Penthouse

The treetops were ridden with delight and life: as though the gnome's dragon tattoo had tore itself from her back and now somersaulted with a thousand tiny flames forming and caressing a path of shining scales at his sides. A multitude of creatures: burning impressions, all joyously gliding on the grounds flipped and twirled and wordlessly screamed. When a fiery basset hound howled in the moonlight, it seemed the others would join in his lasting spark and chaos. But as though his somber look and broken cry was a call to extinguish the molten demons to earth, the nimble dragon dissolved in a puff of smoke, and like a ghost, settled to the floor to sleep as a quieting black shadow. The others followed, a chimera's yellow eyes flashing to me before they all broke to the ground and were gone.

My fingers curled along the rubbery leaves of a palm and brushed against tree bark that lingered on my fingertips like crumbs from a stick of charcoal. I brushed the dirt from my hand with a rising lip and walked into the shadowed clearing. The air was acrid and volcanic, a pungent smell of burning caramel settling down in the sticky humidity. I slipped off my shrug and folded it upon a boulder, watching the night beyond the shaggy brush I neared.

A beam of white served as a spotlight on a pile of dampened kindle. There was a pitched cotton tent, distant, but there still, with green flaps and deep brailing loops and pegs and moving lit silhouettes near the cloth.

The humans’ motions—one tubby and short, the other with two black braids by her long ears—became exceedingly fast, exaggerating and painfully dramatic. I took a fistful of the tent flap and flicked a zipper aside with my toe, drawing it down to confront the pair when we were left in utter darkness. In the glimpse I had caught, the pigtailed one mimed, face caught off guard and terribly distraught while the other waddled and calmly huffed in front of the flame. Their faces were pressed like a stamp, a haunted carving in my mind, but only within those frank borders, because in that same second, they, with their smoking candle wicks and pasty horrified faces and pitched tent were gone.

“You should stay here until the Anniversary of the Moor,” a familiar man with a nerdy-voice spoke by the kindle, “Giannella and Adalee dress as gypsies in memory of their mother. They’re quite beautiful things to look at, but are not very good story tellers,” he tipped a reddish brown newsboy cap and nervously laughed, “I’m afraid that job has to be left to another. We could find one tomorrow if you’d like that day to be any fun.”

“Would I be spending it with you, Lysander?” I asked coolly, pacing back towards the boulder and my shrug. Like a doping dog, he followed in my trail and when I stopped short, stumbled a bit.

“M-May I, Ma’am?” His blue eyes were keen on my jacket. I held it tightly at my side, and he, unsure, had his arm reeling in and out like a fishing line, hand gripping tightly at air while my hip swung as I pivoted inches away.

“Ma’am?” My laugh rumbled with my stomach, “Oh, I do believe that is an improvement.”

“Well, you never told me your name,” he justified, helping the collar fold at my neck, hand hovering at my back.

“I didn’t want you to think we were on a name to name basis,” I smiled through a bit lip, “No, Lysander,” the words were endearing and velvety as I clutched his hand and moved it around to my heart, “I want us to be more than that.”

I stared down after a moment and slowly let go of his shaking fingers so he independently felt the muscle pumping beyond my laced corset and jacket. It was a solid, steady beat like that of a bass drum.

There was a sweet seductiveness that simply flooded my every pore when I was with these new characters: the instinctual change—terrifying at concept, but static and electric at feel—that allowed me to breathe out an old personality as though this history was evidence of my flaws, of burrowed scars. The old belonged in a waste bin, sealed tight and locked away so I could properly breathe in this new persona.

I hardly noticed the absence of his trembling hand: when it had steadied or when it left my skin, as my bound chest was stricken with a layer of heat that only radicalized in the chimes of night life and in the sense that I was no longer leaning on anyone. It had seemed I had him playing in the palm of my hand as well.

“If—if you want to get anywhere with me,” his voice altered, “Ma’am, my mother thinks it’s impertinent for you to meet.”

“Where would we be going?” I asked, “You know all so much about this place and I seem to be the only one who can’t just poof off to where I want to be.”

“Where would you like to be, Ma’am?”

“Where can you take me?” The light breeze vacated as his eyelashes fluttered like Bambi's or whoever the rabbit was on the screen. Smiling to myself and hearing his ever-present asides ("Oh, wow! Just.. just wow!") I led the way, walking the walk.