Hidden in the heart of everyone
scratching behind their sternums
is a large horned beast
dying to pry you apart,
inside from the out.
He is bigger than yourself
yet his form is immeasurable,
so we speak little of his enormity.
His horns twist into spires
as stiff as stone.
He consumes you.
The rumble of his voice crescendos
from the garden of your soul:
You are now mine.
You are not your own.
You are me.
No. You cannot chain up the impulses,
the ones that wish to tear your body to two.
I’ll usher you to your lawlessness.
Watch. Your eyes see your heartbreaker.
It is neither me nor your neighbor.
It is the Anima,
the one plastered in your mind,
singing false songs of love and
infatuating you with vanity.
Do you see . . . ? Do you see . . . ?

Once long ago lived a merchant
with three daughters, one darling dear.
A particular night lost from home brought him inside
a castle to be greeted with a table set for none but him.
Robbed from a failed business venture, on his way out
he bent forth and plucked a rose from a bush
with intentions of gifting his darling daughter.
Pity, a wasted rose, plucked to have no recipient.
Immaculate with a fractal of petals.
Pity the foolish father,
trapped by his host for the temptation of a rose.

She went,
certainly, to replace her father as captive.
The beast passed the opened door.
He was unsightly enough to damn.
Who are you, beast? she called.
In a contained growl, the Animus answered:
I am your master.
I have been to the Seine and back
but none have called me their own.
Never am I public.
If one is taken to my abode,
all of France knows by noon
and none will take me as theirs instead.
I’m too monstrous to measure against a meter.
Beside the sun, I consume the sky.
I will consume you,
but you’ll not be consumed by me.
Cease this talk of consumption,
she screamed. Can you accommodate
at least my wishes whilst I stay?
Quite, of course, he said, noting her charm.
Anything for you.
Henceforth he gave her the world within
the walls of the castle.
The armoire was stuffed to its capacity,
ruptured internally with gowns;
it was the least he could do.
She was waited upon by a score of servants
who were as visible as air itself,
and life became good.

Images of a peculiar prince began to plague
her dreams and pique her curiosity.
Every night she crept about in search
of this mysterious Anima.
Every night over dinner she would lie
over what she had been doing that evening.
The beast, pleased, would ask her hand in marriage.
She graciously declined and carried on conversation.
Might I be free? she asked.
No, it’s not part of the deal.
So vicious and not of understanding, she spat.
His ugliness seared under the chandelier.
And so.
She became consumed by this masculine sylph.
Not knowing his name,
she searched, and she searched,
and she searched.

Dinner came one evening.
The usual banter.
Again he asked her hand in marriage.
Again she graciously declined.
Again she sobbed for freedom.
Again he roared in protest.
Pleading wore the Animus down,
so he gave her a ring and a mirror
and sent her on her way.
Her father was delighted and her sisters were shocked
to see her back for the week the beast allotted her.
Stricken with happiness, she decided never
to return to the beast’s abode.
But in the mirror
she saw the Animus laid lifeless
on the misty ground of the garden
Her heart skipped.
The time had come.
She turned the ring thrice round her finger
and she was transported to the beast’s garden.
Having nothing but guilt to offer,
she bent over the altar of his body and wept:
I love you, I love you,
I love you.

The tears tore him to two,
breaking the vicious spell. On the
the left a flawless prince,
the right still damned.
Again he asked her hand in marriage.
She then graciously accepted him as her own,
seeing themselves for who they both were:
one part her captive,
one part his captor,
one part his Anima,
one part her Animus.

I knew my goal was sadistic, but I’m a killer inside; what am I supposed to do?

The second my foot hit the spit-stale carpets of the band room, the smell of dull oil and dry chalk plagued my nostrils. I looked about the sea of young faces, and realized that I knew only a tiny fraction of them. I made a small pact with myself to resolve the problem: I would make friends with all of them, so when I graduated at the end of the school year, people would miss me.

Darren left the same hole in my heart two years ago, so why couldn’t I do it, too? Maybe it’s because he didn’t try to be missed when he left.



I knew saying it out loud would be awkward for everyone involved, but I said it anyway: “You’re exactly like Darren.”

It just kind of spilled right out of my mouth, and I couldn’t believe I said it. He gave me a quizzical look, as he was new to the school and had never met Darren. It was unique, because the similarities were striking—hair color, tone of voice, demeanor, and laugh, all the same between the two. I never thought that I could replace Darren again. Since he graduated, I had used his identical brother as a replacement, and after he graduated as well, I had just resolved to get over Darren. He was the kind of friend that was irreplaceable.

Then Dakota ambled into the stale band room, and it clicked. He was quiet with a soft-spoken voice. He stood taller than Darren, but was still narrow-waisted and athletic. What was most interesting was his thin black hair that laid flat on his head, and left narrow integral-shaped waves of scalp visible. He stood right next to me, so I was free to stare at all times. I’m fairly sure that he hadn’t noticed me studying his appearance, but even if he had, his passive mannerisms couldn’t possibly allow him to confront me about it.



We went to a football game. American people go to football games at least once in their lives, even if against their will.

He knew about football just as much as Darren, and Darren knew about football just as much as me. I knew pretty much nothing about it, so we were in good company together. The wind cut across our faces and we planted our feet on our music stands to keep them from toppling over like they did at the beginning of the game. We casually complained every so often about bad sheet music photocopies and the weather that sent chills to our fingers and flung our trumpets way out of tune.

I always wondered what a brass player’s chapped kiss felt like.

When the game ended, my friend squinted her eyes at the sight of him passing. “You look exactly like Darren!”

“Who is this Darren guy that people keep saying I’m like?”

I smiled and remembered him.



I walked home with him. I could have hitched a ride to my meeting, but it was inconvenient for all parties involved.

I stood around the outside of the school, talking to my old neighbor, Nathan, wondering what he was doing all alone outside. He said his mom would be there shortly, and we spun up some obligatory small talk. I didn’t want to be at the train depot any earlier for my event any earlier than I had to be. Dakota walked out of the building and unlocked his bike from the rack, quietly engaging himself in our conversation. I mentioned that I should leave, and turned to walk down the sidewalk to town. Dakota followed right next to me, walking his bike.

He asked me about who I was talking to, and I explained that it was my old neighbor, then asked him about his bike, and he told me that it was new. I laughed. “It’s October. You don’t have much mileage left on it for the rest of the year.”

“Yeah, I’ll put studs on it.”

I shook my head, laughing to myself. You couldn’t pay me to bike up the snowy hill to our school at 6:15 in the morning.



We talked about all the unimportant things: annual jazz gigs at the Mormon church, the pride of small-town citizens over their Nativity sets, how inbred my witless dog is.

School.

I’d always been rather satisfied in my academic achievements and status, no matter how slacker-stricken my schedule was this year. I’d done the tough stuff earlier and dropped it for a smooth sailing out of here. He chattered about his advanced courses, the work load, et cetera. I knew exactly what he was on about. I’d done it all last year, but it seemed so real, so now, with him talking about it. Yet I knew I was a screwup for not going on with the college-level courses, and he only emphasized it with his willingness to work—

His hair. Look at the integrals. Mathematicians, bow down; he’s three years advanced.

I shoved that thought into the landfill of my mind.



They put new buttons on the stoplights this year. The little white guy blinked across the street, and we followed him. He explained the finger-traps that were crosswalks that he had dealt with back home in Grand Junction. I always wondered what it would be like the live in the states all your life, then get ripped up in forty-eight hours and dumped off into the abyssal hole that is Alaska.



“Earlier this week I fell right into one of these,” he laughed, stepping on the cement borders of square-meter sized cutouts in the ground designed for the ground-level apartment windows to get light in.

“How embarrassing. I bet your neighbors loved that one.”

He shrugged, his shoulders far above my own, now elevated on the borders of the cubic cement craters. “I don’t think they were home.”

“You think.”

“—Hey, mom.”

My head whipped away from him and in front of me. A man, a woman, and their dog stood in front of the entrance to the apartment on their way out. She was beautiful. Her hair was a voluminous cloud of wavy black locks. The man was immensely tall, a skyscraper of sorts, piquing my fascination. He had a short crop of grey hair atop his head. There was something about these people—all of them—and attracting my inability to stop staring. I hated it, but I savored the sights.



He introduced me to them. In hindsight, I should have shook hands with them, rather than wiggling my awkward spindly fingers at them. I stood along the perimeter of their talk: “How was school? Anything interesting happen?” I smiled and interacted with their squat Australian shepherd in the meantime. She was darling, unlike my near-disabled dog.

I stood up straight and faced them all. “I’m sorry, but I have to get to the depot. I’m doing a community event there this evening and have to set up for it.”

His parents smiled and waved, like porcelain dolls in front of a dream house. I smiled once more. “It was nice to meet you.” I looked down the street and back at him and said goodbye. “Bye, dog!”

And the dog, even. She wagged her tail and just about said bye, too.

She was darling.



I felt empty on the way to the train station. I didn’t even want to go there in the first place.

It was two blocks down from his apartment, but it seemed like eternity to get there. I ran the things we talked about over and over and over and over again in mind, and once more, just to be sure. I could have sat down on the curb right there to have passing cars run straight over my curled toes as a reality check. Two questions plagued me: Did you really just do that? and Did you really think you could relate closely to him?

I hate football. I punted a parking lot rock across the pavement anyway.

Why had I given up my advanced classes? I felt like an idiot next to him. He was the only person I knew that could sufficiently make me feel that much lower without even doing anything. I wondered if his parents had continued their walk together with their dog towards the depot or the farm. I hoped they took the farm route; they wouldn’t have to see me that way. I wanted to look behind me, just to check, but I had a dyslexic moment with reading some sort of twoing warning sign in the Peking lot and dumped the idea.

I kill myself sometimes.



There wasn’t much to be done by the time I got there, however late I was. It left me to my own devices and the distraction of my thoughts.



Five and a half hours and a manic origami-folding session later I was free. My fingers ached.

I discarded my body into the passenger seat of the truck in the darkness. My mom turned her head. “So I heard you walked home with a boy today. And you lied when you said you’d find a ride here.”

Oh, Darren, you never got me in these sorts of conversations.

“I didn’t lie. Was it Karen who told you? We walked by her Tahoe on the way to town.”

“No, Nathan’s mom told me.”

“Oh, yeah, Dakota and I talked to him on the way out. . Anyway, my plans got squished when Julie got sick, and Kaitlin’s on her provisional license. It wasn’t far, so I just walked.”

“Oh, I see.”

My head lulled to the side like a dead man’s. “He’s just a friend, anyway.”

My dog paced about in the back of the truck and sneezed, huffing out a lung in short, asthmatic breaths.



Even his bloody dog was darling.