A story by Stanton Fink

Image: Untitled by Stanton Fink

Project Qimaera

Last updated: 4/29/2026

I

The spring storms had come again to Smew’s Landing, saturating the surrounding spruce and fir forest with rain water, like they always did that time of year in the soggy, rootbound bowels of Oregon. That week’s brood of storms dimmed the gloomy days with veils of drizzle and showers and darkened the nights with impenetrable downpours. The storm seemed to be the run of the litter; the whole morning was just drizzling on and off. Nothing terrible enough to keep the people of Smew’s Landing indoors, after all. 

Tuesday in Smew’s landing meant all of the locals involved with their town’s quaint and hockey-themed eateries were bracing for the flood of tourists with smartphones and out of town neighbors coming for the various, apparently irresistible Tuesday deals. One site was an especially popular destination. One was the Regal Seagull Café, a friendly space that held a “Gunslinger Salami Tuesday Special” every week, and was, apparently, home to the best apple fritters in the Pacific Northwest according to the shared opinions of a clique of well-traveled vloggers. 

The Regal Seagull Café was built from the renovated ruins of a Victorian style crystal palace greenhouse, one of many relics from the town’s early days as a lumber baron’s private folly. Tourists lured in by the spectacle of a two-story greenhouse half-converted into a coffee and whiskey bar found themselves ensnared by a menu of fascinating, yet peculiar food ensembles. 

It was two in the afternoon, during the doldrums between the lunch rush and the post-lunch rush, that a little girl threw off her puffy pink coat and ralphed up her special underneath the crowded Table Ten. The tallest of the busboys, a veritable toqued lookout tower in flannel, straightened his bouffant, then discreetly ran to get a bucket and mop. The busboy smiled, the radiance of his golden chestnut brown face calming the Table Ten party’s squawkings of gross violation. The lanky busboy paused his mopping to reach up underneath his threadbare sleeve of his threadbare flannel shirt with his mahogany spider hand to scratch a thundering itch. After three minutes of vigorous scratching, the busboy rolled up his threadbare sleeve to watch an immaculately fluffy cascade of auburn needles push their way through the polished brown skin of his tanned, sinewy forearm. 

It was happening earlier than normal again. 

He wanted to rip that suffocating fabric off of his growing arm, off of his growing chest, but clearly, this wasn’t an impulse to act upon during the start of the Tuesday post-lunch rush. Defeated, kind of, the busboy sighed as he rolled his sleeve back down and resumed mopping up barf. 

“Luke?” Wendy, the Tuesday manager said. “Luke, you look awful.” Luke started to reply, but found himself choking as he swallowed back down a mouthful of hot mucus. He hoped it was just mucus. “Lordy, Lukey, you’re turning green!” Wendy proclaimed as she watched her busboy’s luxuriously swarthy complexion bleach into a bilious olive oil blanch. 

“But,” Luke sputtered. 

“No, Luke,” Wendy countermanded as she plucked the mop shaft out of her busboy’s bony, suddenly auburn-frosted hands. “I’ll cover your shift. You know how you get when you’re like this.” 

“Yeah, you’re right, thanks,” Luke said, smiling demurely in gracious defeat. Manager Wendy was right: he had to get out of her before he started reeking of pus again. 

“Don’t thank me,” Wendy corrected. “Just go home. Our insurance won’t cover another employee dying on the clock again.” 

As Wendy took over mopping up the barf, Luke ran his bony, now auburn-frosted, now olive oil colored, fingers through his greased, ebony pompadour. He didn’t spare a look back as he headed towards the employee lounge. A man in a blue suede jacket, the lead of the doomed party at Table Ten, loitered around the mopping manager even as his group dimmed their squawking while they relocated to Table Five. 

“Hey, what’s the matter with Slick Racer?” the suede regular asked. 

“Asthma or gangrene, or something,” Wendy grumbled. “The owner insisted we hire that schlub.” Wendy paused her mopping to lean into her regular’s hairy ear. “Though, between you and I, I just wanna keep Luke around long enough to learn how such a nobody can make such a killer Bananas Foster.” 

In the employee lounge, Luke chucked his apron and toque into the laundry hamper, then scampered out the back exit. The late afternoon air in the blue spruce and fir forest was uncomfortably brisk, almost clammy, the sort of Spring weather normal people cocooned themselves in layers of fleece for. Rain or shine, Luke always wore shabby, almost tattered jeans and diaphanously thin flannel shirts, whatever he could afford to scavenge at Smew’s thrift shop. Luke didn’t care too much about the weather. Now, for the most part, he dressed solely for other people’s concern. By the time Luke jogged about a mile beyond the town limits, he put his lard-colored, edema-bloating, auburn-furred hands on his bony knees, and bellowed a gurgling roar as he coughed up a bolus of scalding mucus. Everywhere on the mossy forest floor the steaming, bluing gunk splattered upon, blackened and scorched. Luke bellowed again, louder as his auburn-fuzzy, once thin, lard-colored chest inflated with power and muscle, popping off his shirt buttons one by one. 

The lard-colored, auburn-furred man straightened back up, and wiped his blue-stained, auburn-stubbled chin on his fraying sleeve as he kicked moss and rotten loam over his ammonia-reeking mess with his blue-stained, rotting work boots. Luke scratched his shaggy, auburn-furred chest, then turned his head sharply to the right, letting that soft crack sort his wandering thoughts. 

“Hey, buddy! Are you okay?” a woolly-faced, wool cardigan-clad yuppie called to the blatantly unwell young man from just beyond a ferny ridge. The scruffy yuppie hurriedly tromped through the damply verdant undergrowth over to his new, ailing friend, frantically waving his mittened hands in garbled semaphore. 

Luke, meanwhile, groaned a quiet prayer for a flash flood. 

The yuppie samaritan sidled up to his new buddy patient and went “Dude! Lemme dial nine one one for you!” 

Luke started weeping tears of gummy, bluing goop. He shook his wobbly head as he stifled a laugh. Who says “dude” anymore these days? 

“Don’t,” Luke croaked. He swallowed another incoming bolus of hot, gooey liquid. “Just shouldn’t had all those pilsners for lunch, pal.”

 “You sure?” Yuppie savior was adamant about not buying Luke’s machismo. “I can drive you to the Eukaia E.R.”

“I’m fine,” Luke lied as he started to dial up his act a few more notches. The unwell man arched his back as he thrust his swelling, auburn-carpeted chest out forward. He put his puffy fists akimbo, and stupidly showed off the weird, slithering muscles writhing underneath his visibly thickening layer of bristly, orange fur. The yuppie was still unconvinced, grimacing with even greater concern now as he reached out for Luke’s broadening, throbbing shoulder. Luke raised his swollen, auburn-furred paw to fend off the overly helpful yuppie’s mitten, only for his paw to connect with the yuppie’s bearded face, instead. 

It took Luke five, maybe ten minutes to realize the once overly helpful yuppie now lying motionless in the salal leaves before him was dead, the dead samaritan’s head turned at what should be an obviously egregiously inappropriate angle. Luke grew so light with hot guilt and incandescent dread that his worn and failing shirt tore itself into ribbons, falling off his still-swelling, auburn-furred torso. He fished a smartphone out of the dead yuppie’s jeans pocket, crushing the device into glass shards and plastic slivers in his puffy grip. That done, Luke slung the still-warm corpse over his orange, shaggy shoulder, and anxiously hurried home. 

For most of the past ten years since Luke came to haunt Smew’s Landing, home was a rickety, repeatedly patched and re-patched aluminum storage shed he built from a defected kit he salvaged from the town’s hardware store dumpster. Luke tossed his dead yuppie friend into his shed, then barricaded the door with a log: he’d scavenge the corpse further, later. That done, he slipped his swelling, mucus-bleeding feet out of his mucus-coated work boots and mucus-soaked socks. By now, Luke’s auburn-furred paws had already swelled up into useless, auburn-upholstered knobs. No use playing with his jeans’ fly now. Not that it mattered, as the seat of his mucus-drenched jeans loudly ripped open, allowing his lard-colored buttocks to fart out a long, squishy, lard-colored tail that flopped about upon the pleasantly rotten leaf litter. Luke spat out a strong gout of boiling hemolymph as his auburn-carpeted back thrust further out in a mountainous hump. That lumpy, orange gold and lard strongman clenched his auburn-bearded jaw as his great, growing tail grew still more auburn fur, then lengthened further and further, growing longer and longer and thicker and thicker with each swishing thrash until he knocked away the log serving as the door lock to his precious shed. 

“Criminy,” Luke gurgled. He tried to flex his now-impossibly muscular arms but found himself unable to summon the correct brain spark he needed to bend his now lost elbows. Luke gurgled again as he choked on yet more hemolymph. He spread his freakishly bloating legs, letting a shudder of erotic relief wash through his ballooning self as his useless jeans disintegrated off of his overgrown, shaggy hindlegs. The freakish, swollen-tailed, auburn-furred strongman with greasy black hair stood there in the yard of his overturned shed, flapping the two pieces of pallid meat that used to be his arms, impotently trying to pose like his childhood circus heroes even as he ballooned into a bigger, golden-furred blob with writhing, wormy muscles. 

Luke wanted to be a strongman once, a long, long time ago when he was a little boy, by another name, who wanted to be a firefighter. The auburn-furred blob bubbled in pain as his tiny, still human head began retracting into his swelling neck. He fought against it for a moment but then let his head disappear into the serpentine folds of his impossibly wide shoulders as a second pair of meaty, cone-shaped arms erupted from his nipples. Luke sank down onto his knees, he was sure he still had knees at this point, and laid onto his expansive, expanding belly. He laid there, his jiggling body seemingly dead for a minute. 

Then Luke blob trembled and quivered as he fought to thrust his still human head out of his golden, gelatinous bulk again. He roared one last gurgling roar as he spewed forth another big stomachful of steaming, flaming mucus. Rivers of more, pallid, scalding mucus dribbled out of his eyes, out of his nostrils, and then out of his ears as his own face ballooned out to rupture like a feverish boil at critical mass. 

A big insect head, spattered with yolk orange eyes, slickly gleaming with congealing hemolymph, fought his way out of the gooey, gummy, gaping hole in Luke Blob’s thorax. Luke waggled his kitchen cleaver mandibles as his head eventually ripened into lustrous mahogany. His head now rock-firm, Luke fought some more to pull his new, lacquered ebony limbs free. And once that was done, the van-sized beetle grub casually crawled out of his liquefying old molt. 

Luke looked back to see his precious aluminum shed tipped over into his big, stinking, flaming mess of boiling mucus and oxidizing hemolymph. He loudly clacked his mandibles in frustrated aggravation. He’d have to move again when he finished. So annoying carrying his shed to a new location.

Once Luke’s new, dragon bulk dried, he started crawling away as his creamy hide frosted over with a second, thicker, shaggier coat of longer auburn needles. His sight grew bleary as he plowed through the rot-slick humus, but it didn’t matter. He knew exactly where he was going, sight or not. Upon heading the familiar trunk of a specific giant spruce, he climbed up and up the trunk of that hapless tree until he penetrated the upper limits of the forest canopy. There, he waited, like he always did this time of month, every month, year in, year out for decades, for moonrise.

II

Tuesday being Tuesdays, the post-lunch crush at the Regal Seagull Café mutated into the dinner rush soon after three in the afternoon thanks to a steady flow of out-of-town foodies curious about what exactly was so special about the special. Business was so jumping that Tuesday that Tuesday Manager Wendy found herself thinking the unthinkable and doing the undoable by summoning her ne’erdowell daughter, Wexler, to the Café to help her cover Luke’s shift. As much as she always swore to dock that yutzy yontz’s pay, demote him, or even outright fire him, Manager Wendy was always glad to have her prodigal busboy back, whenever Luke bothered to come back. Mostly because Luke was the one, the only employee in this miserable, miserably hip, hipster greasy spoon whom she could always trust to never steal out of her precious, precious tip jar. Also that his snark was always amusing. 

Whatever 

Rather than help tend to the busy tables, Manager Wendy paced around the Monstera Foyer, nervously watching all of the busy tables as she waited for that schlub Deborah to come back from with another load of apples. If that dumb crone didn’t come back with the Café’s secret salami ingredients soon, they were all sunk. Looking down at all those happy customers, chattering in happy anticipation, it made Wendy queasy. With worry. She wheeled around. 

“What on earth are you doing up here?” she yelled at Wexler. Wendy actually knew why her daughter was here. She plucked the warm, Puyapuya Alpaca smartphone out of her vinyl-clad daughter’s lovingly, competently self-manicured fingers. “Go wait on tables, Wex!” 

“But you know how humidity fades my hair dye, Mom,” Wexler calmly whined as she straightened her licorice-black and pink hair. Wendy stared at her daughter. 

“Do you know what will happen to your hair if you get docked pay again, Sweetie?” 

Wexler noiselessly and begrudgingly descended the foyer stairs, secretly scheming a way to recover her precious, precious phone from her imperious manager-mother. Wendy leaned onto the foyer railing, utterly exhausted from goading her slugabed daughter back into productivity. At least that clod Luke never balked about accepting pointless busy work assignments. A hunched over old woman in a wilted fedora and a soaked overcoat came dragging a dollie overloaded with crates through the front doors. Wendy came bounding down the foyer stairs, hollering about needing to use the back entrance. Wexler sighed as she looked up from refilling water glasses at the Orchid Booth tables. 

Water duty done, Wexler carried her three-quarters empty water pitcher back to the kitsch, nonchalantly, but narrowly missing getting run over by her mother madly hauling the Café’s desperately needed secret salami ingredients. In the kitchen, one of the cooks handed Wexler a tray of two orders of salami for Table Twenty. 

“Two Saturday night specials on a Wednesday!” The cook bellowed. Just as Wexler exited the kitchen, her mother snatched the tray out of Wexler’s hands. Not that Wexler cared too much; she’d just filch her share of the tips out of her mother’s tip jar tomorrow. 

Whatever. 

Wexler went back to fetch the pot of coffee the cook forgot to give her. 

“Here y’go, gentlemen!” Wendy said as she cheerfully placed the two orders before the two hard hatted gentlemen seated at the Bougainvillea Fountain. Wexler came by to refresh the gentlemen’s coffee, right on time, too. “Is there anything else we can get you two before we serve the check?” 

The two gentlemen reeking of bark mulch shared a furtive, sinister rumble. 

“We’d like to try the apple fritters,” one said. Wexler visibly paled underneath her powdered sugar blush. 

“We’ve constantly heard great things about it,” the other explained. 

Manager Wendy smiled wide, her normally adamantine veneer of professional calm cracking like lake ice in the spring. She smiled frantically at her daughter, who then replied with an agonized pantomime retelling of the time she almost got fired over Luke’s disastrous, nay, catastrophic attempt to teach her how to make their Café’s flagship dessert. 

“I will get started on that for you guys right away,” Wendy proclaimed as Wexler nervously scuttled off in search of other, coffee-thirsting patrons. Wendy made a beeline to the Honeysuckle lounge and dragged her favorite sidekick, Deborah, into the kitchen. The two foresters shared a shrug. 

“Anyways, Derek,” one of the foresters resumed. “What is killing all of these trees? For the last ten years straight, they’ve been dying one by one. Is it a super disease?” 

“I found some goop on a tree last month,” Derek replied, pecking at his eggs with his fork. “I sent it to a lab.” He began dissecting his meal. “So far, the results suggest it’s some sort of scarab beetle, maybe a cockchafer or a mutant stag beetle.” 

“Come on, Derek!” the other forester blasted as he slammed his grungy fist onto his plate. “Beetles don’t eat trees whole, drain them dry of their sap, or break off all their branches overnight!” 

“Calm down, Brad,” Derek implored as Wexler came scuttling back into view to sweep up Brad’s ruined meal into a dust bin. “We’re not dealing with a mass murdering serial killer. Oh, and put that, and a new meal on my tab, please.” 

“Sure thing,” Wexler replied. “Oh,” she continued, leaning into Derek’s ear. ‘If you two want to know about serial killers, you should take a deep dive about the ‘Killer Oblate.’” 

“’Killer Oblate’?” Brad didn’t know whether to be piqued or annoyed. But since he just broke one of her plates, he was going to be piqued for now. 

“Ten years ago, Deacon Jeanpierre Aïx was run out of Smew’s Landing when he was discovered trying to kidnap his church’s underaged organist.” 

“And?” Derek asked. 

“Deacon Aïx disappeared without a trace, except for a puddle of slime and his blood in his church’s cemetery. People say God cursed the deacon to become a flying slime monster who gobbles up lost people in our forest.” Wexler then wiggled her freshly painted puce nails for emphasis. 

Brad chuckled incredulously. Or sneezed, hard to tell. 

“Uh…” Derek vocalized as Wexler grinned. 

“I think the deacon was just murdered, probably by his own wife, or the organist's mother, who he was having another affair with, and his body got dumped into a septic tank filled with lye and drain cleaner.” 

The Tuesday manager clapped her rough, dishpan hands onto her daughter’s petite, black lace shoulders. 

“That’s enough wowing the paying customers with Smew’s Landing’s colorful local heritage, sweetie,” Wendy cheerfully scolded as she dragged her overly chatty daughter away back into the kitchen. An elderly, almost hunchbacked woman in a painfully pale pink waitress uniform came by bearing a tray with two banana daiquiris in two large margarita goblets. Upon setting the two drinks before the two confused foresters, good old Deborah then produced two matches from her armpits, struck the matches on her hairnet, and tossed them into the daiquiris, setting them ablaze. 

“Enjoy your Banana Flamberge,” Deborah joylessly declared while the flaming drinks guttered. 

“Um, ma’am, that’s ‘flambé,” Derek hesitantly corrected. 

“And we ordered the apple fritters,” Brad added. Deborah shuffled back towards the Honeysuckle lounge. 

“Whatever,” Deborah rasped. “The guy who makes it isn’t here, and more importantly, happy hour is almost over. I need more tips to pay off my car.” 

***

Dusk came as the wrung-out rain clouds sequestered themselves away. The spring nights in the spruce and fir forests around Smew’s Landing were frigid and damp, almost unforgivably inhospitable for humans even by the hardy locals’ standards. They weren’t cold enough to discourage the thousands upon thousands of treefrogs vocally jockeying for mates and territory, though. Nor the tiny, loud, speckle-colored owls who ate them, either. 

Sunset finally came, and Luke the giant beetle grub’s lushly plush, auburn furred back distended out until it burst like a truck-sized blister, spilling out hot pus down his tree’s trunk. From that gooey, melting ruin, a pallid, butter sculpture creature, Luke’s alter ego, emerged. A vast, pale horn telescoped from his domed forehead like some gigantic pimple while two unblinking ruby eyes turned into glittering topazes. More inflating horns jutted out from his mountainously humped thorax. Crumpled butter pom poms straightened out into sail-like wing cases, and then amber paned wings. Sticky butter flesh hardened into sleek, shiny, yet thorny obsidian armor bleeding bristly auburn fur. 

Sunset progressed into dusk, then into night, and Luke’s alter ego, now a dragonish beetle easily larger than a steam locomotive, spread his shimmering amber wings to fly away into the darkening, starry sky.

***

Sunrise snuck in unannounced and unseen thanks to the thunderous herd of fresh rain clouds that returned from the coast with extra moist friends at midnight that previous night. 

A scruffy-faced man, Augie, cocooned in a puffy, brown, two-hundred something dollar fleece jacket slumbered uneasily in his mud-caked station wagon. The scruffy-faced man had been pouting all night awaiting the arrival of his hiking and drinking buddy, Wayne, who uncharacteristically refused even the basic courtesy of turning his phone on. And after finally brooding himself to sleep at four-something in the morning, Auggie wasn’t going to deny himself the pleasure of dreaming about punching out that woolly-faced, backstabbing jerk who stood him up and made him miss out on “Zombie Apocalypse Night” at the Regal Seagull. 

At nine twenty-seven am, Auggie and his wagon were both jostled awake by a very loud, very invisible bolt of lightning striking the road in front of him. Auggie stopped fiddling for his car alarm key fob when he realized it was not a lightning strike, but a fallen, barkless, chewed upon trunk of what used to be a three-hundred-year-old fir lying in the road. A deep, quiet humming rattled the shrieking wagon, audibly jingling the many coins in Auggie’s cupholder. And then Auggie’s wilderness yuppie brain went boink the moment he realized that that tree trunk did not fall but was dropped from above. 

An obsidian and auburn shadow rode in from the gloomy sky on a cloud of shimmering amber to alight upon that barkless meteorite. A minute or five of patting the chewed tree trunk with manhole cover antennae, and the yacht-sized beetle decided that there was nothing of worth left in its half-eaten meal. The obsidian and auburn creature rotated around to fix a glittering pair of giant, topaz cabochons on Auggie’s mud-covered wagon. Auggie just sat there in his driver’s seat, corpse-like, as whatever this thing was casually walked over to his station wagon. A steely tentacle speared through the wagon roof, piercing Auggie squarely in his stomach. 

***

Thursday morning was thunderously dreary and rainier than usual for Smew’s Landing’s neck of the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps it was because everything in that particular swath of forest that wasn’t wet was inexplicably covered in slime, and that everything that wasn’t unnaturally slimy was sopping wet. 

It was half-past ten that morning when the foresters Derek and Brad found the chewed up fir tree trunk laid in the road. The two arborists had seen many, many instances of botanical devastations throughout their careers; a honey fungus apocalypse, two gypsy moth armageddons, fungal and bacterial blights literally out of both their wazoos more times than they cared to count, a megiddo full of scale insects, and then there was the time the two barely survived getting all of their clothes eaten off in a locust plague. But the state of this tree was something perennially mysterious, vexingly unknowable, yet uncomfortably similar to a rawhide bone fifteen minutes after being gifted to a dog. The two foresters took a long, creeping walk around the misplaced, displaced tree in that heavy rain, their mouths open despite the power of that rancid, sweet and savory stench stubbornly clinging to the unbearably moist air. Brad’s horror suddenly frothed into rage. 

“Do you still think a beetle could have done this?” Brad screaming over the miasma and precipitation. The two finally rounded past the gnawed upon tree’s gnawed off roots, coming to a behemoth knob of putrefied cream surrounded by a battleground of shattered, blackened panels. Derek and Brad finally covered their noses with their gloved hands now that they could see the stench together with its source. Derek motioned at the obviously suggestive arrangement of the shards with his free hand. 

“Yes, Brad,” Derek answered, trying to yell over their shared nausea. “A beetle probably did this.” 

The two then noticed there was a car door opened in that van-sized glop of vile, pale goo. 

III

It was late Monday morning at the Regal Seagull Café. That meant the customers who came for the lamb and oatmeal stew with unlimited coffee refill specials were almost finished being replaced by the customers coming in for the specials. 

Assistant Manager Flauros tented her fingers in satisfaction, watching all those happy faces sweeten in anticipation for that sour swill. If she could make enough profits, or better yet, in tips, she might even convince that anal stickler, Monday Manager Mr. Boonkha, to ask for a promotion. Maybe to “Head Assistant Manager,” even. Assistant Manager Flauros went back to work checking and rearranging the tables’ flower arrangements. Monday Manager Boonkha was finishing inspecting the restrooms, after all. Flauros crushed a spider chrysanthemum bloom in her hand as she watched a familiar-looking mahogany person walking through the front doors carrying a backpack. It didn’t matter that Luke was wearing a nice, new, shiny umber jacket. Flauros was going to get hell again if Luke tracked in more odors again. 

Luke weaved and bobbed around the busy tables, with an unknown destination somewhere in the café. A woman leaving Table Nine bumped Luke, and when a waiter lurched to save his off-duty coworker from reaching the floor, both Luke and the waiter tumbled backwards into the indoor waterlily pond. Oh, Flauros was definitely going to get hell for that. 

As Assistant Manager Flauros assisted the wet waiter to a restroom, Luke discreetly left a big trail of waterlily water to the currently empty employee lounge. There, he sloughed his wet clothing, put aside his new wallet, and then packed his wet clothing, together with the reeking dirty clothes in his soaked backpack, his soaked socks, and his sopping sneakers into the café’s washing machine. He poured in three-quarters of a bottle of jasmine and lavender scented detergent in the hopes of exorcising that rotten sock and pungent corpse perfume he was unfortunately known for. That done, Luke hunted through the laundry hampers for something to wear. He found a pair of dungarees, probably from the Saturday shift, and pulled them on up his shaggy, bronze-furred hindlegs. 

Luke zipped up the dungarees as he stared down past his carved, cherrywood chest. He felt fleshy, extra meaty this time around. Luke started posing and dancing in the empty employee lounge, a shirtless, wire sculpture of a circus strongman, a smokey-tanned, underfed Adonis. A sinister thought hatched in Luke’s shaggy head like some wicked, newborn Athena. 

Maybe I could start using more than one host at a time, he considered, shoving a whole banana nut muffin, wrapper and all, into his mouth. People would notice, he predictably realized. 

He started filling a paper cup with vanilla hazelnut nondairy creamer and sugar. People would get concerned about the growing missing persons list, too. Luke thinned his creamer slurry with a little coffee and nutmeg, then swallowed his thoroughly masticated muffin wrapper. 

The underfed Adonis paused his overthinking to take a long, slow swig of his coffee-flavored creamer sludge. Luke adored the heady, floating buzz of caffeine, how everything turned into soothingly hypnotic static once that bitter rush hit. He hated the taste of coffee, though, something about the aroma of burnt wood displeasing him. That, and he’d probably need to stay in his normal routine. To be on the safe side, obviously. 

“How come you’re always doing your laundry in the Café?” Wexler asked. Luke slurped down the rest of his coffee-spiced creamer sludge, turned around. 

“On what they pay me, plus whatever I make in tips here in Shangri La, I can’t afford to visit a vending machine, let alone go to the laundromat across the street, without an annuity or five,” Luke replied. 

“Then why don’t you get another job?” Wexler complained as she picked at the corners of her pink nails. “Or at least put a shirt on? You like a big, skinny wicker basket man with giant nipples and creepy armpit hair.” 

Luke snorted and then got handed a novelty tee shirt by a balding, dumpy man in a tweed suit and barista’s apron. 

“Please remember what management has said about performing stripteases, flirting, inter-employee romances, or other prohibited behaviors on company premises, Ms. Johnson, and Mr., um, Luke,” Monday Manager Mr. Boonkha scolded.

“Yes, Mr. Boonkha,” Wexler sighed as Luke struggled to pull that medium sized tee shirt over his head. Manager Boonkha began shifting around the coffee machine, replenishing coffee grounds and refilling everything else Luke had just drained. 

“Furthermore, Wexler, and, um, Luke,” Manager Boonkha continued. “Neither of you have shifts today: why are you two loitering in the employee lounge?” 

“Why can’t we?” Wexler retorted. 

“Yeah!” Luke added, finally pulling his wild, ebony-maned head through that tee shirt hole. “And I’m doing my laundry!” 

“You two can’t stay because today, you two aren’t café employees, and more importantly, you two can’t stay because I say you two can’t stay.” Manager Boonkha threw a dozen meadow-lilac scented dryer sheets into the dryer in anticipation of Luke’s odoriferous load, then sighed in frustration. “No wonder your mother dyes her hair every week.” 

Wendy’s daughter huffed. 

“Could the prodigal girl and I at least stay to finish my laundry, your lordshipness?” Luke pleaded. Manager Boonkha gently took both Luke and Wexler by their arms. “If you two are that desperate to loiter, go loiter in a coffeehouse.” 

Manager Boonkha guided the two to the back exit. 

“Isn’t the Regal Seagull a coffeehouse, too?” Wexler sarcastically lawyered. 

“The Regal Seagull is a café,” the manager corrected. 

“But my laundry!” Luke desperately pleaded. “My shoes!” 

Manager Boonkha led the two beyond the exit’s threshold. 

“You can retrieve your laundry after my shift is over,” he adamantly stated. 

“But, but my laundry!” 

“After my shift is over, Mr. Luke. Ms. Johnson.” 

And with that, the exit door gently shut closed, and locked. So much for appeals. 

Luke raised his big, hairy foot, wiggled his long, hairy toes, and then started stomping barefoot in the legion of rain pulled in the cracked asphalt of the alley. Wexler watched this spectacle with cat-like fascination. She realized that, in the ten years since she met the restaurant’s favorite busboy, she had never observed Luke’s saccharinely helpful mood beyond ‘enigmatically milquetoast snark,’ let alone witness the bananas foster child throw an honest-to-God temper tantrum. Then Luke suddenly stopped and turned towards Wexler. 

“You wanna do lunch, Wex?” he asked. 

Wexler took a second or twenty to process what she just heard before she allowed her puce lips to pry themselves apart. 

“I thought you just said you were broker than broke less than ten minutes ago.” 

“My wallet changed its mind.” Luke loudly rolled his shoulders, mildly unnerving Wexler with his eerie, crackling flexibility. “But I’m not going to let his majesty keeping my clothes-” 

“And shoes, don’t forget about your shoes.” 

“But I’m not going to let being barefoot stop me…” and then he wrapped a long, dark, willowy arm around Wexler’s wool and corduroy shoulders, “…from stepping out wit’ma baby, tonight!” 

Wexler squirmed in her coworker’s apparently iron embrace. 

“Baby? I’m a twenty-something townie, and as far as I know, you’re twice as old as my mom.” 

Luke let go of his coworker, truly stung by her cruel assessment. 

“Dude, I’m only thirty,” he lied as he threw up his long, long, tree branch arms to plead. “So I’ve been to a concert back in the day, does that make me Methuselah?” 

“Yeah, uhuh. Yeah.” 

“See? See? No one alive still knows what you, Luke the busboy man, knows about funny nineteen-eighties commercials!” 

Luke’s face turned into a solemn teak mask. 

“Little baby girl person named Wexlerianna Van Riverstein,” the teak masked Luke facetiously snarked. “If you’re done with your flailing, can we go out to lunch now?” 

Wexler ceased her histrionics, now confused. 

“Wait, you’re serious?” 

“Huh?” Luke put a big, spidery hand to his big seashell ear as he went walleyed. “Can’t hear you! Whatcha sayin’?!” Then he hooked his long arm around Wexler’s. 

“Don’t you want to, um, new shoes?” 

Luke lifted up his big, wet, still hairy foot, wiggling his long, wet yet hairy toes. 

“The thrift shop down the street don’t sell clown shoes my size. Trust me, I’ve asked. A lot.” 

“Well, um, busboy man, lead the way.” 

Busboy man ran his spidery fingers through his shaggy ebony mane, restoring his beloved, young bouffant. That done, Luke twirled around a lamp post underdressed and then took Wexler’s gloved hand. 

“Shall we, milady?” 

Wexler gave a tired, disgusted sigh as she pulled her hand free, turning away to go back to her mother’s apartment. 

“Dude, you’re spiking my weirdometer.” But as she walked away, she realized her gloved hand was still caught in Luke’s iron grasp. 

“Dudeling Junior O’Gratincakes,” Luke mocked. “You don’t know anything about weird.” Wexler put her free hand on her hip and scowled. Luke got off the lamp post, let go of his coworker. “You’re a big, macher mystery hunter, but you don’t have a blog, you don’t even know why people call me ‘Luke,’ even though that’s not my real name.” 

“Wait, what?” Wexler sputtered. 

Luke waved from down the foggy street. 

“Come with me, and you’ll see a world of pure imagination!” Busboy man sang as he bounded away on his long legs. Perplexed, yet annoyed, Wexler followed her gangly coworker while not-so quietly ruing her town’s awful plague of cracked sidewalks. Luke’s merry little game concluded at the foreboding, tomb-like entrance of a pub. In playful imitation of a wooden cigar chieftain, Luke held one long arm high in mockery of a tomahawk. With his other long arm, Luke held one of the grim, wrought iron and walnut wood doors open for a panting Wexler. She grabbed a fistful of Luke’s tee shirt. 

“Huh, huh, Wexler huffed. I am so going tuh tuh kuh kill you fuh fuh this,” Wexler huffed. “Wah walking in all this accursed humidity is making muh muh mascara bleed.” 

Luke gazed upon Wexler’s furious, melting face, tittering deeply as he watched tarry tears of carmine eyeshadow dribble down her sweat-marred cheeks. Wexler immediately let go when she realized her aggravatingly annoying coworker was bouncing his lean, yet disgustingly muscular pecs bounce underneath his tee shirt again. A gentle shove, and Wexler was guided into the hazy lobby. Wexler coughed at the pub’s cigar reek while Luke approached a waiter with grease-petrified hair. 

“Two for lunch, please,” Luke requested. 

“The pub doesn’t serve minors,” Yaan, the oily-haired maître d’ growled at the melting-faced girl. 

“I’m twenty-two!” Wexler yelled even as she continued blotting humidity off of her smudged cheeks with a handkerchief. 

“I know,” the oily-haired maître d’ growled. “Got a howl out of your mother, though, Wex.” 

“We’d like the special, please,” Luke interjected. 

“Very good, sir,” the maître d’ growled. “Right this way.” 

The maître d’ led the two on their winding way through the dim, wood and aged tobacco smokey labyrinth of the pub’s main dining room. Wexler remembered one time the pub was closed down. None of the staff or patrons could be bothered to follow the health or fire safety codes about smoking cigars indoors. She was thirteen at the time and recalled quite clearly that the town’s extremely fearsome fire marshal made a big song and dance about running the pub’s staff out of Smew’s Landing in a parade, only to suddenly leave town without a trace, never to be seen or heard from ever again. She also remembered the pub staff naming a cocktail in the disappeared marshal’s honor when they reopened the following week. 

“Thanks, Yaan,” Luke said as he and Wexler scooted into their designated (and overstuffed) booth. 

“I’ll be back with yer drinks, and tell Wendy I said ‘hi,’ please,” Yaan growled. “Anything else?” 

“I’d like a puff of smoke with extra mesquite,” Luke said. 

“Very good, sir.” With that, Yaan skulked away into the smoking gloom. 

“Isn’t Yaan just a ball of sunshine?” Luke beamed. Wexler squinted, unsure if she was hearing weird sincerity or more of Luke’s sardonicism. The grimly grinning waiter placed a basket of lacquered chippy things that smelled onto the table. 

“Apple sauce, compliments of the house,” the grinning waiter grimly demurred. 

“Thanks!” 

“Thank you.” 

Luke helped himself to apple sauce as the grinning waiter, too, disappeared into the smoke. Wexler exhaled for focus, then ate, too, for luck. 

“Tell me what your real name is Luke,” Wexler eagerly demanded. The mahogany stopped chewing in order to swallow while his complexion turned cherrywood. 

“I never said anything about that, Madam Sherlock,” Luke said. “If you recall, I said I’d reveal why people call me Luke.” “Luke” then smirked. Maybe it was the creepy, combined ambiance of dim lighting, electric candles, and a ten-year-old aura of cigar smoke, but Wexler realized there was something off about Luke’s smirk this time, something scary. 

“But-” 

“When the time is right, I’ll tell you,” then he grinned wide, flashing bright teeth. “And only on my terms, because you don’t have the upper body strength to pry it out of me.” 

Now there was her goofball Luke.

“So, then, why do people call you Luke?” 

Luke munched on apple sauce. 

“Remember when I first came to work at the Regal Seagull?” 

“Vaguely.” 

“Well, when Mrs. Terwilliger’s secretary, her old one, whatshisname, Fungo, Canopenero…” 

“You mean Jailbait Ferdinand Cano, who got fired five years ago for skimming funds?” 

“Yeah, that’s the schmuck: during my job interview with him, he mishears my condition as ‘leukemia,’ and Mrs. Terwilliger-” 

“Wait…” Wexler’s face lit up with that joyously luminescent inner glow of nosy curiosity. “You have a medical condition? Is it fatal? Is it contagious? Are there boils? Is it-” 

“Private. It’s private.” Wexler munched on more apple sauce to shush herself. “Mrs. Terwilliger misheard Ferd say my name as ‘Luke,’ it was like no one there had batteries in their hearing aids that day.” 

“So what is your real name?” 

Luke scooped up the last bit of apple sauce, shoved it into his mouth, and began chewing. 

“Mmm.” 

Wexler’s smudged face twisted into a gorgon’s mask of whiny agony. 

“Oh, come on! Tell me, please? I gotta know your real name, or I’ll just die!” 

The mahogany man in a pub tee shirt swallowed his bolus of apple sauce. 

“The opposite, milady. You’ll die if you do know.” 

“Your drinks,” Yaan growled as he deposited two parfait glasses, then a fuming, copper goblet before the pair on their table. “I’ll be back with your salami in a moment.” 

Luke downed his puff in a hungry gulp, followed by his drink in a predatory slurp. Wexler stared at the wooden man as she sipped. 

“What?” Luke asked as he scraped his lower lip with his wrist. 

“I thought you hate smoke.” 

“I said I hate burnt wood taste.” 

“Oh, um, well, then, where’d you come from and why come to Smew’s Landing?” 

The wooden man sighed as he hunted for those last few drops of his finished drinks. 

“I guess I walked myself into that,” he grumbled as Yaan came back with their meal. Luke began neatly dismantling his while Wexler began sawing hers in half. 

“Ooo, tell me, tell me, where’ya from, and why do you like it better here?” Wexler chittered as she sank her teeth into her halved salami. 

“Let me tell you a story,” Luke began as he organized his duck burger’s solid components. “Once upon a time in a kingdom far, far away, the crown prince decided he was going to become a fireman instead of king when he grew up.” Wexler squinted incredulously. “But Mom said he should be a footballer, and Dad said he should be a lawyer.” Wexler ate. “And while the power trio argued, the crown prince’s brother, the other prince, ran away from home to join the circus to live out his dream of being a strongman.” Luke finished sorting his meal’s solid components. “But ’cause the prince’s brother was way too weak and scrawny to ever become the strongman, the circus staff turned him into a lion, a tiger, and a bear, and then tried but failed to put him down when he ate their lion tamer and seventeen audience members.” 

Wexler stopped in mid-chew, letting a thread of drool and homemade honey mango-mushroom ketchup dribble out past her pink lips. 

“That made no sense,” she stated. 

“Neither did Inanna’s descension into the underworld to steal her sister’s throne,” Luke retorted just before he rolled his salami. “I mean, why did she want two thrones? One for each of her gigantically ample butt cheeks?” He shoved that cylindrical mess into his waiting mouth. 

“Point taken.” Wexler finally swallowed the last of her food. “But you still haven’t told me where you’re from, or why you came here.”

The cherry and walnutwood man flushed mahogany as he gobbled up some applesauce. He then began meticulously scouring his spider fingers. 

“I just did.” Luke took forty seconds masticating his, then the rest of Wexler’s meal. “You’re a clever girl, and I know you’re much smarter than a Hollywood actress.” 

Wexler pursed her pink lips in vexed thought even as she blotted them clean with her linen napkin. 

“Point taken,” she repeated with a poutier pout. 

“Would you two like any more drinks?” Yaan growled. “Dessert, perhaps?” 

Wexler drained the last of her drink. 

“We’re good,” Luke said. He looked at Wexler, who then pushed her plate with her remaining morsels. “We’ll pay the check up front.” 

The pair scooted out of their booth to follow the grease-haired maître d’ back through the smoky labyrinth. At the front desk of the lobby, Luke took out his filth-glazed wallet and retrieved a portrait of Andrew Jackson, one portrait of Abraham Lincoln, a portrait of Alexander Hamilton, and seven portraits of George Washington, setting them onto the counter before Yaan, with an urging, to “keep the change.” As the two pass beyond the wrought iron and walnutwood doors, Wexler stopped in her tracks when she realized Luke wasn’t walking with her. 

Luke was almost startled when he felt Wexler’s gloved hands hook onto his bare, walnutwood arm. He looked to his side to see strong, independent Wexler holding onto his arm, wiping her blush onto his tee shirt sleeve as she made fluttery goo-goo eyes at him with her mascara-smeared eyes. 

“Isn’t the big, strong, sailor man going to escort the poor, defenseless, little Wexler home?” Wexler cooed. From Luke’s lofty height, he couldn’t even bother to summon an insincere reaction of amusement. 

“Y’do know you spend more on a box of hair dye than I make in six months, right?” 

Wexler punched her coworker in his floating ribs. 

“Take me home, you cockblockhead. Be a gentleman.” 

Luke sighed as he readjusted his arm in his coworker’s demure embrace. 

“Fine, fine, ‘gentle man mode’ activate.” 

Five blocks down the foggy street, a left turn at an avenue, and the two came to the statue-heavy entrance of Pennyroyal Apartments. 

“Do you live here?” Wexler asked. 

“I live at the Waterlily Flats on the other side of town. I thought you knew this.” 

Luke threw up his spidery walnut hands in frustration before rubbing his agonized face. 

“I thought you knew I’m not a nosy person…” He dug his spidery fingers deep into his sable hair, churning it vigorously before recomposing his calm and reconstructing his pompadour. “Just please lead the way, Wexler.” 

Wexler retook her gallant coworker’s willowy walnutwood bare arm and snuggled into his side. 

“Look at us, bickering like an old married couple…” she giggled. “Imagine what our kids would be like!” 

Luke sighed, then discreetly gulped to keep a bolus of salami-flavored mucus from rising back up into his throat. 

The walk from Pennyroyal Apartments to Waterlily Flats was lovely; the clouds boiled away, and the fog delightfully evaporated in the afternoon sunshine. Blackberry bushes were everywhere in town, dominating empty lots, infesting landscaping, and choking the greenways. The way the blackberry bushes were the densest in the blasted ruins of Mergellus Manor suggested the plants were actually a curse levied upon Smew’s Landing. Luke’s chest heaved and expanded ever so slightly; he was looking forward to Blackberry Season. Free food, mostly. He sighed wistfully, then Wexler, too, sighed. 

At Wexler’s urging, the pair cut through an alleyway as a shortcut. “Romantic, so romantic,” she insisted, probably sardonically, and God help him, Luke found himself almost agreeing. Grimy, eroded brickwork, oily puddles of ominous garbage juice oozing between his spidery toes, numerous bouquets of rancid trash aromas assaulting his nostrils, definitely a place that made him feel alive. And then the two coworkers arrived at a sprawling complex of stucco bungalows and fluorescent-white flowering pear trees. Luke gawked at the swimming pool turned lily pond by the manager’s office. He gazed longingly at that scummy, speckled green lens even as Wexler guided him towards Apartment B-two seventeen. 

At B-two seventeen, Wexler finally let go of Luke’s arm to fish out her door key. Luke wrenched off a twig full of pear blossoms as Wexler fumbled for her key, and he dragged the twig through his bright teeth, flicking the now-bare stick away the moment before Wexler turned to look back at him. 

“So, see you at the ‘Gull?” Luke asked as Wexler opened her mother’s apartment door. Wexler smirked. 

“Yeah, people have been complaining about your apple fritters.” 

“Oh? What’s wrong?” 

“You haven’t been making them.” 

Luke chuckled as he walked off. 

It was dusk by the time Luke finally returned to his aluminum shed. It had been a long time since Luke had walked through the forest barefoot, and he realized he needed to enjoy doing that again. He pulled off his tee shirt, wiggled out of his coworker, Dean’s dungarees, and flopped down to wallow in a thicket of soft ferns and salal leaves. 

Luke lay there in that thicket, naked except for a sudden dusting of wispy black hair on his chin, chest, and belly rapidly thickening into a fluffy blanket of auburn fur growing across his body down to his wrists and ankles. As he lay there, waiting for the waning halfmoon to rise, he decided he’d just relax that night. His wiry muscles grew loudly lumpy as his auburn chest became vast, broad and quite shaggy. “Yeah, I’m gonna take it easy tonight,” he smugly growled as his suddenly deeper voice dropped another five octaves. Luke stretched mightily, letting his lumpy, shaggy body grow lumpier and shaggier. He took his swelling, auburn paws to his still-human head and vigorously ruffled his bronzing coif. “Yeah, I deserve a break.”

IV

In the dimly dappled summer light of the spruce and fir forest, that gray limo barreling down the I-two ninety looked like a black hearse late for a funeral. The limo’s passengers were indeed in a hurry, as they were indeed late for an important appointment. Thus the impetus of the chauffeur to go thirty miles over the highway’s speed limit. Inside the limo’s cabin, Miriam worn a dark, probably blue business dress next to the limo’s minifridge, helping herself to yet another swig from her bottle of sparkling sauvignon blanc every time she felt the limo dip below sixty-five miles per hour. 

“Mother!” a woman in an identical dark business dress scolded. “We’re late, already! What will they think if we show up with you stone drunk again?” 

Chuck, a man in a dark, probably also blue suit took another chug from his own bottle of marsala, numb to his indignant wife’s nagging, and oblivious to his two sons’ violent bickering over yet another round of punch buggy. 

“Anita, dear, let your mother unwind,” he said. “You know how tense she gets whenever we have to deal with that toupéed boor your benighted sister shackled herself to.” 

Miriam chuckled into her sauvignon as Anita fought hard her urge to sink her four-hundred-something dollar manicured nails into either her mother’s throat or her own temples. 

“Listen, Chuck. Just because Mother has put us in her will does not mean we’ve been enslaved forever as her mindless enablers.” 

“Daughter, hold your tongue,” Miriam barked. 

“Mother, either talk, or drink, not both.” Miriam snorted as she kind of begrudgingly returned to her bottle. “Heracles! Pluto! Stop!” 

Everyone was thrown onto the limo cabin’s floor when the chauffeur slammed hard on the brakes. A branchless, barkless tree had tumbled onto the road two-hundred feet ahead. 

One of the boys peeled himself off of his brother and crawled away to press his face into the limo window. Deep in the undergrowth beyond the side of the road was a big, topaz orb, like an orange-brown glass sun hovering over an ocean of green foliage. Then the boy realized that sun was really an unblinking eye. 

***

Enough dreaming, enough sleeping. It was summertime, and that meant it was berry season. Luke sat up in the stream he fell into the night before. He touched his thin, wiry-muscled chest just as the last of his new host’s ruined shirt finished disintegrating into watery slime. He stood up, and the slimy remnants of his new host’s jeans finished dissolving into slimy, bluish gunk tangling in the soggy, bronze fur of his gangly hindlegs. 

“Ugh.” 

Luke squatted back into the water, taking annoyed care to rinse his fur clean. If he didn’t, wearing pants would be hell. Now clean, Luke bounded out of the stream and spent a half hour discreetly hiking his nude way through the forest back to his shed. Since it was peak tourist season, Luke had to move his shed five times in the last month to keep nosy picnickers and buttinsky nature lovers from stumbling upon his precious home. 

Back at shed sweet shed, Luke quickly pulled on his usual outfit of a threadbare flannel shirt and repeatedly torn jeans. It was slim pickings in Luke’s shoe pile, as he fitted his big, ebony-furred, flipper-like hindfeet into a mismatched pair of flipflops. If this kept up, Luke would have to save up to hitchhike to that cost-fewer shoe store downtown. Maybe he could wheedle Manager Wendy into giving him a ride. 

Whatever. 

Luke grabbed a pair of plastic, ten-gallon buckets, shut his shed, padlocked it with that new lock he finally got around to buying, and bolted back into the forest. It was Berry Season, after all. 

***

It was Thursday lunchtime at the Regal Seagull Café. That meant it was Canard en Daube Day. And that meant that the restaurant was a zoo full of duck enraged customers, and stayed that way until closing time. 

Assistant Manager Flauros carried a full tub of dirty dishes into the jam-packed kitchen in order to hand it off to Dean and Wexler, who were currently on dish duty. That done, Flauros squeezed her way through the crowded kitchen, wormed her way through the equally crowded employee lounge, and made her way to the back exit, sitting down on the steps just beyond the exit’s threshold. Flauros let out a pained sigh, then pulled out a book of matches and her last emergency cigar from her shirt pocket. She lit up and groaned relaxingly as she puffed away at her stogie. 

“Heya!” Luke shouted. 

Flauros almost dropped her cigar upon hearing that. 

“Oh, Mr. Luke,” she said as she recovered her bearings. She reluctantly offered her precious cigar to the smiling, bucket-bearing, off-duty busboy towering over her. “Did you want this?” 

“Nah, but thanks,” Luke demurred. He set his two blackberry-loaded buckets down, then sat down beside the obviously frazzled assistant manager. “Everything okay, Flower?” 

“No. Today’s been so busy, I haven’t even had time to set the flower arrangements.” The assistant manager sucked hard on her stogie. “If Boonkha was here, I’d probably be fired already.” 

“Well, help isn’t here today, so there’s that.” 

“I suppose so. Thanks. And thank you for getting the berries for Pie Friday, too.” 

“Try some,” Luke suggested. Flauros stopped puffing her half a cigar. Luke smiled slyly as he hefted one of his berry buckets. 

“You think I should?” 

“Gotta taste test for quality, after all.” Flauros shared the busboy’s sly smile. The assistant manager gathered a squishy handful of berries. Luke stood back up to carry his buckets through the lounge and into the kitchen where Deborah eagerly snatched both buckets out of the off-duty busboy’s spidery hands. Just as Luke turned to go, a damp, dishpan hand gathered up a fistful of threadbare flannel. 

“Hey, where did you take my pants to?” Dean demanded. 

“They’re in the hamper where you always leave them. Besides, it was one time.” 

Dean paused thoughtfully as he let go of Luke’s shirt. Luke then disappeared back into the crowd of coworkers while Dean looked back to see Wexler wasn’t at the sink. 

Workers at the Regal Seagull Café almost unanimously chose Thursday Manager Steph as their favorite manager, as Steph was always too busy helping bus tables and taking orders to bother with bossing or nitpicking on anyone. That worked in Wexler’s favor that day, as there was no one guarding the Monstera Foyer leading to the administrative offices on the second floor. Every time Wexler made her way onto the second floor, she felt like she was going back in time. Dim yellow light emitted by lamps, antiquated, flaky fleur de lis themed wallpaper, fading photographs in frames, it was a dusty, mildewy paradise. Wexler fished out a worn-out credit card just as she fiddled with the doorknob of the records office. She then returned her lock-picking card to her pocket upon remembering that none of the second-floor offices were locked. 

Inside the dark office, Wexler booted up the nineteen ninety-two computer, only to discover that Dean never got around to updating or upgrading that computer. The computer had a velvety layer of dust that should have clued her in about its condition, too. 

No matter. 

Wexler jimmied open a filing cabinet drawer and began rifling through employee files. Jeff Boonkha, Dean Endao, Deborah York, Mizia Flauros… The room turned into an abyss of light.

“Ms. Wexler Roger Johnson,” a terrifyingly familiar elderly voice barked. “What, may I ask, are you doing snooping here?” 

Wexler stood up straight to face a silver-bunned old woman in a dark gown glowering at her. 

“I want to know the secret ingredients to the salami,” Wexler lied as she slammed the drawer shut. “Deborah was being too coy.” 

Mrs. Terwilliger squinted her sunken eyes, and quietly hissed through clicking, age-yellowed teeth as she slowly stalked towards the Quince. MacDougal. 

“Oh, please, deary,” Mrs. Terwilliger burbled. “I stole the recipe.’” 

“Ssso, nothing special besides capers?” 

“None at all, I’m afraid.” Mrs. Terwilliger put a long, white nail to her warted chin as she studied the pattern of dust on the computer keyboard. “But I doubt that this is why you’re here, Ms. Johnson.” 

Wexler ummed, then sighed in defeat. 

“I wanted to mail Luke a letter, for a surprise,” she lied. “You don’t suppose I could get it with your help and permission, Ma’am?” Mrs. Terwilliger scratched her beak-like nose, then proudly strode over to the filing cabinet against the far wall. There, she opened another drawer, fished out an employee file, and made Wexler’s heart skip two beats by clicking her teeth again in audible disapproval. 

“Look at this,” Mrs. Terwilliger complained as she showed Wexler the empty employee file folder for Luke Nööguy. 

Wexler skittered backwards towards the door. 

“I’ll just give the letter to Luke when I see him, then.” Wexler curtsied. “Thank you so much for your help, Ma’am.” 

***

Luke hiked through one of the rockier forest paths, whistling as he hefted a big trash bag filled with food scraps and wilted flowers. He’d eat like a king. At least for a day. Technically, Assistant Manager Flauros asked him to take that load to the dumpster.

“Hey, Mr.” 

Luke stopped in his tracks. He dropped his sack of treasure, scanning for his mystery guest. Dangling from a tree branch, maybe ten feet off of the ground, was a girl in a pixie haircut. Luke reached up and plucked the girl from the branch like a midsummer pear. He set her down onto the needly loam and set about gently flicking stray leaves out of her hair. 

“Lemme guess,” Luke grinned.

“I saw a big green bug,” pixie cut replied. “Thanks for getting me down.” 

“How big?” Luke asked, motioning widely with his long, tree branch arms. 

“The girl held out her fist, enclosing a space as big as a large strawberry. Luke chuckled. 

“It was really shiny, but it flew away when I almost fell.” 

“Sounds like a fig eater beetle.” Luke grew thoughtful. “I haven’t seen a fig eater in a long time; they don’t usually come this far north.” 

“How come?” 

“Too wet, winter’s too cold.” Luke smirked again as he folded his arms behind his shaggy head. He stretched loudly, then his threadbare flannel shirt yawned wide, vomiting forth a red wave of damp, auburn fur. “Uh…” 

Pixie cut girl shrieked, taking to her booted heels as a pair of lymph drenched, bony arms erupted from Luke’s broad-again, shaggy-again chest. Luke snatched up his trash bag of treasure, and bolted again, leaving behind his now-ruined flipflops. 

***

A tall, young man with sweaty, shiny, cherrywood skin sat on the bench at the number Three Hundred Sixty-Four Bus at Downtown Smew’s Landing. He anxiously tapped his enormous, plastic bag-taped feet on the sidewalk as he waited for the Twenty-Two headed north. The young man nervously adjusted his newish tank top over his massive, auburn-furred chest, hopeful that no one would notice his second pair of arms hidden somewhere underneath his tank top. Luke was confident that he could afford the fare and transfer onto the Forty-Four. 

“You can do this, Luke. You can do this. It’s just public transportation,” the young man with cherrywood skin huffed. “What happened last time was just a Luke fluke.” Luke snorted. 

Luke turned to his side to see an old lady in a white fur coat, holding a snarling albino pekingese. The young man snorted at the sight of a bandy-legged dollop of whipped cream then immediately stood up to wordlessly offer his seat. 

“Pardon, Ma’am,” Luke said over the barking. 

“So gracious,” the old lady cooed as she plopped herself onto Luke’s prewarmed seat. 

“You headed north, too, Ma’am?” Luke asked as he kind of surreptitiously shifted his arms. That loud mutt reminded him why he couldn’t stand small dogs. Or big and medium dogs, either. 

“Oh, no, I’m headed to see my acupuncturist, then do some shopping.” 

“Oh.” Luke scratched his furry throat. 

The old lady cackled as she stood up for the arriving Twenty-Two. As the two got on, Luke whistled, blowing at his jet-colored bangs. It was fun being able to walk to the back of the bus.

The back of the Bus was nice. The seats' polyester plush still had an acrid “new car” smell to them, lovingly blending with the many hidden layers of aged sweat, cigarette smoke and drug fumes within. Luke looked out the dingy window, watching Downtown Smew's Landing transition into Oregon suburbia. As much as Luke loved people, he couldn't stand the suburbs. Too many strange trees that too many fussy people fussed too much over, and too many dogs. 

The lady’s Pekingese started barking at Luke again the moment it realized he was glowering at it again. Luke broke eye contact to go back to looking at the suburban trees. He shifted uncomfortably in his lonely seat at the sight of a strawberry arbutus. He ate a strawberry arbutus once, having mistaken it for a large manzinita. Gave him painful, and painfully skunky gas for a week. Luke looked away when he caught sight of a bay laurel. 

Downtown transitioned into suburbia. Dusty, urban-blighted. The old lady and her dog got off of the bus. Luke yanked on the cord getting off at a stop next to a bodega. 

Just as Luke walked over to the bus stop’s grimy bench, his stomach trumpeted loudly. Perhaps there was time for a snack before the Forty-Four arrived. Luke lifted up his wrist to check the time, and saw just his cherrywood skinned wrist, coated in a generous dusting of ebony and auburn hair. 

Luke then remembered he hadn’t worn a watch since his last watch, a wristwatch his father gave him as a birthday present. The first night he started changing, in fact. He realized he loved that dinky thing. That, and he had time for snacks, and he had money for snacks. 

Inside, the bus stop was grimly dim, and cramped. Nonfood items reeked of dust, lemony furniture polish, and detergent. All of the edible goods smelled of cinnamon, sugar, and extra citric acid, even the fruits and bakery junk. Luke mentally thumbed through the plastic packets of spices, then scanned the cracker and cookie shelves. The moment Luke reached for a bag of duros de harina (or, as he preferred to call them, “orange-colored wheel-things”) on the chips shelf, a fluffy, brown and white Persian cat suddenly emerged from behind the other bags of chips to screech at the young man as though he tried to wrench her fluffy tail off. Luke jerked backwards, bumping into the chicharrones shelves, knocking those bags to the floor. The big, toothy grin of a nearby boy in a dingy gray wifebeater wilted into a snarling scowl as the screaming cat fled deeper into the bus stop. 

“¿Qué carajo le hiciste a mi gato, pastel prieto?” a tanned boy growled. 

“Nothing, nothing!” Luke pleaded as he put the bag of orange wheels back even as the snarling boy in a dingy wifebeater drew even closer. A big, burly bald man in a matching dingy gray wifebeater emerged from behind another aisle. El Baldo scanned Luke disapprovingly, scowling sharply when he saw Luke’s homemade boots. 

“What are you doing?” Baldo shouted. Luke put up his big, spidery hands and gently backed away from him. 

“Nothing!” Luke pleaded again. “I was just leaving!” Baldo grabbed at Luke’s tank top with a meaty hand. 

“What is going on over there?” Clemente, an old, mustached man with snow white braids, hollered. Then the old man turned towards his bald, elder grandson, shouting, “Van, let go of that boy!” Van gripped Luke’s wrist harder as Clemente turned towards his younger grandson.  “Chuy, stop being a creep!”  

“Chuy and I caught this freaky bum trying to murder and rob us!” Van shouted, still gripping Luke’s spidery hand. “I say we give this jerk a tour of our dumpster!” 

The younger grandson Chuy’s scowl bloomed back into a big grin at the sound of that, a switchblade in his grip clicking with joy. 

“Chuy, stop that!  Let the boy go, Van,” the old man calmly repeated. “Listen to yourself, what are you even thinking?” 

Luke pulled his wrist free and hurled a plastic two-liter bottle of root beer onto the floor. By the time the rest finished wiping their eyes clean of soda foam, Luke was already outside, bounding down the street. Luke let a stray thought about regretting not getting any snacks float into his head. That particular musing quickly evaporated as demonic pain erupted in Luke’s left calf. Luke limped around a corner and down an alley. He stooped down to dig his index finger and thumb deep into the hole in Dean’s dungarees fishing out a hot bullet. 

“¡Te encontré, pinche ojete!” 

As Chuy grappled with Luke, Luke finally decided to burst free of his tank top, unfolding his auburn-furred arms. Chuy’s brown eyes went wide as he gawked at the sudden, metamorphic appearance. He just kept staring at his big chest full of matted, blue stained auburn fur until Luke clamped his spidery hand over the boy’s unresisting, slack-jawed face. Luke then clutched the boy’s thin neck, and then he squeezed hard. That done, he then threw that now wet, still-warm corpse aside, uncaring of the loud, messy splat on the alley wall. 

“Uuurgh,” Luke spat. Obsidian bailing hooks easily slid free of his trash bag shoes. Dungaree seams giving way as his swelling hindlegs bloated too quickly with too much painful power. He inhaled, growing taller, growing wider as he regretted not having the time now to savor Dean’s pants tearing apart. He could feel his hairy, furry skin peeling off in big, wet sheets. More pain blossomed across Luke’s still-widening back as Van emptied a round of bullets into that monster. Luke slowly turned around, stepping out of the sticky, dissolving ruins of his borrowed dungarees as Van frantically tried to reload his handgun. Luke casually slapped the gun out of Van’s palsied hands, and grabbed his surviving assailant, freshly unsheathed hooks digging deep into hot flesh. Then Luke opened his mouth wide, letting his long, suddenly centipede tongue snake out towards his captured victim, only for Van to bite down hard on the tip. 

Van choked on a mouthful of scorching, acridly scalding venom as he tore himself free of Luke’s pronged grasp. Luke collapsed onto the concrete, his hulking, malforming body suddenly transforming into a blue mass of rancid, auburn-furred insect. Van ran away screaming down the street, not looking back even as he tore off all of his stinking, blue-defiled clothing. 

***

Shopkeeper Clemente Verididas could not bear to enter or even turn towards the alley where police and that hazmat team were investigating his grandson Chuy’s corpse. Not just because his grandson was murdered, and not just because Chuy died from being mangled alive by someone’s bare hands, but because the stench off of Chuy’s mangled corpse was just too much for that poor old man and his much put-upon heart and lungs. 

Back in the backroom of his bodega, a police investigator helped Clemente into a chair, and another detective handed the old man one of his own bottles of agua dé jamaica. 

“Please tell us again what happened when you last saw your grandsons Chuy and Van, Mr. Verididas.” The old man clutched his bottle of hibiscus drink, fingered one of his braids, and finally sighed. 

“Chuy got into a fight with some homeless guy ’cause the bum, a really big’n tall bum, spooked our cat. He tried to murder and rob Chuy and Van.” 

“And then what happened?” 

“And then my other grandson, Van, jumps in, threatening to murder the bum ’cause Van’s always such a dumb encabronado, always needin’ to be his white knight protector.” 

“And then what happened?” 

“Then I got arguing with that zoquete Van, who tells me he’s gonna kill the bum ’cause that wey thinks the bum is some sort of bank robbing desperado! All ’cause the guy spooked a cat!” 

“Mr. Verididas,” the investigator said. Can you describe the homeless man your grandsons were harassing?” 

“He was really tall, really tall, taller than either Chuy or Van. Really buff, really buff, with a big, big chest, and really, really long arms. And really long, really skinny legs in loose pants. He seemed top-heavy, he wasn’t one of the neighborhood bums.” 

“What ethnicity was the vagrant?” 

“Uh… He had a dark complexion, like a mug of black tea.” 

“African American?” 

“I don’t know, he had shiny black hair, in a greaser’s jellyroll, an-” 

“Pardon?” 

“Y’know, bouffant hair, but the hair on his big chest was red, like he was hidin’ a big dog or a tiger under his shirt, and he had a really big nose.” 

“I see. How old was he? Could you tell?” 

“I, uh, I don’t know…” 

***

In another alley about forty-two-and-a-half blocks away from his grandfather’s bodega, Van Nanchez, now naked, climbed up a fire escape and into his girlfriend Nancy’s apartment. Van wanted to hide at his mother’s apartment, but police were already there by the time he approached it, and more importantly, he was in no proper state of mind to talk or think about what happened to his poor Chuyito. 

Van slunk about in that dark apartment like some exhausted beast who was just too frazzled to bother searching for that light switch. Thank God Nancy was working late at her beauty salon that day. He was in no state of mind to explain to her what happened either. Van crept into the bathroom, locked the door, and after, maybe, ten minutes of hesitation, flicked on the lights. Van’s reflection was tallow sallow and puffy-eyed. Am I dying? He touched his painfully puffy eyelid, making both eyes water copiously in retaliation. His jaundiced fingers stung as he touched his drool again. The rancid metal taste of that monster slobber loogie was getting stronger. Van downed an entire bottle of minty mouthwash, that brand with alcohol, and assumed he got some respite from that awful curse lingering in his mouth. He scratched at his slimy, sticky, graying, swollen, swelling chest, suddenly realizing that his chest was frosting over with a thin layer of fine, black hairs. He reached into the medicine cabinet for a razor. When he tried to remember if the pink one or the purple one was his, a thin stream of green, mint yet cinnamony flavored drool dribbled out of his mouth. Then the rest of the swallowed mouthwash came raging up out of Van’s stomach and into the sink, immediately followed by a stomachful of hot, beige-colored, ammonia-flavored pus. Another bellow, and the sink was filled to the rim with disgorged vileness. Weakness grabbed the unwell young man, dropping him onto the floor. When Van dragged himself over to the toilet bowl for another round, all nausea could squeeze out of him at that moment was a belch of cadaverous acridity that wafted back into his sallow, suddenly whiskery face. When he sighed in wobbling, trembling relief, Van then shuddered, then gurgled, then emptied his bloating stomach three, four, and then finally, five more times of that awful, awful béchamel that tasted of overripe bile. 

“Am I dying?” Alkai, no, no, Van crawled into the shower stall and, after another ten minutes of back and forth between catching his gurgling, burbling breath, and painful weeping, mustered back enough strength to turn the shower faucet handle. Cold, lukewarm, very warm, to hot, to scalding hot, and then the handle came off in Van’s wet, sticky grip. Not that Van was in the right state of mind to care. That boiling rain was what Alkaious, what Van needed. Enough strength was returning to his pulsing, throbbing, jaundiced limbs to let him pull himself back up onto his sticky, grimy, pulsing feet. 

Blotching tan skin finished turning butter yellow, finally turning ever so slightly pinkish as Van ground a bar of soap into his darkening, increasingly shaggy chest. As he began singing in an off key, roughened voice, he was too busy trying to reabsorb life energy from the hot water to notice or care that, underneath his foamy exoskeleton of fresh lather, that wispy coat of fine black hair spreading past his abdomen, down his thighs, onto the tops of his throbbing feet, across his broadening, aching shoulders, down his halfway bulging arms, was steadily thickening into a deep layer of warm, walnutwood brown fur. 

Van grabbed one of Nancy’s shampoo bottles and squeezed hard. As pale lavender colored shampoo and conditioner went everywhere, Van thought for a moment he had Chuy’s face in his hand, his manito’s brain matter oozing from between his fingers. Startled, Van backed out of the shower stall, shattering the shower stall door. A concerned knock on the bathroom door. 

“Van? Are you okay? What happened? Your mom called Chuy died!” 

Nancy arrived home early.

“My God, what?” Van feigned. He reached back into the shower stall to fiddle with the handle. After scrubbing himself dry of lather with a towel, he draped the towel over that puddle of glass shards on the floor before wrapping another towel around his hairy waist as a damp, terrycloth sarong. A couple of flushes to the toilet, and Van finally opened the bathroom door. The young hairdresser waiting on the other side fell backwards onto her shag carpeting as that miasmatic wall of ghastly, funky, escaping steam punched her square in her pretty face. Van offered Nancy his abnormally hairy hand. 

“What happened?” she croaked. 

“You fell over,” he chuckled. 

“No. What happened at the bodega?” Nancy groggily reiterated. “What happened to you? Your hair… you have hair.” She motioned at his shaggy, tan furred chest. “Everywhere.” Then she motioned at the layer of tan creeping across his scalp and chin. “This morning, you were a as hairy as a chihuahua. Eyebrows.” 

“I’m trying out a new hair tonic I got. Used up the whole bottle,” Alkaious lied. Nancy furrowed her professionally manicured eyebrows as Van faked an obviously insincere smile. 

“What brand did you buy?” Van winced, his pallid, scruffy face retracting into a pained, guilty frown. “What happened with Chuy and you? The police are looking for you.” 

Nancy took Van’s hairy hand. He pulled it back, silently praying that she didn’t have time to feel the gunge leaking out of his still damp skin. 

“I’ll talk about it tomorrow.” Van sighed anxiously. “I just wanna sleep it off, babygirl.” 

Van waddled over to Nancy’s couch and flopped onto it. Nancy smirked when she noticed how Van’s back hair matched the couch’s upholstery. 

“You want a blanket?” Silence plucked her smirk off of her face. “Honey?” 

“Yes, please” came a hoarse whisper. 

Nancy got a cotton comforter out of her closet and draped it over her ailing boyfriend’s unnaturally hairy body. When she bent down to kiss Van’s now-sideburned cheek, they both shrank away in a shared cringe. Nancy spit out a tongueful of brown hair, immediately realizing her boyfriend’s freshly washed skin shouldn’t taste like musky bile. 

“Van, are you feeling okay? Maybe we should go to the ER.” 

He pulled the edge of the comforter over his scruffy head. 

“Can we go tomorrow? Please, babygirl, I just wanna sleep.” 

“Okay,” Nancy shrugged. “But first thing in the morning, I’m taking you to the hospital even if I need to use a wheelbarrow.” 

She walked into her bedroom, unable to banish the stray thought of Van looking like a gigantic silkworm cocoon. 

***

“Luke is it now?” a voice allied out. “Luke, tell me, is this the end? Is this our end?  Is this your end?” 

“Not at all.  Of course it isn’t.” 

“Aren’t you tired? Aren’t you tired? Aren’t you ready to go?” 

“I am not, I wasn’t ready to go when we first met, and I’m not ready to go now. I will rest when I need to, and I will not be ready until I take back what was taken from me, what was taken from us.” 

“What about the price you’ve paid? What about the price you’re still paying?” 

“I agreed to our bargain, and I uphold my end of it even now. If all you wanted, if all you want to do is to wheedle out of me a confession of regret I don’t actually have, stop bothering me.” 

“But all you’ve done. All you’ve witnessed, all those faces, doesn’t all that weigh on you like a pile of boulders?” 

“Again with the wheedling. What I’ve done, all I’ve seen, everyone I’ve met, everything confirms my epiphany about life!’” 

What was that?” 

“What’s the point of life if you can’t consume it?” 

“Is that what you believe?” 

“It’s what I know. And until I get my fill, and until I get tired to the point where rest won’t heal me, it’s none of your business. When it is your business, I’ll let you know.” 

***

Nancy could not fall asleep. Van started up with that heartbreaking, wet, hacking cough, spending four hours sounding like he was trying to regurgitate a hairball. But every time she tried to wake him up to take him to the hospital, he’d just speak in a demure tone “no, no, I’m fine, I’m fine.” 

Maybe around two something in the morning, Van finally stopped coughing, and instead, started making an awful squelching sound. At first, Nancy thought he was puking or retching, but then eventually realized the sound was more rhythmic, as if someone was stomping their feet or clapping their hands inside a tub of jam. Then she realized it wasn’t squelching, nor puking, but tearing, as if someone was digging their fingers deep into a raw chicken thigh to peel the wet flesh apart from the bone. 

“That does it!” Nancy shouted.

With that declaration, Nancy threw off her covers, hopped out of bed, stormed out of her bedroom, flicked on the living room lights, and was struck dumb. On her couch lay the now-impossibly swollen, gelatinous Van Nanchez, once her boyfriend, now this big and jiggly, cavefish cream-colored almond jelly sculpture. Nancy’s heart pounded in her forehead as she watched whatever that thing that used to be her boyfriend sit up on her couch to look at her. Now, that thing was hatching. A tall, butter white, pus-soaked man with a big nose rose from the rupturing, boyfriend-shaped sac. Nancy turned away to vomit at the scent of that forty-thousand-year-old funk coming off of that hatching abomination on her melting couch. And as Luke regained his bearings, as much as he would have loved another long, hot shower, he took advantage of Nancy’s incapacitating distress by grabbing her recliner to smash open her living room window. By the time Nancy could breathe again, that horrible slime man who hatched out of Van was long gone down the fire escape. And her couch cushions apparently all rotted away from the smoldering, blue goo.

V

It was another summer Monday morning in the spruce and fir forests around Smew’s Landing. Warm, humid, perfumed with loamy, piny fragrance. The Westbound Eighty-Three came rolling down the I-Two Ninety West. As the Bus leisurely made a turn in the forested highway known as “Widow’s Twist,” something, a brown carcass appeared on the asphalt in the bus’s wake, as if the Bus hit a dehydrated deer that wasn’t there a moment ago. Except that it wasn’t. The carcass straightened his long, hairy limbs, then Luke stood up on his auburn-furred hindlegs to scamper off the road and into the ferny undergrowth. 

As much as Luke loved running barefoot through the forest, and despite having lived as a carefree, clothes-free hermit for almost thirty years straight, that gangly, auburn-furred beast was just not in the mood to enjoy running around naked in the forest at the moment. Call it pique, call it frustrated petulance, Luke’s plan went bust, and he was aggravated and mortified. What was supposed to be a simple shopping foray wound up as a big bungle of death, destruction, and grief. Luke just-

Luke knew better than to let his emotions get the better of him. He stopped to sniff the sultry air while checking exactly where he was in his forest. This was just a setback. Judging from the cluster of yew trees, Luke estimated he was about four miles southeast of his shed. This was just a setback; he had too more packets of emergency outfits left in his shed. Luke bolted again as he heard a falcon screeching. He’d just go back to the Regal Seagull and beg for a ride from Wendy or another coworker. Now he was two miles from his shed. And if all else, he could call Yaan up on that big, big favor he still owed him. 

Three miles past Widow’s Twist was a fenced off bend of the river called Quahaga’s Tears, named after a vengeful, local goddess to whom the Twist also refers to. As it was once told to Luke, a long time ago when he was someone else, the swift rapids of the bend were the remorseful tears the goddess shed for all of the lives lost whenever she fed her children, the big, slick boulders hiding underneath the jade and foamy waters. Luke avoided Tears whenever he could, for obvious and not so obvious reasons. But Tears was still a lovely place to visit, from a safe distance, obviously. The droning roar of the rapids was soothing, the colors of the dancing waters, jadeite and nephrite, were hypnotic. Luke decided he wasn’t in that big of a hurry to get home as he leaned against the cast iron guardrail. The interplay of cool spray and muggy summer air was thrilling made Luke’s auburn hackles rise up in a big, shaggy wave. Whatever. Luke inhaled deeply, letting his hairy wicker chest violently expand loud enough to be heard almost above the river roaring. 

As the shaggy-furred busboy sagged onto the railing, he noticed someone on the far side of the river. Some dumb kid was sticking their dumb little head through the spacing between the railings. Luke felt his belly fur thicken in big clumps as a defense mechanism. 

“Hey! Hey!” Luke tried to yell over the spraying din. “Hey, kid! Don’t do that!” The kid leaned further towards the rapids, now more interested in looking at his light-up sneakers lift off the damp pavement upside down. Luke began frantically waving his long, long arms. The boy looked back up to see a dancing scarecrow in a reddish-brown onesie on the other side. The boy smiled and waved, and when he turned back to call for his mommy to see the funny scarecrow man, too, the boy fell backwards onto his butt, then slid forward into the waters below in one fell, silent swoosh. His own warnings failed, Luke leaped over the guardrail and into the raging waters, hind paws first. In a calmer stretch of the river, perhaps about two miles downstream from the goddess’s tears, a sopping wet scarecrow man, covered in chin to elongated toes in sopping wet, dark auburn fur, majestically rose out of the river, carrying the boy he rescued from being dashed upon the rocks. Luke laid the still, wet boy on a sun warmed rock, and realized the blue-faced kid wasn’t breathing. He placed his palm on the boy’s shirt and felt a faint heartbeat. He touched the boy’s pudgy face and had a vision of Chuy. Luke put the tips of his right index and middle fingers to the boy’s belly, pressing ever so gently down, making the boy thrash and cough while spitting up a lot of river water and his half-digested lunch. Luke casually turned the coughing, retching boy onto his side as the boy continued puking up, from the stench of things, salami. Luke tried to remember what he was like when he was a kid. 

“Are you okay?” Luke asked as he wiped the boy’s chin with his spidery fingers and a leaf. A woozy grunting. Luke picked the boy up in one hand, tucking the still woozy thing in soggy clothes firmly under his long arm, and walked away from the river edge. 

“Hey, mister scarecrow man,” the boy said as Luke continued to carry him under a still damp, furry arm. “Uh, thanks a lot for saving me, but I can walk by myself.” 

“Nothing doing, kid,” Luke replied as he shifted the boy under his other arm. “The trouble I went through to get you, I should just take you home with me.” 

“Wait, what?” 

“It’s a joke, jeez.” Luke scraped at the hair still plastered against his forehead. “But seriously, the path I know back to Tears is a steep climb, and I don’t want you getting hurt again.” 

“Oh, I guess you’re right, then, mister scarecrow man.” 

“Call me ‘Luke,’ kid.” He picked up his pace as he scrambled up a mossy rock pile. “What’s your name, kid?” 

“Ravah.” 

“That’s a nice name.” The Tears’s roaring came back into his ear’s view.

“Yeah, he’s great.” 

Luke stopped at the end of the great log bridge he was scaling, threw back his shaggy, still wet head and howled into the forest. 

The two came to a vast thicket of blackberry bushes. Luke hoisted Ravah onto his shaggy shoulders, then continued onward through the thorny thicket. Five minutes through the brambles became ten minutes through the brambles, then half an hour. Ravah plucked a berry, spat the sun-rotted thing out, and then got handed a sprig of perfect berries by Luke. The boy handed a half-smushed berry back to his escort a thanks. 

The Tears visitor center came into full view. Luke hadn’t been to this wretched, log cabin hive of villainy and eyesore since the staff banned him from it for that incident with that not-so-tame raccoon over twenty years ago. He figured it would be safe, or at least okay to bring the boy inside, though. It would be safe to go inside, after all. There had to have been staff turnover, as those grizzled knotheads couldn’t last forever. 

“Hey, Mr. Luke Man,” Ravah asked again, bending over Luke’s head. “Whatcha sayin’?” 

“Oh, um, just a bird call.” 

As the two exited that bay of endless brambles, one of the staff, a burly forest ranger with long, gunmetal-colored hair done up in tightly wound buns, stepped out onto the center’s observation balcony. She turned towards the bramble field, her dark eyes narrowing in aggrieved hate as she spotted Luke. She cocked her tranquilizer rifle before unholstering her walkie-talkie. 

“Stalker, stalker, ten-nineteen, ten-twenty-four, stalker, this is Clyde: the booger-wooger is back, I repeat, the booger-wooger is back.” 

Clyde’s walkie-talkie squawked back to life in her gloved hand. 

“Clyde,” Rutherford responded. “Ten-twenty-two. Find out what booger-wooger wants, stall for time until we get back there, then shoot.” 

“Ten-four.” Ranger Clyde squinted harder. “The booger-wooger has the boy.” 

“Stay there, Clyde, don’t engage.” 

“Roger.” 

Luke walked up the steps of the visitor center, and upon reaching the threshold, lifted Ravah off his shaggy shoulders to deposit the boy on the floor. Ranger Clyde slowly, carefully approached the two, her rifle clenched securely in her large, gloved fists, her square jaw clenched with two decades worth of lovingly tempered wrath. Luke’s topaz eyes watered as he struggled to keep them from rolling back into his head. He forced a polite smile as he placed a spidery hand onto Ravah’s shoulder. 

“Well, well, well,” Clyde cawed. “Your sick reign of depravity here twenty-two years and seven months ago wasn’t enough for you, eh, booger wooger?” 

“Hello, Anita,” Luke sighed. 

“Hiya, Ms. Clyde!” Ravah piped. “Mr. Luke Man saved me from drowning!” 

“How nice!” Clyde cooed. “’Luke man is it, now? Too bad you neglected such heroic prestige with Rutherford twenty-two years ago.” 

“Whatever, Anita,” Luke sneered, ignoring the ranger’s seething. He bent down, putting his mouth close to Ravah’s ear. “If you’re ever in Smew’s Landing, stop by the Regal Seagull Café, and I’ll treat you to ice cream and a movie.” 

“Wow!” Ravah began to wiggle with excitement. “You live in a seagull and you’re made of magma?” 

Luke patted the boy on the head before jogging back towards the brambles. He wondered what went through his own parents’ minds when they realized he disappeared from their world and they weren’t going to find him. 

***

It was another summer Saturday morning in “Old Town” Smew’s Landing. That meant Old Main and Juniper Streets were taken over by the Saturday Farmer’s Market. And that meant almost every local farmer, gardener, mushroom picker, baker and anyone, everyone else in the western half of the county with even the pretense of artsy-fartsiness to set up a stall to hawk their overpriced wares to tourists and other ne’erdowells suffering from too much money in their pockets. And then there was Wendy Johnson, who, with her sidekick Deborah, and other minion-of-the-day Dean (lugging Wexler’s old Radio Flyer wagon), had to go down to the Smew’s Landing Farmer’s Market to pick up the twenty gallons of mugolio syrup from one Frau Tanne that Mrs. Terwilliger ordered. Wendy would have preferred to save time and money, and just make some date syrup with jujubes, but Mrs. Terwilliger insisted on authenticity for the ‘Seagull’s upcoming “March of Favor” week next week. 

Oh well. 

“Luke!” Dean shouted as he spotted Mrs. Terwilliger’s favorite busboy sitting at a ridiculous-looking makeshift booth made of cardboard and fruit crates, apparently selling little paper lunch bags filled with blackberries. “What did you do with my dungarees again?” 

The off-duty busboy in overalls scowled as he folded his long, willowy, auburn-furred arms across his puffier than normal chest. 

“You’re wearing your dungarees now, Dean,” Luke retorted. Dean scowled back while Wendy gigglesnorted. “You’re always wearing dungarees. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you don’t wear dungarees, you grow dungarees. And if you’re always so worried about your precious deangarees, why do you keep washing them in the employee washing machine?” 

“Ha! ‘Deangarees,’ I love it!” Wendy cackled. Dean’s wrathful countenance softened while Deborah’s wrinkled, deadpan face remained unchanged. 

“Well, I, uh, nevermind…” Dean stammered. Luke snorted again and closed his topaz eyes. 

“So, since you’re done playing around, can y’guys stand to the side so you don’t scare my customers away?” 

“Customers?” Wendy asked in between giggles. Deborah finished the last of her duckburger, then scrubbed her lips clean of sauce with the back of her wrinkly wrist. “How’s business coming, Mr. Knott’s?” 

Luke scrunched his face into an uncharacteristic pout. 

“I’ll have you know I’ve racked up two hundred and fifty-seven dollars, and ninety-seven cents today.” 

“Really?” Wendy asked, her sunny face all aglow with astonishment. Luke’s pout scrunched poutier as he pulled his long legs up in a vain attempt to retract himself into an oblong ball. 

“Ten dollars and a button,” Luke begrudgingly confessed. Wendy burst into a firestorm of guffawing that was snuffed out as she choked on a chunk of her duckburger, spraying her flunkies and Luke in their faces with a mist of duck flavored slobber and spicy quince barbeque sauce. 

“Why don’t you just come back to the Café and get some extra tips?” Deborah asked while Dean whacked the gagging Wendy on her back. “Besides, what do you need all that cash for?” 

“Excellent questions, Deb,” Luke sardonically enthused before thumping his heel onto the counter of his makeshift berry stand to show off a big, red and brown-furred, paddle-shaped hind paw. “I can’t go back to the Café at this moment because I have no more shoes, and I got mugged.” He wiggled his odd, elongated, hairy toes. “I mean, I could go back, but being barefoot in a licensed eating establishment is a health code violation, and the health inspector already has it out for me.” 

“Don’t say that, Luke, honey,” Deborah consoled, her craggy face crinkling in sympathy. Dean shook his head just as he finished the last whack on Wendy’s back. Luke put his hind paw back onto the pavement. 

“He’s not exaggerating,” Dean corrected. Wendy coughed again for good measure. 

“We’ve been to that office,” Wendy added. “The nutjob’s got Luke’s photo on a dartboard.” Then Wendy elbowed Dean, who started putting Luke’s berry bags into the red wagon. “Anyhow, Lukey, you should’ve told us you were having hard luck,” she continued as she counted twenty, wrinkled portraits of Abraham Lincoln onto the cardboard counter of Luke’s pretend stand. “Come with us to Frau Tanne’s booth, and then we’ll all go with you to Judi’s Boutique for some shoe shopping.” 

“The largest men’s shoes Judi’s sells is size twelve,” Luke stated. “And as you’ve just seen, I’m a not-petite size.” He shuffled the money into his overalls’ bib pocket. “Thanks for the sale, Wendy.” 

Deborah helped put the last of the berry bags into the wagon. Dean smirked. 

“Have you, ahem, tried shopping at Ha Ha Hut Clown Supplies in Eukaia?” Dean finally sniggered. Luke stood up and put his stool into the wagon. 

“I’ve been there,” Luke replied. “I also found out the hard way that authentic clown shoes aren’t designed to be worn on big feet.” 

Wendy choked again as she tried to leak a laugh. As Deborah finished her turn at whacking Wendy’s airway clear again, Wendy fished out another salal berry muffin and placed it into Luke’s spidery hands. The off-duty busboy popped the entire thing into his mouth, wrapper and all, and then took a look at the mugolio syrup invoice. Once he realized they were looking for the creepy pinecone vendor lady, he swallowed his masticated muffin, wrapper and all, before leading his coworkers to the Swiss chalet-looking booth on Old Main that was manned by the creepy Austrian supermodel-looking people in lederhosen. 

The original plan the power trio conceived was to use Wexler’s old red wagon to haul the twenty gallons of mugolio syrup back to Dean’s car. Reality busted that plan as the glass bottles were simply too heavy for the wagon to carry. Not that that mattered, as Luke was on hand to carry fifteen of the twenty gallons to Dean’s car. Wendy was so pleased by this that she bought Luke another dozen muffins and a duckburger. 

In the ten minutes from the farmer’s market back to the Café, Luke disappeared his duckburger together with all those of his muffins he didn’t share with Deborah and Dean. And as Wendy and Deborah helped Rory sort Tanne’s syrup and Luke’s latest batch of berries away into the Café’s larders, Luke summoned Dean to his front passenger seat, and the two drove off to Eukaia on Wendy’s orders (and, apparently, Mrs. Terwilliger’s blessings). 

Luke lit up like a pecan Christmas tree over Dean explaining they were headed to Cost-Fewer Shoes. The drive to and through Eukaia was the fastest half hour he had ever seen. What would have been a tedious four hour and forty-five-minute slog on two different buses went by like lightning as the two coworkers bobbed their heads in time to the rock music. 

“What?” Luke shouted. He got out of Dean’s stopped car. Dean just looked on, genuinely stunned by the spectacle of Luke actually expressing actual, genuine anger.

Luke walked towards the empty storefront that used to be Cost-Fewer Shoe Store. The faded, broken electric sign overhead suggested that the shoe store had already died and was replaced by “Allspice Valley Gifts” before becoming Ozymandias’ glass tomb. Luke raised a hairy, spidery hand, a hairy, spidery paw, and slowly clenched it into a hairy fist. Dean clapped both his meaty hands over that hairy fist, struggling and yanking on it to keep Luke from putting it clear through that dusty, flaking for rent sign stuck to the dusty windowpane. 

“Easy there skinny fella,” Dean urged. Luke inhaled, his puffy chest puffing out just a little more. “Don’t need to get your panties bunched.” 

“What do we, what do I do now?” Luke asked, now a little unsure what to do with his raised fist. 

“We’ll go over to Bargain Club, they have everything there,” Dean promised as he tugged on his killer coworker’s hairy wrist. “And even if they don’t, I’ll order it for you on the internet.” 

“Internet…” 

The trip to the Eukaia Bargain Club was somber; Luke’s angry disappointment over the whole Cost-Fewer disappearing debacle polluting Dean’s car insides worse than Luke’s more usual, more typical stenches. If it hadn’t been for Dean putting the rock music on a seventeen-minute loop, he might as well have been chauffeuring a hearse to a funeral. And then they arrived. 

“This is it?” Luke asked as he gawked at the sprawling building housing. Dean locked his car with his key fob and darted off to get a shopping cart. 

“What’d you expect? Shangri La?” Dean sarcastically asked as he flashed his membership card at the clerk at the front entrance. “It’s just Bargain Club.” 

“I mean, I grew up with department stores,” Luke said as he passed by a ten-foot stack of vitamin E jars. Dean stared quizzically at Luke. “It’s just that, this place seems so crass.” 

“How old are you?” 

Dean continued staring even as he loaded a couple cases of biscotti into the cart. “The last Seers store in Oregon closed down thirty years ago, when my mother was in high school. And who uses ‘crass’ anymore?” 

“I… didn’t grow up in Oregon,” Luke half-lied. “And stop talking like Wexler.” 

“Eh, why don’t you stock up? I know you live off the grid, so get some supplies, and we can charge it to the Café’s account.” Luke took hold of a five-pound bag of circus peanuts. “Besides, Seers may have been great, but can they compare to the Eighth Wonder of The World like this?” Dean motioned eagerly at a fifteen-foot-tall pyramid of gallon mayonnaise jars, flashing his patented toothy grin. “But seriously, help me load what we can into the cart; Mrs. Terwilliger’s ‘March of Flavors’ is coming back, and we have a ton of aioli to fake.” 

Thirty-two, then fifty-two-gallon jars went into Dean’s cart, then another cart Luke got, then sixty-something pounds of assorted fancy schmancy cheeses, then a baker’s dozen bottles of local truffle sauces, and then the two stopped in Bargain Club’s footwear section. 

Luke picked up a left sneaker and fondled it longingly. A tear easily slipped out of the corner of Luke’s saddened topaz eye as Dean pointed out a men’s size eight. Luke then tossed the shoe over his shoulder, almost beaning some oblivious flannel-clad schmuck as he pounced on something else, instead. 

“Ooo, this is good!” Luke purred as he slid one furry hind paw, followed by another, into a pair of ugly, blocky, mocha-tan, fur-trimmed hiking boots. “Really good.” 

Dean peered closely at the box’s label. 

“They’re size eleven, though,” he said. “And you’re a size nine.” 

Luke dropped five more boxes into his cart. Dean snorted as they pushed their carts deeper towards the cavernous heart of Bargain club.

***

Dean being Dean, he parked his car near the employee entrance of the Regal Seagull Café to make unloading their freshly acquired supplies easier and more discreet, in stark contrast to Deborah’s gung-ho hilarity of going through the front entrance. A dozen staff came from the employee lounge to meet Dean and Luke at the employee entrance, taking all of the stuff, aside from Dean’s share of his dungarees, into the restaurant to be sorted away, with all of Luke’s goodies packed neatly into a big box for him. 

Luke picked up his box but then set it back down near the employee entrance when he heard a chorus of loud laughter wafting in from the main dining room. He hadn’t heard yucks that outrageous since the Cafe’s talent show last month when Boonkha got hypnotized into impersonating Caleb. In the main dining room, the party of twelve at the Masdevallia Table were apparently having a grand time watching and laughing at Wexler struggling to prepare an order of Bananas Foster without setting the entire restaurant on fire again. But just when Wexler was about to spill another blazing skillet, a familiar, spidery, auburn and mahogany paw clasped her rubber gloved hand, steadying it and her trembling skillet. 

“Easy, easy, Dudeling,” Luke calmly urged. “Don’t need to flip or shake, not pancakes, not a wok.” 

“Right,” Wexler affirmed, sighing out her pent-up anxiety. “Thank God and Goddess you’re here,” she then said. Luke straightened the guava pink half of her bangs, then made a smug salute. 

“Okay, patrons and matrons, that's our show for tonight!” Luke boomed, eliciting applause from both the Masdevallia Table and the party of seven at the Impatiens Table to the right. “And remember to tip your arsonist, folks!” 

As the laughter lingered, Wexler hooked her hand around Luke’s woolly arm. 

“Wait, you’re leaving?” she anxiously whispered. Luke slipped free of his coworker’s concerned, fearful grasp. 

“Not my shift tonight, kid.” He winked, flashed a pearly toothed smile, and let his already puffy chest puff out enough to almost let Ganderville take flight. “I’ll be back for the March of Flavor, though.” 

“You’d better,” Wexler grumbled. “I am not mixing all that fake aioli all by myself.” 

Luke laughed all the way back to the now empty employee lounge, stopping at his big goody box. He husked himself of his lucky Ganderville tee shirt, kicked off his new books, piled his shed clothing on top of his box, and carried it out the door in a brisk trot. 

His brisk trot lasted well beyond the town limit, through the forest, and up to that grim little patch of salal he normally avoided. Luke set his box back down, and finally sloughed off his overalls, kicking them away with his swollen hindlegs. Then he coughed, retched, and groaned orgasmically as his hackled back humped mountainously. Luke straightened up as his already enlarged chest thrust painfully further again. He looked ahead to glower at the pair of flannel shorts-wearing hikers gawking at him in the dimming, evening gloaming. 

“Hey! Bloody lookiloos!” Luke angrily hollered. “Haven’t you ever seen a guy put on his animatronic bigfoot suit before?” The two hikers shared a puzzled, muttering glance, shrugged, and continued on their befuddled way in order to leave that grouchy bigfoot wannabe in peace. Luke rolled his head as his neck crackled and bloated while his increasingly shaggy shoulders continued widening further. “I hate tourists!” He stroked his chest fur to compose himself. Now a little less frazzled, he gathered up his shed overalls and box, and resumed his own journey. 

Back home, the now-ten-foot-tall Luke tucked his box of treasures into a corner of his precious shed, next to his last emergency packet of clothes, and a five-year-old bag of rainbow-colored marshmallows. That done, he shut the shed’s doors. As he hefted the big log he used as a lock in his swelling paws, he chuckled, no, belched up a trickle of mucus. That creamy vileness formed a string from his smirking lips, and sizzled as it touched his faithful log. 

Was this wish worth this? 

Luke felt himself continuing growing bigger, stronger, even though his second pair of arms were still not yet ready to sprout. 

Is it worth being a strongman with no circus? A fireman with no brigade? To only be human some of the time?

Luke lifted one mighty arm high, flexing it as though he were a woolly bodied Mr. Universe. He flexed the other, and twirled his log in his paws, twirled it around his monstrous, now-maned neck, then found himself pitching his faithful log into the distance. Luke grinned as his second pair of lymph drenched arms finally began to fight their way out of the flesh of his meaty pecs. 

Of course it’s worth this, this power. Luke was strong, he was powerful, he had friends, he could make new friends. In fact, he had a job now and he figured he was going to live forever. Maybe one day, he’d even get the courage to tell someone what he really was. 

Luke stopped his daydreaming and his flexing to lope away on all six as an auburn, apish yet insectile bear to fetch his faithful log, hastily praying along the way that he hadn’t heaved that blasted thing into yet another campsite or, God forbid, another cabin again.

this work was featured in issue #14