HOLY SHIT.
Okay, how can I put this into words? How do I describe last night?
I was laying here, falling asleep and staring at the unicorn. Thinking about the music I’d hear in my dreams and the night I dug it out of the dirt, near the trees.
I heard a loud… I don’t know… scratching sound, and the room got very, very dark. Like I was underwater, like my whole room was sinking in a submarine, diving into some dark abyss. My ears plugged up and the air got hot… and then, a minute later, my ears popped and I could sort of see again. Everything was fine. Normal. Except when I looked around my room, I saw him.
I turned on the lamp by my bed, ready to scream.
He stood by the window, and he was big. Massive. He was, I don’t know, seven feet tall or something. Hairy and wearing weird clothes, sort of like a robe but it only covered his middle, not his arms or head or feet. But they weren’t feet. They were hooves, like on a horse, or a goat... but way bigger. Hard and nasty-looking.
This giant man with horse feet... was just standing there, staring at me like a big creepy shadow. But here’s the thing—he wasn’t creepy, or scary, not at all.
He was nice.
I liked him right away, even though I was obviously startled at first.
At least it wasn’t Father.
So he stood there, watching me, and I didn’t move because I was too freaked out, and then he smiled, and he had big white teeth, and he said…
“HELLO, PRINCESS.”
She didn’t respond, didn’t know what to say. The beast of a man had just appeared out of the shadows, standing between her bed and the window. In her fright and surprise, Esther looked first to the bedroom door, as if expecting to see it open, Father standing there, arms folded, watching and smiling.
But the door was closed. The house quiet.
“Hi…” she managed.
The man laughed. A big, deep, wide-open laugh that she was sure Father would hear.
“Ssshhh!” she said, sitting up urgently, stealing another look to the door.
The man covered his mouth, dark eyes wide, as if sorry. Or amused. He took the hand away, crouched so he could be more level with Esther.
“Pardons, my dearest. Don’t want to wake your dad, do we? No, not that.”
Esther shook her head, and the man pounded one hoof against the floor reflexively. He stepped closer to her bed, out from the shadows.
He had long, bushy black hair. His face was stretched and narrow, but strong-boned. His mouth protruded, the giant teeth pushing against fat lips. His eyes were smooth black stone that glinted like diamond when they caught a stray sliver of light. His hooves were tapered black pots, scarred by use. His draped woolen robe couldn’t conceal the geometric shapes of his protruding, spherical belly, his massive square chest. His naked arms were thick as trees and roped with taut muscle. His hands were twice the length of a normal man’s, and they curled in on themselves like eagle talons, the dark nails of each finger honed to a point. She knew they weren’t hands but claws, each one big enough to wrap easily around her head, powerful enough to squeeze until the skull snapped.
She could feel the heat of him. Wispy black smoke drifted off his skin.
And yet, she liked him. Liked him immediately, and was not afraid. She studied him, overtly sly. A look she had perfected with her mother, one that always got a laugh.
“What’s your name?”
“Whatever you wish it to be,” he said, his voice rumbling, head dipped in a bow. “I have many, but care for none of them.”
He said this in such a manner as to make Esther giggle and smack her palm to her forehead in the slapstick fashion of television sitcoms. “Oh gosh. You are frustrating!”
He bowed more deeply, and she laughed again. “A name, if you please. For I will soon vanish without one.”
She thought about it, searched her mind for things that made her laugh, or smile, that made her think of the way things used to be. “Hobbes!” she commanded, pointing a finger at his black eyes for emphasis.
He nodded, as if not unexpected, and took a small step back into shadow. “May I stay, princess? I’ll sit on the floor over here, like a good dog, and you and I can speak to one another, speak of things that we could not say to anyone else in the world. Would you like that?”
She nodded, smiling.
“Wonderful,” he said, eyes sparkling, chunky white teeth a slice in the dark. “Where shall we begin?”
She shrugged, said nothing. He pretended to ponder the issue, then gasped and lifted one long, needle-tipped finger, his face brightening as if struck with a most brilliant thought.
“Tell me, princess,” he said, and she heard the murmuring intrada of violins whisper from beneath her bed. “What does thee know of Hell?”
THEY WERE IN the kitchen, argument full steam.
He arrived home late and drunk and there was no food in the house. While he was away, she’d made herself a dinner of shredded wheat without milk, tried to lose herself in whatever was on television so she wouldn’t have to think about how sad she’d become. There was a great, constant weight on her shoulders, a tiredness she was not mature enough to identify as the early stages of deep, clinical depression. It wrapped around her, a cursed hauberk that sucked the joy from her, bogged down her spirit.
When he finally came through the door, Esther was seated at the kitchen table, finishing a family mural assignment that was to be a combination of pictures, drawings and text on a sheet of yellow poster board given to the students by Mrs. Holmes, her sixth-grade teacher. She’d been gluing a picture of her and her mother taken one day in their backyard, Esther sitting in a small red wagon, arms around her kneeling mother’s neck, both smiling. Beneath the photo she’d written a paragraph about how much she missed her mother, and what her favorite things about her were. The funny voices she used when telling me a story at bedtime. How she would comb my hair with her favorite brush, made from silver. When we went shopping on my birthday and I could try on whatever I wanted. Her smile.
