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A beast came to the city that spring and spread its wings wide, shadowing us all, its every breath altering the barometric pressure and wilting natural curls and colored crests of hair alike. Its jaundiced eyelights glinted in the bus windows late in the afternoon and more than once you must have felt its claws at your back, gentle, reminding you it was still there and merely waiting for an opportune moment, melancholy, strange, when your already-precarious equilibrium would waver.

There is not a soul born in our generation and come of age in our city who did not perceive the beast or feel its hunger somehow. You can tell how old a person is by looking into his eyes and studying the weight of what’s been lost, and then find the heaviness there that comes to replace it, and if you’re good with calculations and very lucky besides, you may be able to see him at seventeen or twenty, all intact and alive and walking free. There’s a theory that says every moment of time continues somewhere, that the battles of our history book are still being fought, and old couples together for years are only now falling in love. Somewhere, then, you and I are seventeen. Your name escapes me but your eyes remain. They’re hazel, green and gold, and the lashes brown but you’ve colored your hair some violent orange-red and I’ll never know it any other way. We never hold hands in the street. We melt like salt into a thoughtful sea, like-minded, strange. We are swirls of post-war children conceived with a sigh of relief after that first shaky decade. We stand at Greatness’ edge, gentle-spirited but with impenetrable facades, song-bearing winds at our backs. I turn and you are there, with silver ear-rings and glitter eyes and plastic marbles anchoring your hair. I smile in a guarded way and think to myself that the Queen’s jewels would seem dim in comparison with this tinsel prosperity. I fall asleep just as the spectacular violet-white light begins to fade into a London grey. I see my brothers falter, every one. I watch them from two vantage points, here and there. I see all time in frames, past and future tense. I wait for you in the places of my dreams.

The stifling end-of-summer took a toll on everyone in the town’s center. The beast, seeking momentary relief from it, mistook the tube-station for a cooler cave. It crawled down, realizing the mix-up along the way but deciding to wait out the afternoon rush there, behind a pillar. It checked its pocket-watch along with the masses on the platform, then turned its horned head to the stairs and there beheld you running down, filthy, out-of-breath. Your eyes were emptier than even your pockets, your hair was breaking in a rubber band and your make-up was smeared. There was dirt under your fingernails. The beast moved through the crowd unseen but nevertheless trailing a shroud of unease that caused the to-be passengers to clear a path. The station air went heavy with its breath. It tapped your shoulder with a claw, then breathed a fire around your back that superceded the color of your hair or even the glints of fire hid in your eyes, and you ran. The car, its light just visible, was coming. A few hundred people began to queue up, but you never had any patience and your back was on fire, besides. The conductor pulled the brake, the sound hard on the ears but the people seemed to withstand that better than the shower of sparks and blood immediately following. In the entire station only one young man saw it step-by-step. Now he freezes in time, a statue misplaced among humans, white and red.

If only you had waited a year or two. The colors turn turquoise and pink and yellow overnight. The sun comes back, twice as bright as we ever knew it to be. Palms wave their leaves in breath-soft breezes; all the world is light.

He lost his mind that day. It began to happen as he exited the station but hit full-force as he leant over the sink to wash the blood of a fire-haired girl away. Something had followed him home, was at his back.

--Ellen Hughes