much cash y’got on ya?”
“Uh…” Beau stammered as he pulled out his pink vinyl wallet from his pants pocket. Before the elementary school dropout could begin his given task of counting his cash, Leo’s rust-furred hand deftly snatched the entire unknown sum of bills out of Beau’s pink vinyl wallet.
“Hey!” Stu grimaced at his surviving son, who then immediately blanched into shivering silence.
The exonerated assault suspect happily shoveled his ill-gotten wergild into his black canvas backpack as the defeated Annals holstered their pistols and exited the diner in quiet shame.
“Thanks a bunch, guys! I will not be-” Leo stopped mid-taunt when he realized Otus was now trembling ferociously at him.
“You are going nowhere until you get your lunch, boy!” the raging leprechaun howled.
“Um… To go?”
“You are going nowhere until you get your lunch to go!”
Leo’s sandwich barely lasted him more than two bites as he sprinted across the street. According to the schedule on the sign, the next bus to Troia wouldn’t come until three forty-five pm.
Dammit.
At this rate, Leo would never make it to the Zafari without arousing suspicion or panic. Leo plopped himself and his backpack down onto the hot metal bus stop bench and slipped off his letterman jacket. The boy peeled off his father’s lucky gold tank top, wringing two, maybe three cups of warm sweat out of it. Leo gasped just as his shaggy, bleaching-furred barrel chest began to painfully thrust out a little more again. He took off his watch off his slick, wet, fur-carpeted wrist, holding his trust timepiece in his tingling, inflating forepaw.
It was only eleven past eleven.
Absolutely fantastically fantastic.
The growing, exasperated boy groaned as he tossed his watch, his jacket, his still sopping wet tank top back into his backpack. He shucked his lengthening hind paws of his sneakers, then struggled for a second as he pulled off his socks. Leo wiggled his taloned toes, noting that his hind paws’ pads had already blackened. He found himself groaning again as he dug his taloned fingers deep into the striped, rust and cream fur of his increasingly muscular sides, trying to worry out some fresh knots. He didn’t want his now-finger length fur to mat from that morning’s sweat-a-thon. Leo then took care to untangle his father’s tiger fang necklace from his now-entirely cream-colored chest fur. He began taking inventory of the necklace’s various fangs; there was that fat, long one, the broken one, the cracked one with a hole drilled in it, the little bitty fang, the gold ring with a heart-shaped ruby.
Leo held the ring up to the brilliant, almost-noon light, studying how the band was woven into threads of hemp. He remembered asking Dad about this ring once when he was a kid. Rather than yell or say anything, the hoary old bastard just wordlessly moped around the Zafari for a week. Leo let his necklace fall back onto his big, cream-furred chest. He began fumbling with the zipper of his sweat-soggy jeans.
“I’d know that debauched joi de vivre anywhere! Good afternoon, Mr. Enzo!”
Leo nervously looked to his shaggy side to see a short, bottled-eyed old woman in a straw sunbonnet and a purple plumeria muumuu smiling at him. “Oh, Mrs. Stasso, I didn’t see you there… Pardon…” The increasingly hoary boy suddenly stuttered in his Father’s gravelly baritone.
“Mr. Enzo,” Mrs. Stasso said. “Where have you been?” She took Leo’s sweating paws into her pleasantly gnarled hands. “Oh, it’s been so long, let me look at you! I still can’t thank you enough for moving my refrigerator into my kitchen.” The old woman squinted her feeble eyes as she petted Leo’s auburn sideburns.
“I, um, I hope things are well with you, Mrs. Stasso.”
“Things could be better,” Mrs. Stasso groused. “My store just closed down, and my bursitis is acting up again.”
“I, um, I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Stasso.”
“Oh, enough about li’l old me. How have you been, Mr. Enzo? Don’t tell me it’s true that your Zafari is closing? Where will you and your two cherub sons go?”
“’Fraid it’s true,” Leo reluctantly confirmed. “Business was really bad,” he lied. He frowned. “But we still have a good place to stay.”
“Come, Mr. Enzo,” Mrs. Stasso said as she pulled on Leo’s paws. “Have lunch with me. I’ll let you take some of my apples home to your boys.”
Leo downed his carton of turkey barley mushroom soup in one gulp, then stood up to his full current height of seven and something feet.
“Those apples?”
“Of course. I might have some old tee shirts for you, too. It’s not safe to wear such a woolly sweater on such a hot sunny day y’know.”
The two toddled down the street, good ol’ Grandma holding onto the hand of a young, ginger wolf with a poofy white beard. Imposter Enzo’s stomach bellowed loudly from its fortress of flesh, cream belly fur, and ever-tightening, sweat-drenched denim.
“Goodness!”
Think, Leo! Idiot! What are you thinking? You’re changing! You’ll eat Mrs. Stasso! And her dumb dog! And her neighbors! All for what? Apples? Oh, God, Mrs. Stasso’s cookies are the best! I’d go through hell to have her apples! Wait, no…
The Impostor Enzo stopped in his tracks, letting his forepaw drop out of Mrs. Stasso’s hand as his hind paws scorched on the sizzling pavement.
The grandmotherly widow asked, “Is there something wrong, dear?” She turned to look back like a Coke-bottle eyed Orpheus.
The Impostor Enzo buried his still kind of human nose into the copper and auburn fur of his wrist and faked a snuffling sneeze before retaking Mrs. Stasso’s re-offered hand.
Mrs. Stasso’s apartment building, was exactly as Impostor Enzo remembered from the last time he’d been there two years ago, from the same bums nesting around the grungy, burnished yellow guardian lions at the front entrance, to the same, fluttering, dusty cobwebs festooning the trash-littered stairwells.
Apples.
The Impostor Enzo focused on apples. He focused on apples even as Mrs. Stasso jimmied her key into her door keyhole, focusing on apples even as he ignored the lightning flashes of pain within his cracking pelvis shifting shape underneath his hairy flesh.
Mrs. Stasso’s apartment was exactly as Impostor Enzo remembered, from the lilac print wallpaper and fake mahogany furniture to that shrieking Pomeranian, Chloe. Mrs. Stasso dropped her sunbonnet onto her slipcovered couch while Impostor Enzo began quietly panting. Chloe’s shrill barking was gently pulling him out of his cookie trance. Mrs. Stasso squatted down to scoop the furious, yapping lint ball into her bandy arms as her guest set his backpack onto her couch.
“Chloe, Chloe,” she cooed. “Mind your manners, sweetie. It’s just Mr. Enzo; he’s not going to eat you.”
Impostor Enzo giggled guiltily as he scratched his left nipple.
“She’s just jealous that I got a better sweater than her.”
Mrs. Stasso stood there, seemingly confused as she clutched her squirming, yapping dog, then erupted in volcanic cackling once she finished processing her guest’s little sweater joke. The Impostor Enzo sidled into the dinette set in the kitchen as Mrs. Stasso took Chloe into the bedroom. The tigerish boy plunked himself into a steel and artificial leather chair.
Oh my God, Leo, what are you thinking? What are you doing? Apples? All for apples?
Impostor Enzo inhaled, the ribs of his massive, still barreling chest cracking, crackling as he filled his beast’s lungs with aromas of lunchmeat. Mrs. Stasso returned, chuckling as she held out a bedsheet-like shirt that read “I ♡ Pahayoke”.
“Oh,” Impostor Enzo demurred. “Mrs. Stasso, y’didn’t need to.” The grandmotherly widow inserted the folded shirt into his backpack. She chuckled.
“Nonsense!” she replied. “I know how much Duncan loves novelty tee shirts. This one was George’s favorite.”
“Thanks kindly, ma’am,” Impostor Enzo said. “Duncan will love it,” he ad libbed. He got up as Mrs. Stasso pulled out lunchmeat out of her ancient refrigerator.
“Sit, Mr. Enzo, you’re my guest, and I wouldn’t dare let one of my guests work on my watch.” Mrs. Stasso paused again, her expression turning stucco while her kitchen knife of Damocles dangled low over an apple. “Unless I need you to move another refrigerator for me.” Then she laughed again. Impostor Enzo tried to force out a laugh of courtesy but stopped when Chloe started barking again from the bedroom.
Mrs. Stasso carried a plate stacked with salami sandwiches onto the table. She giggled as her guest’s share of the sandwiches disappeared almost the moment she set that plate onto the table. She laughed again as she brought another plate, this time, stacked with apples.
“Oh, wow” Leo the Impostor eagerly rumbled.
“I’ll let you take some sandwiches and apples home for your boys, too.” Mrs. Stasso said as she packed some lunchbags into Leo’s backpack. “Be sure they eat the goodies before you do, please.”
Impostor Enzo found himself growling. Mrs. Stasso plunked down two bottles of chilled pilsners as she sat herself down into another metal and artificial leather chair. Impostor Enzo ummed eagerly as they clinked their bottles in a toast.
“Oh, beer! Thanks!”
“I know you always liked a nice, hoppy beer.”
“Yeah, Dad hated beer… Which… Is why he taught me to, um, hate… it…”
Mrs. Stasso flattened her smile, then pursed her lips.
“That’s not a good thing to do, teach a child to hate.”
The Impostor Enzo suckled his bottle empty as he felt the seams in his wet jeans begin to give out.
“Yeah, that’s why I let my sons. drink whatever nonalcoholic drinks they want… Oh, and Mrs. S, can I use your bathroom?”
“Please, Mr. Enzo, don’t need to ask.”
The eight-foot-tall boy stood up and darted by the couch to snatch up his backpack as he galloped to the bathroom. The same old miasma of artificial jasmine scent and talcum powder greeted Leo’s nostrils as he locked the bathroom door behind him. He groaned loudly as his hips shifted again harder, squeezing his furry jewels of might against taut denim. He unbuckled his belt, and tore his jeans’ fly open, letting a torrent of wet, white fur pour out. Leo’s nascent primordial pouch now free, he needed to get out of this flower-printed oubliette. He slung his backpack over his painfully broadening shoulder, and popped out the windowpane and screen with one gentle shove from his forepaw.
From that emptied three-story window, Leo leapt, landing on the roof of a condemned two-story condominium unit across the street. He darted to the rotten ledge, propelling himself off the crumbling edge with such force that he sailed over the neighboring unit, landing in the empty street as his jeans tore apart into a useless kilt of tattered, denim streamers. After gathering the ruins of his jeans into his backpack, the tigerish boy stayed down on all fours, sprinting down the street to the Pahayoke city limits like some lumpy cheetah in a hurry.
***
Leo had been running on four and two legs through Calostoma County’s oak and bramble forest for almost an hour before his mighty limbs finally rebelled, their sudden, cramp-induced paralysis thrusting the tigerish boy headfirst into a desiccated blackberry bush. The tigerish boy crawled out, sloughing off his backpack as he did so. Then the tiger boy opened his bleeding, fanged mouth wide in an uncomfortably shrill, howling roar.
“Agh!” He collapsed face first back into a prickly leaf litter, already exhausted from the morning. Even so, it was still coming, it hadn’t even started. “All that for sandwiches! All that for beer and apples, Leo! All for apples!”
It was coming earlier. It was coming stronger, and it was coming faster. Obviously, there was going to be lots of trouble coming too.
The tiger boy’s hipbones continued shifting, grinding, widening, his pitifully shrill roaring climbing up octaves and falling down octaves until he finally slumped back into the leaf litter with a resounding, bird-startling thrash. As the crows still scattered from Leo’s echoing fart, the quarter-tiger impotently dug his hind paws deep into the loam. He shivered as his throbbing muscles struggled to throb in sync. He hesitantly raised his inflating neck.
“Help me, Daddy! Help me, please! please!” the sixteen-year-old monster done wailed. His tail was getting ready to sprout again and Leo was afraid. He stupidly raised his forepaw as a fist and toppled over onto his ballooning side. Leo grimaced a great and terrible grimace full of sharp and bloody teeth as his blue-hot clavicles started moving his crunching, bloating shoulders. “Agh! Oh, Daddy, Daddy, I’m so sorry! Please! Please help me! I, um, I’ll be a good boy! Ngh!”
Leo the still-growing tiger boy scrubbed his itching, hairy, still sort of kind of human face with his forepaws as his untamed greaser-hero sideburns became ferociously wild mutton chops that continued growing and growing into monstrous tufts of red and white fur. Leo gripped his red and white cheek fur in his swollen, swelling forepaws, feebly tugging at his cheek fur as they merged with his poofy white goat beard and flowed down his great, shaggy, increasingly bullish bullneck as a simmering tiger’s mane. Leo whimpered as he tried to ready himself to yell again. Whimpering became growling as Leo’s mountainous back began erupting through his ever-thickening hackles. The half a tiger found himself snarling again.
Gettin’ there.
The gangly, stretchy limbed, half-formed monster boy trembled as he achingly struggled back onto his wobbly, pulsating hindlegs. Once he could teeter back up to his full, ten-foot height, Leo the half a tiger bolted through the thorny underbrush as though he was a man, as though he was still the high school track star he should have been. He ran and ran as far as his monster hindlegs could carry his changing monster body. Maybe this would be the day Leo could finally run away from this thing pursuing him that he otherwise became. Then again, maybe not, as the half a tiger boy found himself crashing back into the underbrush again.
The way the dazzling afternoon sun shone through the drought-shriveled forest canopy easily showed that it was maybe six, probably seven hours until moonrise. But poor Leo was in no position to enjoy the sunshine. The four hundred, soon to be five hundred pound, three fifth a tiger thrashed about in the loam, screaming and weeping as he finally began pooping out his tiger’s tail. The still growing boy-monster shrieked, he pleaded, he cursed, he coughed, and he pleaded again. The agony of having to poop out a two, no, a three, no, a four-foot length of spinal cord over the course of an hour was tortuously bad enough. It made the normally defiant Leo pound his big, shaggy fists on the ground, and kick his hind paws deep into the loam. Ah! But the itching! The tickling itching of all that unholy fur growing on his five-foot and growing tail. That, that was a torture that made the great and proud and mighty Enzo Rudolfo Lancio Klamath Junior (now Leo) cry, made him beg, made him moan, made him weep, made him low and moo like some piteously pitiful milk cow being milked to death with cold, chapped hands.
The three-fourth tiger continued bleating and thrashing in another one of his bramble refuges, his growing, might-mutating tiger’s limbs spasming as they continued growing mightier and tigerisher still. The tiger boy lowed as his still half-mighty chest thrust out again even further, now with a chorus of crackling ribs. Leo bowed his back, grinding his cream-furred belly into the crunchy, prickly leaf litter as though he were a twelve-foot-long nag going swayback from being mounted by the heaviest rider in the world. The three-fourth tiger boy whined as he tried and failed to remember exactly how his moron Father could make this power of metamorphosis of theirs seem so fun.
Leo’s change spurts and growth spasms slowed, then paused, almost as though to let him catch his already tired breath with his great tiger’s lungs. He sniffed at the stultifying summer air with his still kind of human nose, then rolled his not-so-human head to try and crack his stiff, tiger mane. Leo knew he had eclipsed his brother in size and mass over eight moons ago. But before Leo could ponder how big he’d eventually become, the tensing muscles at the base of his mutating skull tightened, squeezing out a roaring scream and Leo’s last semi-rational thought. The eye of his personal storm was passing. Storm clouds of white fur bloomed inside of his now-feline ears, his cheekbones springing forward with a thunderclap of crunching. His big, once-human nose flattened as his bleeding, bloody jaws evolved, elongated into a feline snout. He slumped back into the churned, leafy earth as spear like whiskers sprouted across his freshly resurfaced snout.
Leo the tired, almost a tiger, dragged his aching, cramping, pulsating, palsied, shaggy, fifteen-foot-long bulk out of the ruined brambles in the hopes of finding some place less thorny to thrash uncontrollably in.
***
“Daddy, Daddy!” Enzo yelled as he toddled down the stony path past the Hyena Hut. The six-year-old boy wanted to show everyone his new cape he made from tying his stuffed Big Brat to his head with his undershirt. Ha Ha the Spotted Hyena leaped out from her hut to snap at Enzo’s shorts; she loved to nip at her master’s favorite cub more than anything in the world.
“Hey! Quit it, Ha Ha!” Enzo shouted. The she-hyena pulled the boy down to the dusty flagstones as she insisted on stealing his shorts. It was how she showed her boundless love, after all. “Hey!”
“Hey.”
Big, red, hairy tree branch hands clutched Enzo, helping the little boy back onto his little bare feet. The boy looked up to see a big, woolly, tiger skeleton man, no, Daddy was wearing Harrietta Briar’s fur again. Daddy tore off his white tee-shirt to tie around his son’s waist as a makeshift loincloth. Big, knotty-boned fingers with long, curved talons hooked underneath Enzo’s armpits, then his father hoisted him high into the air.
“Behold!” Enzo’s father hollered at the crown gathering around the Last Quercy Oak’s iron-spined cage. “Conan the Barbabyan!”
***
Full moonrise. Leo spat out the very last shards of his puny human teeth just as his fist-sized carnassials finished their steady emergence from his monster gums. Saber fangs as big as parsnips finally erupted from Leo’s snout, glistening with bloody slobber and reflected moonlight. A twenty-three-foot-long tiger, twenty-nine counting his gloriously swishing tail, began skulking about the still-warm, polluted oak forest undergrowth. Leo was reborn, and back in his old stomping grounds.
Deep down, he obviously remembered he was still Leo the boy. But he was Enzo now. And Enzo was hungry now, and he needed to hunt now.
Elsewhere, a young buck, almost two years old, and freshly stripped of his velvet, waded into a thicket of dehydrated brambles to feed on blackberries and brittle leaves. A little after three minutes into his modest feast, the buck collapsed, his left lung flooding with blood from where a hunter’s arrow pierced him. A gurgling grunt, and the buck was gone.
A ghillie-suited bow hunter emerged from her hunting blind. The bow hunter was proud; she had just bagged her first buck of the season, a largely tined buck at that. The nocturnal bow hunter readjusted her night vision goggles, her pretty little head bursting with venison recipes and decisions of just exactly where to hang that prize-winning rack in her studio apartment. Then her pretty little head emptied itself of every thought beyond a sudden blast of pain when a fast-moving paw, the size of an ottoman, struck her.
Enzo was hungry that night, oh so very hungry as he made short, snarling work of those two corpses. The unnatural tiger lounged in the crispy, prickly leaf litter, licking his luxurious fur clean of his preys’ deliciously messy bodily fluids, taking special care to clean his fang necklace hidden deep within his mane.
Distant roaring perked up the giant tiger boy’s fluffy ears mid lick.
A new rival to eat? No… He rummaged through Leo’s memory. Traffic… A, uh a bus… More prey!
The excited tiger boy eagerly loped through the oak and bramble forest until he stopped at the dry, dusty shores of a river made of dirty, dark stone. By the side of that forest street, Enzo witnessed a strange, shiny, log-shaped animal on circular legs flee an orchard of narrow, metal trees bearing glowing fruit. Transit Three Twenty-Two dropping off another passenger. Easy peasy pickings.
Leo the tiger boy craned his mighty, bullish neck upward, his steaming nostrils flaring as he studied that lone, lonely little child in a hoodie with bunny ears who was pensively pacing around the bus stop. The boy, who couldn’t be more than eight-years old, carried a familiar-looking stuffed animal in his petite arms.
Hey, he has a stuffed tiger toy, just like mine!
The hungry tiger thundered towards the bus stop just as the nervous little boy turned around to face his impending, rumbling doom.
This work was featured in issue #14