A story by Stanton Fink

Image: Untitled by Stanton Fink

I

In a spartan, yet squalid living room of a spartan, yet squalid apartment, a cat poked its head through a gap in the cardboard-sealed window. The cat skittered onto the filthy yet barren floor, silently moved towards a duct-tape upholstered couch, and leaped up onto it. The animal seeped in between duct-taped cushions, and disappeared. Behind that miserable, tape-mummified couch in that miserable living room was a door leading to a miserable small bedroom. 

Dominating that miserably cramped bedroom was a dilapidated mattress. Beside that dingy mattress was a lamp-adorned fruit crate its owner pretended was a nightstand. A beat up vanity dress with a cracked mirror sat on the far side of the bedroom (if the room could be called that) as though to distance itself from that farce of a decorative afterthought. 

A mountainously large, redheaded man in pajamas, lay asleep on that miserable mattress. On the crescendo of snoring, a button popped off of his pajama shirt, allowing a meadow of thick, white hair to blossom across his vast chest. A thin, little boy, too petite to be called “bony,” lie nestled deep in a valley formed in the crook of his brother’s massive arm. 

The mountain instinctively pressed the boy close to him in a hug. He then placed his shaggy, paw-like hand over the boy’s maimed right hand. With his swollen thumb, the mountain gingerly stroked his brother’s scar-puckered knuckles near where the boy’s fingers once were. Rudy Kaplan  yawned a mighty, rumbling yawn as another button popped off, turning his meadow of white into a hairy avalanche of snow that flowed up his blowing neck to pummel against his craggy chin. 

Clutching his whimpering brother to his vast, shaggy chest, the mountain sat up. He pivoted towards his pretend nightstand, and planted his big, shaggy, bedroom slippers squarely on the floor. The mountain let his brother lie in his lap as he switched on the lamp, their mother’s lamp. He fumbled for, then fumbled with a plastic phial with his shaggy paw-like hands before finally prying that infernal, childproof lid off with a horn-colored talon that slid cleanly out of the broad tip of his finger. 

“Hey Dunc, Duncan,” the mountain cooed. “You need your pills.” 

He stroked Duncan’s sand-colored hair. Duncan pried his mouth open a crack to let his brother put his pills in. 

The mountain then put a water bottle to his brother’s lips for the obligatory swig. The mountain slurped down the rest of the water to wash his own pills down. He let Duncan lie back down onto the mattress. The mountain, in turn, got up out of bed, and shambled towards the door. He shot a brief, venomous glare at the beastly reflection in his cracked vanity mirror. 

“Get a life, ugly,” he snarled. 

In his short death march to the bathroom, the mountain didn’t notice, or rather didn’t care, that a thin tail was successfully fighting its way out of a tear in the seat of his pajama pants. He was too busy remembering a time when he still looked human, no, a time when he still was human. Back in the glory days as a globetrotting photojournalist, just after his glory days as an all-star college athlete. He remembered that glorious day when he was called into his editor’s office to receive his “greatest assignment ever.” 

“Rudy, my son,” Rudy remembered his editor saying. “You’re heading an expedition to Yunnan, China to document the Maohu People.” 

Rudy remembered laughing upon accepting that assignment. No reason really: he was a big laugher in those days. The mountain scowled as he banished that awful memory from his shaggy head. 

Rudy stood before his bathroom sink, reluctantly facing down his reflection again. Once upon a time, long, long ago, he adored primping and preening and posing in front of his reflection wherever he met it. Those glorious days were so long ago now (but not long enough ago in the mountain’s personal opinion). He stared at that mirror, studying how his scruffy beard and fluffy mutton chops were smothering his once-handsome, once-human face. He never was pleased how his luxurious facial fur made everyone think he was some sort of elderly hipster-yeti either. 

Rudy gently traced the thick tip of his sausage finger around the outline of the reflection of his face, hoping to numb his urge to thrust his ham-like paw hand through the mirror. He watched his hairy, hair-filled ears growing bigger, steadily emerging from his fluffy sideburns. 

It was coming, he realized. 

With that realization, the rest of Rudy’s pajama buttons popped off as his mighty chest barreled out. A great, seething sea of thickening white fur flowed uninterrupted from his chin down across his mighty chest to his groin. 

Rudy’s tail began slapping against the linoleum of the bathroom floor as he tabulated how much time he had left. When he arrived at a figure of 13 hours, the shoulder seams of his pajama shirt gave out, finally releasing his forest-like mane of red fur. 

Rudy’s scowl softened into a sly smirk. If there was one benefit to it, even if it was the only benefit, it was the soul-boiling exhilaration he got from being filled to literal bursting with overflowing power. He had to. He needed to, for Duncan’s sake. 

The mountain focused his surging power, and felt his mighty, might-deformed body swell up ever so slightly. He grinned a fangy grin as the bulging muscles of his monster’s arm tear through the thin fabric of his sleeves. The seams of his pajama pants split open in response to his shifting thighs, vomiting forth fountains of more red fur as they tore apart. As he finally sloughed off the last tatters of his ruined pajamas, he stood there in his bathroom, balancing on his tiptoes, no, standing on his hindlegs. 

There, leaning on that miserable sink, in front of that miserable bathroom mirror, was an odd-looking, broad-shouldered, rat-tailed big cat, cloaked in a cape-like mane of red fur and a snow-colored belly, wearing a grinning man’s face. Duncan, half-asleep, shambled into the bathroom, and wedged himself comfortably between his brother’s belly fur and the rim of the sink. As Duncan armed himself with his toothbrush, Rudy delicately squeezed out a drop of toothpaste for him. The mountain tousled his brother’s sandy hair with his great paw. 

“Morning, Sparky,” Rudy greeted. Duncan grumbled in response. The mountain reached for his electric razor, putting it to his fur-hidden chin. After all, it was time for the mountain to don his human disguise. 

On the far side of that squalid living room, Rudy fussed over an electric stove while Duncan sat half awake at a card table, their father’s card table, waiting with a paper plate. Rudy looked passably human now that he shaved off his beard and mutton chops, had put on his green Wigman’s Grocery shirt and apron, hid his paw-like hands inside cheap gloves, hid his tail inside his black slacks, and squeezed his hindpaws into shoes. Duncan, meanwhile, dressed in his school uniform, a blue vest over a black polo shirt and khaki slacks. 

“What’s for breakfast?” Duncan yawned. 

“Scrambled eggs, Sparky,” the mountain cheerfully replied. He beamed as he doled out his brother’s share of the eggs, silently boastful over how human he made himself look. Rudy then sat down at his father’s card table, and began eating his share of the eggs out of his frying pan, his mother’s frying pan, face first. Duncan examined his brother’s tigerine ear. He fished out a bandana, and tied it around the mountain’s head to hide the mountain’s tiger ears and shaggy hair. The mountain’s human disguise now complete, he paused to give a quick hug and a snort of thanks. 

Once breakfast was over, their mother’s frying pan was stashed in the bathroom sink where it would be washed in the evening, and Duncan’s plate was placed in a trash bag mostly filled with red hair. The brothers were then out of their door, carrying between them the trash bag, a dufflebag, and a backpack. 

The pair started their largely uneventful trek to the subway station by ramming the trash bag full of red hair into the trash can in the lobby of their apartment building. Next, Rudy held Duncan’s good hand as they raced together for three blocks before laughing all the way down the escalator at the subway station. The subway platform was crowded that morning, as it was every morning. Rudy wrapped both of his big arms around Duncan, not so much to protect his brother, but more to keep his good luck charm closer. 

Ever since Rudy fled Yunnan, he loathed crowds with a wordless passion. So much meat crowding together, grinding together, wallowing in a delightful miasma of seductively rancid sweat. The subway cars were, as they always were since Yunnan, an unbreathable swamp of human pheromones ignored by everyone but Rudy. All those aromas of fear, anxiety, and irritation made his eyes water.

“Hey, Sparky,” Rudy said as he tried to swallow the suffocating lump forming in his throat. 

“Yeah?” his good luck charm replied. The boy shifted in his big brother’s embrace, instinctively aware of the mountain’s smoldering. Red splotches shine on his cheek. 

“We got rid of the trash, right?” He held his little brother tight. 

“We tossed it right when we left, remember?” Duncan pulled his arm free to better hug Rudy’s bulging, throbbing triceps. 

“Yeah, thanks.” Of course Rudy remembered, such was how the first half of his distraction ritual went. He began the second part of his ritual by stroking his brother’s sandy hair. 

“Hey, look! It’s Harry the Hugger and his boy toy!” 

The mountain noticed the crowd parting around him and his brother. He felt a slide rise up and shift underneath his Wigman’s Grocery shirt. A smelly, filthily dressed man, maybe in his late thirties, was circling Rudy and his little brother like a lone jackal closing in on a cow mired in mud. The smelly man’s matted beard reeked of rancid beer and stale tobacco. Saccharine, that odious bouquet made Rudy snort as he scoured his weepy eyes of tears with the back of his shaggy wrist. 

“What’s the matter?” the smelly jackal yapped. “Mad I discovered you with your little friendly friend?” 

Rudy blinked the last tears out of his eyes, then glowered. 

“Please shut up and leave us alone,” Rudy declared. The smelly jackal’s laughter turned shrill. Other passengers began to gawk at his  glowering expression. A tired old woman sitting behind the brothers shuffled the three shopping bags on her lap. 

“What are you going to do if I don’t? Kill me? Molest me?” The smelly jackal continued tittering. 

“Just do as he says, and go home, you stinking lush,” the old woman growled. 

The smelly jackal leaned perilously close to the brothers in order to better leer at the old woman. Whereupon the mountain reached out with his gloved paw, and snagged that smelly, laughing lush by the filthy neck, hauling him in close. The lush met Rudy’s snarling gaze, his tittering laugh changing to squealing puffs upon realizing that behind that hairy face was an ancient predator, hungry, angry and not at all human. Rudy let his prey go as the shrieking lush flooded the subway car with salty fear and red wailing. Duncan grimaced in disgust and relief. 

Rudy wiped his gloved paw on his slacks, hugged his Sparky a little tighter as he drank up the delicious terror, the frantic pounding on the sealed subway door a soothing victory cadenza. 

“This morning,” Rudy said. “I was afraid no one would build anything.”

One of Rudy’s coworkers at Wigman’s, a nosy, gossippy manager, would pester him about why, if he detested the subway so much, didn’t he just drive a car for his commute. Besides the obvious hints dropped about the problems of a car, car insurance, and fuel on a box boy salary in the 21st Century, the main reason why Rudy loathed driving a car even more than riding the subway was rather a sentimental reason.

Norstrand Street Station. Their stop. Two brothers hurried out of the subway car and into the Norstrand Street Station. They were behind schedule so Rudy hoisted his Sparky, or Duncan, onto his shoulders. He ran up the escalator and ran down the street for two blocks, only slowing down when he finally approached Duncan’s eighth-grade place of learning. He set Duncan down and rubbed his Sparky’s hair one last time.  

“You be good, today, Sparky.” 

“Yes, big bro.” He started to cry. “You promise you won’t eat anyone?”  

“Not on my shift. But we’re gonna have a fun day tomorrow; wine, women, and drugs! And we’ll order for lunch!” 

The two shared one last laugh before Duncan headed through the school gates. Rudy stood there at the entrance, waving to his brother for a minute even after the boy disappeared into the school entrance. 

“I’m taking good care of him, Ma,” he muttered. “I’m taking good care of him like I promised.” 

The mountain stared at his gloved paw, watching a patch of crimson fur fight its way out of a seam. He remembered the first time he ate a man. It was an exhilarating experience, addictive, yet exhausting.

Rudy remembered being told he was “…chosen to have received a great gift,” and he remembered being told he needed “…to earn the right to keep it.” At the time he was too delirious from pain, and magic herbs, and being alive again to refuse offers. 

He readjusted his duffle bag, and went on his way to Wigman’s, the laughter of a child and her accompanying grandmother echoing in his hidden ears. 

II

When Rudy arrived at Wigman’s Grocery, the store was already open and teeming with customers. Not that it mattered to Rudy, as he hadn’t been assigned to help in months. He made an unobtrusive beeline to the back of the store, then clocked in. Pulling out his Wigman’s Grocery baseball cap, he shoved his duffle bag into his locker. His cap on, he hurried to the loading dock of the stockroom. Rudy was needed for his special talents after all. 

Despite having been an athlete and a photojournalist, Rudy got his current job as a box boy by calling on a favor owed to him by the store’s founder, Bernard Wigman Senior. Bernard Senior felt he owed Rudy dearly as Rudy was one of the few people who took the loving time to teach a beloved grandson how to be and stay a just and upstanding team player. In Rudy’s mind, he systematically beat the teenage pomposity out of Bernard III in high school wrestling and high school football. Six years ago, upon hearing the tragic situation of Rudy and his family, Senior and III were both eager to offer condolences and assistance. Thus, over the overridden protests of the staunchly anti-sentimentalist Bernard Junior, Rudy “The Mountain” was made “Wigman’s Grocery’s Number One Box Boy,” a title he held with such happiness, an one ever since. 

In the crowded stockroom, Bernard III, the morning supervisor, warmly shook his hand, lurid memories of Boston crab holds and concussive tackles ever fresh in his mind. 

“Let’s get bananas on these bananas!” the supervisor laughed. If Rudy wasn’t dead positive of an imminent murder, he would have punted Bernard for using that stale, old chestnut again. And again and again. But the mountain was too polite, and the morning’s truckload of fruit wasn’t going to unload itself, especially since the store’s only working forklift had been out of purpose and out of gas for the past six years. 

The other workers swarmed and milled about, lending Rudy half-hearted assistance in the warm form of unpacking and carrying away unloaded pallets while shooing away perverts. The other staff always marvelled over their #1 box boy’s strength, despite witnessing semi-daily demonstrations for the past six years. 

In the loading of his eighth pallet of apples, Rudy stopped by the bakery department, and half-knelt down as he set the pallet onto the floor. 

“What’s he doing?” a baker asked as she watched Rudy arch his back while reaching backwards. 

“He’s stretching,” another baker explained. Neither baker noticed him staring longingly at a big display gondola freshly stacked with bags of bright macarons. 

Most of the staff with Junior, blatant balking over a shameless display of nepotism. But, after witnessing Rudy Kaplan at work, coupled with fingering all of the money he saved them from spending on heavy machinery maintenance, they promptly welcomed their #1 box boy. 

Now that Rudy finished surveying the bakery, he picked up his pallet and returned to his route to the fresh produce department. After unloading his eleventh pallet, he felt III slap him on his muscle-pumped back. 

“Be careful there,” Bernard III said as he patted his own, jiggling beerbelly. “Why don’t you go on break now?” 

“See you after lunch?” Rudy smiled as he started back towards the lockers. Bernard III didn’t answer. As far as he was concerned, III clocked out a long, long time ago when he stupidly hired his high school rival in the stupid hope of finally one-upping said rival. In fact, III. secretly, even, figured that Rudy could do everyone’s job, from his own to Bert’s in accounting to Angie’s in the floral department, and would still come out looking like Eugene Sandow on steroids.

Wigman’s #1 box boy decided that he’d spend his break catching up on mop duty. After he pulled on a pair of elbow-length rubber gloves, he wheeled his haphazard cleaning cart around the store, swabbing the floor here and there with his mop, trusting people not to notice that his mop bucket was empty of water. He made a wide and leisurely arc in the bakery, then walked to the ladies’ restroom. Rudy set a plastic caution cone in front of the door. Now alone, Rudy dumped his mop bucket full of hidden goodies onto the restroom counter. He never visited the employee lounge, let alone eat there. While the other staff appreciated his work at the store, they made sure he understood that they wouldn’t be caught dead socializing with him. Of those staff who could be bothered to remember Rudy’s past, the only reason they could think of over why Rudy would come crawling back to this urban podunk of a hometown just to beg his high school rival for a submenial job was a future-eating rumor. And the staff didn’t want to taint themselves by mingling with him. Other employees not in the know simply avoided mingling with a man who looked, smelled, and shed like a Siberian in summertime. 

Rudy surveyed his goodies; an heirloom tomato, a carton of grapefruit sherbet, a box of macarons, a rainbow trout and his prize of prizes: a really fatty cut of steak that the store butcher thought she threw out. He clutched some steak with both gloved hands and rammed it into his mouth. Rudy knew the real reason why the other employees shunned him. He never joined them in their gossip. After all, he felt it was a fair trade if he let them believe whatever they wanted to believe about him if they never bothered him about discretely using the store as his personal pantry as revenge for being paid less than minimum wage. He gobbled up his tomato, tore into his trout, slurped on his sherbet, and wolfed down a big handful of macarons. He looked up from the sink to meet the shocked gaze of an elderly lady in a mumu. Her mouth hung open in apparent horror upon the sight of a man in the ladies’ restroom. Rudy hurriedly tossed his uneaten treasures into the trashcan. 

“It’s not what you think ma’am!” he apologetically sputtered. “I was just examining produce!” And then sideburns miraculously bloomed into mighty, snow-colored mutton chops at his periphery right before the elderly lady’s eyes. He quickly realized that the old woman was now officially beyond calming or reasoning, what with how she inhaled. Rudy clutched his uniform as the silver-haired banshee began to mock an air raid siren. 

Wigman’s Grocery’s ladies’ restroom filled up with managers, looky-loo clerks, and the balding, mustachioed supervisor, Bernard Wigman Junior. Now that she was safe, the banshee leaned into the scrawny arms of Dougal Bixby, Wigman’s Grocery’s #2 box boy. 

“Oh, my stars! This pervert monster was doing some satanic onanism ritual right before my very eyes!” Dougal pulled out a handkerchief for her while some of the managers began shooting Rudy and each other asking glares. “He was using a fish and potions and cookies and blood! See? Look at him! Look! He’s turning into a monster right before our very eyes!” 

Managers and clerks, even Dougal, all started to share a dirty laugh. Rudy felt his hackles crackle through the thick of his own spine, creeping up out from the back of his shirt collar to graze the back of his shaggy scalp. Everyone went respectfully mute the moment Junior gave everyone his fish-eyed glower of doom. 

“Ma’am,” Supervisor Junior began. “Wigman’s Grocery has no rules or policies barring employees from performing their work-related duties in restrooms of opposite genders.” 

Supervisor Junior sighed, and all of the assembled employees stiffed into more appropriately somber and solemn expressions. 

“But, but he’s, he’s…!” the old lady continued protesting. 

“Mr. Bixby, please escort the nice lady to the customer service lobby and give her a $15 giftcard.” 

The supervisor sighed again, and everyone promptly took their cue to follow Dougal and the old lady out of the ladies’ restroom. 

Junior tugged on his mustache as he turned to Rudy. 

“Mr. Kaplan, you know you’re late for your shift at the coffee bar, right?” 

“I… I can explain, Mr. Wigman! I… I can pay for the giftcard, too!” box boy #1 stammered.  “Oh, and, yes sir!” Rudy anxiously wheeled his cart out. 

“And Mr. Kaplan,” the afternoon supervisor continued. 

“Yes, sir?” The mountain paused. 

“The time you enjoy your bonus on company time, please remember to take the time to lock the door so we hopefully won’t get another PR disaster like we did today, okay?” 

“Understood, sir! No one ever watches me do this.” 

If it were up to Junior, he would have fired that Charles Atlas hairball a long time ago. In fact, if it were up to him, he would have fired the hairball, Bixby, his own miserable son, and everyone else, everyone else, a long time ago. But that would require defying the wishes of the store’s executive director, and defying the executive director would, in turn, require defying his father’s dying plea that Junior never defy the executive director. If Bernard Wigman Junior never found it within his heart to defy his father during the years he knew him, he wasn’t going to bother trying now, either. 

“That’s the lamest hand turkey I’ve ever seen!” Duncan’s classmate Percy declared. Duncan rolled his eyes. He could feel the larger boy’s breath in his hair as Percy hovered over him. 

“So are you going to help me, like, improve by-?” Duncan asked. 

“Your lame hand turkey is the lamest hand turkey in the whole world!” Percy mocked. “You deserve an F forever, lame-o!” 

Duncan sighed. So much for the lie about art class being some sort of sanctuary. 

“If you’re not going to help, Percival, could you do everyone a favor by going back to hell?” 

Percival’s veneer of childishness flaked away as he grabbed a double fistful of Duncan’s vest, hoisting the smaller boy out of his chair. 

“What did you just say?” the bully demanded. 

“Percival Schloss!” Mrs. Currant shouted. “Unhand him!” Percival fearfully hesitated at the art teacher’s command, and continued holding Duncan up. “Immediately!” Percy let him drop to the floor. The art teacher, angry, arose from her desk to hustle over to the two miscreants. “What is the meaning of this?” 

“Duncan told Percy to go to hell!” a fourth student gleefully volunteered. Mrs Currant readjusted her spectacles. 

“Mr Kaplan, is this true?” 

“I’m very sorry,” Duncan apologized. “I didn’t realize Percival was teaching art class instead of Mrs. Currant. I’ll remember next time.” 

Percival’s cheeks flushed pink as Mrs Currant’s jowls quaked carmine. 

“I will tolerate neither violence, nor insolence in my classroom!” the priggish woman shouted. “To the principal’s office with the both of you!” 

The two insolent students obediently filed out of her classroom as per their teacher’s orders. By the time the two were out of earshot, Percival jabbed his nose into Duncan’s ear. 

“You’re going to die for this, you know that?” the bully hissed. 

Duncan ignored his tormentor as he continued his death march to the principal’s office. The principal, fake stern-faced, opened the door of his office in anticipation. So began, no, so continued this face of school justice. 

All throughout his latest trip to the principal’s office, Duncan pretended to contritely take to heart the principal’s gentle chidings for being disrespectfully facetious, and pretended to listen intently to the principal threaten Percy with expulsion for the thirty-eighth time that school year. Internally, Duncan remembered the first time he saw his brother kill a man. He tried, he tried and failed to picture that revenant of memory with Percy’s face. He tried to replay that phantasmagorium again and again, Mrs. Currant as his brother’s victim, then the principal, and even that nagging boy, Jackie. But, he doesn’t matter. That bloody tableaux remained immutable, every gory detail pristine. Not that it mattered. 

This farce of justice was almost over, as Percival was winding up his inane melodrama of false remorse and crocodile tears. The three’o’clock bell rang, and the principal pardoned the two little criminals. Duncan politely fake-smiled, nodding in false obeisance. Percy wiped his face clean of crocodile tears and crocodile snot, and both insolent students promptly walked out of the principal’s office. 

Percy followed Duncan, vengefully intent on making the smaller boy suffer as payment for not being a victim who didn’t humiliate his bullies. Duncan, in turn, weaved and bobbed out of Percy’s way, ignoring the bully in order to focus, instead, on retrieving his backpack. 

“You’re going to die!” Percy taunted. “You’re going to die, and I’ll even kill your goofy giant brother!” 

Duncan stood still and let his facade crack. 

“Just go away,” he said as Percy finally snagged hold of his collar shirt. 

Having fallen into this trap, the smaller boy clamped his good hand onto Percy’s forearm. With a swoosh of Duncan’s maimed hand, the bully suddenly found himself sitting painfully on the ground. Percy grew crimson-faced as he hauled himself back onto his feet, preparing himself to pummel his victim. But then he saw Duncan’s maimed hand was actually a sandy-furred paw tipped with four talons. Percy then realized his vest and his polo shirt were torn open, the pallid peachskinned flesh of his skinny chest exposed to the world.  

The bully blushed, then shrank away from the smaller, paw handed boy as he watched a fifth talon erupt from Duncan’s thumb. 

“Just please go away, Percy. Okay?” The bully responded with a squeal of fright, galloping away down a hall. Duncan stuffed his now-regenerated hand paw into his pocket a moment before Jackie approached him. 

“What’s his problem?” Jackie wondered, handing Duncan his hand. Duncan made a noncommittal shrug as he accepted Jackie’s gesture. 

“I think I broke his heart.” Jackie raised him up.

“You’re weird.” 

The two boys’ journey to Wigman’s Grocery was uneventful, marred only by Jackie’s rambling lecture uselessly advising Duncan about how to best deal with bullies. They entered the store, and discreetly fought their way through the afternoon crowd towards the coffee bar. Duncan and Jackie got in line behind a raven-haired young woman. When Jackie realized the barista was a large, grizzly-faced man with snow-colored mutton chops and a big, fluffy, snow colored goatee, he nervously excused himself from the line. An improvement for Duncan, one less pair of eyes for when he broke the embarrassingly bad news to his brother. Brothers made eye contact, Duncan mouthed “It’s happening again,” cautiously waving his healing paw. Rudy went blank faced. 

“Hey, Yeti!” shouted a surly, espresso-starved teen. “Quit stalling with my almond milk-foam cocoa latte!” 

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Rudy apologized, composing himself for a moment before grabbing the wrong handle to spray his rubber-gloved hand paw with steam. Other espresso-starved patrons whipped out their phones to assault the mountain with a volley of blinding, silent lightning in the giddy hopes of capturing the clumsy barista’s expressions of hilarious agony for meme-tastic posterity. “Mr Kaplan,” Junior’s voice dully thundered over the store speakers. Rudy rolled his eyes and shuddered. The raven-haired woman cocked her head as though remembering something. 

“Mr Kaplan, please report to the manager’s office.” 

 He darkly muttered. “Ma’am, I will be right with you.” 

“What about my latte?” 

“He will be right with you,” the raven-haired woman repeated as both Kaplans left. 

Rudy entered the office to find Junior arguing with his grandson, Vice Executive Director Jackie. 

“Grandpa, I don’t understand: why did you let the monster run the coffee bar?” Jackie demanded. 

“I told him to so he can expand his-” 

“No, Grandpa, the Monster is expanding enough already! Don’t you remember that he’s not allowed in any food prep departments?” Jackie plucked a generous tuft of red and white fur out of Rudy’s throat. “He sheds!” he showed. “The last time Daddy let him work in the deli, we then had to throw out so much worth of ruined salami, and we had to pay fines because people complained to the health department about getting his hair in their sandwiches, too!” 

Junior gave Rudy a fear-filled glance of sincerest regret as Rudy thought evil woman, and wondered why he couldn’t before.”

“Uh, um, you can clock out early, hairball, I mean Kaplan,” Junior verbally stumbled. 

“Yes,” Jackie agreed. Junior escorted his underling to the door.

As penance, Junior gave the Kaplan Brothers two bottles of soda before going back to face the growing throng of restless, disgruntled coffee bar patrons. Having clocked out, and his duffle bag over his shoulder, Rudy ushered himself and his brother out through the store’s loading bay. 

Sodas and each other in hand, Rudy and Duncan walked down a crummy-looking street. As the two put more distance between themselves and the loading bay of Wigman’s Grocery, the neighborhood gradually evolved from dingy and dilapidated to grime-caked and vermin-infested. 

“So,” Rudy finally said after a second swig of courage, er, root beer. A blood curling scream howled. “How’d you get your paw? Did you…” 

“Percy was hassling me again,” Duncan confessed. “And, I, uh, got mad.” 

The mountain pulled his paw out of his brother’s so he could wrap his big arm around Duncan’s shoulder. Rudy emptied his root beer with a third swig. 

“Did you hurt him?” 

“I, uh, I don’t think so.” 

“Good, ’cause I would’ve killed him.” Duncan responded to his brother sullenly nursing his root beer. Time for round two. “Want me? I’ll give you a discount!” Rudy threw his bottle into the air, and punched it across the street. 

“No.” 

“Then what’s buggin’ my Sparky?” Rudy hugged his Sparky tighter as they approached a seedy, rundown gym with an illegibly faded sign: Quinn’s Gym.

“Is, uh, is my paw gonna stay like this?” Duncan finally asked. “Or is it uh-” 

“Gonna fall off?” Rudy finished. He rubbed his Sparky’s arm as they walked into the gym. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’m sorry.” 

The other patrons, poor, grungy, and health-conscious, ignored the entrance of the mountain and his brother, as they always did. After all, everyone in Quinn’s Gym was there to use the machines or lift weights not to socialize or snoot at other patrons. 

Rudy and Duncan mercifully found themselves alone in the locker room, which was great, as Rudy’s condition mandated privacy whenever he needed to change disguises. And trying to use the gym’s restroom, let alone having his brother come in there with him to help change into his workout clothes, was like trying to do the turkey trot in a sarcophagus. Duncan instantly swapped his school uniform for his track suit, then as Rudy sat down on the locker room bench, helped the mountain off with his shoes. Hind paws now too big for sneakers. Forepaws swelled up and burst out of Rudy’s gloves. It was coming. Soon. Rudy grabbed one pawful of his tee-shirt, then two, then husked himself of it, exposing his great and massive, striped, sweat-spiked torso. He smiled a fanged, yet sort of reassuring smile as he scratched Sparky’s head. 

“Don’t worry, Sparky. I’ve got more at home.” 

Rudy slithered out of his slacks, then stared at his shaggy lap. Duncan fished out his brother’s workout disguise of a hoodie and sweatpants while Rudy sat there, looking like a morose tiger wearing a mask. Duncan carefully laid his brother’s clothes on Rudy’s lap. The mountain drew his Sparky close, grinding his shaggy chin along his brother’s hair. 

It would be here, maybe 2 hours if he could relax. 

Duncan grabbed his brother’s tail, five feet long now, and stroked it. 

Hood on, tail discreetly tucked into his sweatspants, now Rudy and Duncan were ready to work out. The brothers began by taking turns, delicately unloading their day’s collective aggravations on the gym’s only punching bag. Duncan wore adorable little boxing gloves, and he filled the gym with a humming tat-tat-tatting that hovered just above the clankings and gruntings. Rudy pretended he was wearing big, furry boxing gloves. When it was the monster’s turn, he gently hammered away at the bag, filling the gym with a wall-shivering sound. He thought of a mezzanine. The other patrons slowly halted their clankings, and courteously ceased their own beastly gruntings in respectful deference to the monster’s own godlike exhalations. And then silence. 

“Whoa, easy there, big buddy!” Quinn, the owner, playfully cautioned, his leathery hand on Rudy’s shoulder. “Let some of my other customers have some punches before you wear another bag out.” 

Rudy shared a laugh with his friend as he and his brother switched places. As Rudy guided his brother’s rhythm, three of Quinn’s newest clients strolled into the gym. Something about this trio of swollen gym rats was reminiscent of Rudy, or rather, reminiscent of both the person Rudy used to be, and of the person Rudy should have been, that is, had either person been a pompous twat incapable of shoving his ego through a door. 

The muscular trio haughtily surveyed their new rent-a-playpen, searching for suitable, new vict-, er, workout partners. A burly old man at the legpress. Too deaf, maybe too surly to be safe. An overeager food stamp warrior whizzing away on the gym’s only working treadmill. Too sweaty, too smelly. Another old man in a hoodie at the punching bag. Delicious. With a jailbait grandkid. Perfect. The three were going to milk their new playpen playmates for all their worthless worth before the intolerance of jealousy got the three banished yet again. 

“Yo!” one gym rat bellowed. He shared a snarl of disappointment with his swollen cohorts when Rudy deliberately failed to acknowledge the taunt. Quinn pointed at the trio  angrily. 

“Don’t go hasslin’ my good customers!” the owner warned. 

“Hey, Grampa!” the second gym rat taunted. “Where ya taking Jailb-” 

Rudy’s paw fist connected with that second gym rat’s sternum, granting that bloated bully the power to fly, occipitus-first, into the gym’s only stationary bicycle. 

“What did you do that for?” the third gym rat shouted. His fallen comrade twitched and gurgled blood from inside the wreckage of the bicycle. 

“I’m just mad my man Kaplan did not kill the lot of you!” Quinn roared. The first gym rat placed his hand on Rudy’s shoulder in a gesture of fake friendship. 

“We’re only horseplaying, man,” the first gym rat lied. Rudy placed his paw on the gym rat’s offending hand, oh so easily sinking his unsheathed talons deep in between metacarpal bones. 

“Don’t touch me,” the mountain rasped. The weeping gym rat withdrew his bleeding hand to his chest, unsure whether his pierced hand or impaled ego hurt worse. Quinn grabbed hold of one of the gym rats’ tanktop straps. 

“Listen, garbage: take your garbage friends and never come back here!” 

Back in the safety of the locker room, Rudy slumped back onto the bench as Duncan indifferently packed their stuff into their duffle bag. The mountain shivered as he finally gave up fighting back his change. He sighed as his shoulder seams tore open, bleeding thick, sweaty fur. 

“Oh, gods, Duncan, I’m too late,” Rudy moaned. 

“No, we’ll be fine. The subway’s a, uh, uh couple blocks,” Duncan comforted, snagging his brother’s big, trembling paw. Rudy’s arms tore free of his shredding sleeves, now hulking tiger’s forelegs. 

“I can’t make it, Dunc,” Rudy said as his white-bearded chin jutted further out. He stood up on his hindlegs, sloughing off his suddenly tattered sweatpants as he stretched to a still-growing height of eight, no ten feet. “Just go home.” 

“But…” 

“I’ll be fine. Go,” Rudy said, his voice deepening into a soothing growl. Duncan tearfully hesitated as his brother’s snout pushed out of his face and beyond his hood. The mountain smiled, a sly cat’s smirk. But then that smile turned awful, filled with bloody teeth. Duncan looked beyond the locker room entrance to see the third gym rat standing before the pair, the petulant man’s petulant face frozen in a mask of disgusted curiosity as the third gym rat walked in. 

“What the freaking freak are you?” 

The monster steeped in front of his brother just as his hoodie sweatshirt popped off his still-growing tiger’s chest. That giant, bipedal tiger took a wobbly step forward, easily towering over both brother and gym rat. The monster drank up the fear in the room with a snuffling rumble, but stopped himself before he got heady and forgetful: he had tasks to do now, after all. 

“Go. Home.” 

Rudy then dropped to all fours, his tiger’s jaws an inch away from the gym rat’s face, his forepaws sunken deep into the lockers behind his terror-soaked prey. The gym rat dropped to his butt as he started squealing. Rudy let his prey escape from the gym. The giant tiger escaped, himself, by squeezing out of a high window. Duncan quickly gathered up the tatters of his brother’s ruined disguise, then followed Rudy out the same window after barricading the locker room door with a chair. 

The third gym rat hurled himself screaming into a busy street. Honking cars, screeching tires, and cursing motorists helped dim his terror. For a moment. Then he caught a glimpse of red fur, heard a snarl just beyond the tumult of stopped traffic. A whiff of cat musk, though, set him back on his heels, him racing across the intersection for the illusionary safety of the far sidewalk. 

The screaming bodybuilder barged into Wigman’s Grocery under the silly notion that one would find sanctuary there The gym rat plowed through the line at the coffee bar, and, while fending off the flailing, angry people he purposely bowled over, he snatched up a boy to rescue, no, to use as a human shield. 

“Lemme go!” a squirming Jackie shouted. 

“Shut up, k-” 

Gym rat and Jackie both fell as the gym rat tripped, but Jackie, alone, impacted with the floor. To the boy’s side was a bright yellow sportshoe, one of the ones worn by his abductor, lying on its side in a puddle of fresh blood. Jackie looked up to see a great, big shaggy tiger, bigger than a pickup truck, perched high on an aisle shelf. Dangling from the truck tiger’s bloody jaws was the broken corpse of that gym rat. A swish of its long, long striped tail, and tiger and prey were gone. Jackie wailed as his grandfather picked him up to carry him away from that awful, awful puddle. 

III

The raven-haired woman carried her twenty minute cocoa-coconut caramel almond milk latte, and a bag of groceries and lunch back to her raspberry red convertible parked in a parking complex some three blocks away from Wigman’s Grocery. There was always some gruesome, overarching reason that dragged Angelique Bauers back to the hellishly bland urban podunk that was her ex-fiancee’s hometown, and Angelique could guarantee, with money, even, that it was not the fifteen dollar meatball submarine from Wigman’s delicatessen “made with imported salami.” Her smartphone started singing again. Ah, now there was her reason why she was back here again, what with her editor, Billie, calling for another update from his star reporter for the investigation into a certain Senator Castlethorn’s money laundering scandal. Something at ground level outside of the parking complex made her drop her bag and fish out her singing smartphone. A bodybuilder was dragging another bodybuilder by the armpits into the backseat of a gold-colored Ford Kob. As she gawked at the first bodybuilder get into the driver’s seat, she wondered if she just saw the aftermath of a murder. 

“Ay, Tone-tone, your bro’s gotcha back,” the first gym rat comforted, desperately ignoring how uncomfortably still his comrade lay in the backseat of his Kob. The first gym rat blinked his eyes free of more tears again, adjusted his rearview mirror, and didn’t notice the black tufts of hair bleeding out of the back of his hand. 

From her view in the second story of the parking complex, Angelique began taking pictures of what she reasonably assumed was the aftermath of a murder. The Kob’s engine revved to life for half of a moment just as a pickup truck-sized tiger rammed its telephone pole-like forelegs deep into the Kob’s hood. She continued clicking away with her phone even as she watched that giant tiger silence the Kob’s screaming driver by trampling the car roof flat. And then, the giant tiger paused in mid-stomp to look up at its audience. It, no, he, Angelique knew it was a “he,” stared up at her as though he knew her. God help her, she stared back because she realized she knew that bloody mouthed cat, too. The beast anxiously twitched his tail, and then leaped away. 

Afternoon soon matured into evening. Most of the faculty at Saint Germain Elementary School had already left for the day, leaving only the principal and the janitor to clean and lock up. The principal was going to let the janitor lock up after he finished his review of the rooms. Right after he disabled and reset the alarm going off in the student records office. Ten steps into student records, the principal ran back out, hollering and waving his long arms as though he just saw the Devil, himself. If the Devil was a big, giant tiger tearing up filing cabinets like poorly secured boxes of cat treats, that is. 

Percival Schloss was being put to bed without dinner again that night. Not because he’d been a naughty boy yet again, though. This time, it was because he was too incoherently inconsolable to eat anything since coming home that afternoon. 

“But Mommy!” Percy pleaded tearfully. “Duncan’s a monster person and he said he’s gonna get me!” 

Percival’s mother coyly smiled as she carefully arranged her son’s beloved army of stuffed animals and action figures in her son’s Corvette bed.

“Now Percy,” she calmly began again for the twentieth time. “Duncan Kaplan isn’t out to get you, and monster people don’t exist.” She kissed her still crying son’s forehead. “Go to sleep, and tomorrow, I’ll fix you blintzes and cream of millet, your favorite.” 

She pulled Percy’s blankets and covers up to his chin. 

“But Mommy!” he continued to bleat. His mother ended that conversation by turning off the lights as she strode out of her son’s room. 

“Sleep tight, my little angel.” 

Being a hip and trendy super mom was getting to be really tiring for Percy’s mother that night. If it wasn’t for the fact that she’d lose her alimony check, she would have gladly palmed her beloved little hellion off of his big hellion father years ago. Percy’s mother parked her yoga-tightened derrière at the dinette set table of her apartment’s kitchen. She considered hiring her little angel a nanny, but that would probably cut into her alimony paradise. She poured herself a brandy snifter of boxed rosé. Next week, she’d consult Percy’s TCM pediatrician about prescribing him an herbal formula to dial his disturbed little shen down a notch. Percy’s mom hefted her pink chalice high in a toast to her latest victory in competent parenting, then let her filled snifter explode on the floor. 

“MOMMY!!!” 

Percival’s mother tripped over a chair, then slapped and stomped herself bloody as she peeled herself off of the shard-trapped floor in a mad dash to her son’s room. When she turned the lights on, she realized she was not in her son’s room anymore. Broken furniture. Torn bedding. Crushed toys scattered everywhere. Percy’s Corvette bed, smashed in two. A blood-splattered blanket. She half heartedly shambled towards the big hole where the window used to be. The hole her precious, precious little angel left her world through. Percival’s mother picked up a big tuft of red and white fur. 

Angelique sat in her convertible, having been sitting in her convertible for hours, wracking her brains while ignoring Billie’s stream of increasingly frantic texts and voice messages so she could review and re-review her gruesome photoshoot from that gruesome afternoon. She knew that tiger, but how did she know him, how did he know her, and who was he? She accidentally swiped beyond her last picture of the tiger, bringing herself to her silly picture of that clumsy, yeti-like barista at Wigman’s Grocery. She realized she knew that old man, and by some dark miracle, she realized, no, she knew that he and that cat monster truck tiger were the same creature. But why and how? The only old man she knew who had that same shade of soft auburn was one Horace Kaplan. And Horace couldn’t have been the barista, as he was five feet, five inches in elevated combat boots, paunchy, painfully cleanshaven, and dead six years ago in a car accident that claimed his entire family. A second accidental swipe brought up a decade-old selfie of herself and Horace’s eldest son, her ex-fiancee. 

“Rudy?” 

Angelique sat there, chewing on her half-eaten fifteen dollar sandwich, and sipping on her hours cold latte, ruminating on how her fiancee was still alive, and had aged 50, 60 years into a hulking, semi-geriatric yeti over the course of half a decade. 

Duncan walked up the street towards his apartment building, his brother’s duffle bag slung over his back, his arms full with a box of pizza and a bag of Chinese takeout. His brother’s breakfast for tomorrow, and leftovers from his dinner tonight, respectively. Duncan entered the perennially dark lobby, trundled past the perpetually dormant elevators, and made his way into the stairwell. Duncan opened the door to his squalid apartment, and set his load of food onto the card table, his father’s card table. He shambled into the bathroom, ignoring the frying pan that had sat in the sink all day as he pulled off his sweatshirt. Sandy fur covered his right arm up to his shoulder, and was pooling in sand-colored clumps on his chest even as more sandy fur was slowly coating his left arm. 

There were now five of those accursed cats when Duncan, still shirtless, plopped himself onto the duct-taped couch. His brother’s doings, though, he had no desire, nor ability to question, or blame or even criticize anything his guardian did to protect the both of them. Rudy poked his head through the window, lifting the cardboard up with his snout before squeezing himself through the frame. The giant tiger leaned onto that much abused couch as best as he could so he could lay his head on his brother. Duncan laid his head on top of his brother’s, and wept into Rudy’s mane.

This work was featured in issue #14