Silver and Salt(15)

It made him almost invisible, halfway there and halfway not. That was his talent, a snake in the grass, one you didn’t see until its fangs were hooked into your flesh. Camouflaged, waiting for a bite of fresh meat, and that meat could be you. The city was his grass and he was the hide-and-seek serpent. He was the poison that hardly anyone would see coming. I saw him, though. He was special, in a venomous way, but I was special, too.

Special enough that “almost invisible” didn’t cut it with me.

Mr. Bailey, who worked mopping the floors at school said “almost” only counted in horseshoes and hand grenades. He’d been in the war, he’d said. I didn’t know which one; there were lots of wars. He said, too, he’d grown up on a farm in Kentucky for a while, dodging kicks while mucking out stalls. Mucking meant shoveling horseshit, he’d whispered to me gleefully. Mr. Bailey had killed people in a war, he was pretty gleeful about that as well, and he’d seen lots of horseshoes flying at him. Mr. Bailey was batshit crazy, but he knew when “almost” counted.

It didn’t count here.

I wasn’t a snake in the grass like this guy, but being different in my own way helped me see him. I watched, always, the kind of watching hardly anyone else did or could do. I’d been taught since I was five to see what waited in the alleys and the shadows and the dark. I knew about the things that hid there, and because I did watch for them, I saw him, too. Not like what I usually watched for, but bad all the same.

I kept watching as he talked to a little girl. Sitting on two of those concrete blocks stacked high and swinging her legs, she was seven or eight with dirty toes and pink nail polish, wearing yellow sandals and a shirt covered with daisies. She was talking fast and happy to the guy crouched in front of her. He smiled and laughed with her, before handing her a tiny stuffed purple pony. It wasn’t even new. It had thrift store matting in its fake fur, but her face lit up as if it were a real live Shetland pony, ribbons in its mane and solid gold saddle. As she grabbed it with both hands, he stood, tugging lightly at her orange ponytail. Girls would call it strawberry blond, but it was orange as the fake juice they served in the school cafeteria. Waving at her, the man gave her one more happy smile and walked to the sidewalk and away. I watched him go with tight lips. I knew what he was and it wasn’t her father, uncle, nothing like that.

He was a monster.

I knew, because I knew monsters. My mother, my brother, and me—no one but us knew what crawled the surface of the world. Grendels, the real monsters that existed outside of a horror movie. The kind that hide in the dark, press their moon-pale bodies on your roof to scratch the cheap tiles with long curved black claws and let you hear their gargled glass laughter, knowing, knowing you’re hiding under your blankets, your pajama pants soaked with your piss. The kind of monsters with red eyes that flared through a slippery fall of white hair, and hungry grins filled with thousands of metal needles. I knew these monsters as they followed me my whole life. I knew them thanks to my mother having f*cked one for money, as she didn’t mind telling me over and over and over…she didn’t shut up. Never shut up.

Anyway, I was the result—half monster, no matter how human I looked.

They were why I watched, the Grendels.

But I also knew there were different monsters, ones that are all human, that weren’t made by an albino thing with talons, demon eyes, and a blood-smeared mouth wide enough to swallow you whole. They were people, these lesser monsters, whose parents were both human and normal and might’ve been nice people who had no idea what they’d raised. Or they might not. They might be responsible for what he was. In that way, he—the man no one else but me bothered to see—could be like me. Monsters can be made, same as I had been. Or he might not be like me. Some monsters, the human ones, are born that way for no reason.

It had made me think. I was both: made and born.

Planned.

Observed like a rat in an experiment since birth.

Fourteen years and I still didn’t know why.

When I finally found out, I’d probably wish I’d never learned the reason, the why.

But while I didn’t know enough about my monsters to do anything but keep an eye on them, all of them, and there were plenty in the dark and murky places, I thought I could do something about this. This little girl, she had only one monster. I could help her with just one, and a human one on top of that, not half as hard. I wished mine were like hers. Mine made you believe in hell even if you didn’t believe in God.

I started towards her as she played with her pony. Who let little girls alone in this neighborhood of brassy sky, shitty stench, speeding cars, and bums begging for change behind the liquor store, anyway? Someone who didn’t care or someone who cared too much, had too much faith in the world. The shorter version? An * or someone stupid. Sighing, I lugged my backpack over to the girl.

If only I hadn’t seen the monster, I’d be halfway home by now and screw responsibility.

But I had.

“Hey.” I put my backpack down on the ground in front of her and sat on it. “My name’s Caliban. What’s your name?”

She giggled and petted the pony. “Melanie, but my mee-maw calls me Mels.” She tilted her head sideways as she looked at me. Lots of little girls did that—the head thing. I had no idea why and less curiosity. “Caliban is a weird name. Are you lying? Did you make it up?”