8Ball

He exists somewhere along K Street and Elm.

A strange ghost with absolute and feral eyes. He is emaciated thin. Hollow. Gaunt. White, waxy pallid. Dirty blond in an impervious and meticulous spiked wave across the top of his skull. Shrouded in discarded black denim, arms  bare, jacket-vest open exposing a strip of concave, smooth, particularly sallow torso. Boots black and thick. About his neck found, shiny trinkets on a length of dog chain locked there forever with a tempered steel Masterlock with no key.

A frightening and weird dog in a cold, unstable, dilapidated city.

Echoing an undomesticated animal with a white-blue sunken stare a thousand miles far and wide, he appears out of place and out of step with all else around him. He commands it like a Viking.

He is unreadable. Shows no sign of anything representing cultured and moral humanity. He is a compressed wolf, super-focused, ultra-quiet. Contained, maniacal derangement.

There have been old women from the Old Country, when they speak, they call him, Sobstvennost' d'yavola, “the devil’s own.”

Others of less thick blood call him only 8Ball, a convoluted restructure of old cartoon words.

Both fit him. And he will answer to both…with disturbingly quick and sinuous accuracy.

The swell of human chatter and angle close up, a sea of insipid, hot breath and solid yet pliable flesh. They swat at him, like the absent hand at a minor nuisance.

He has restraint. He shows this only by walking through them. Through the ineffective flow without hesitation. A premeditated tide of muscle, sinew, bone. And yet movement hinged and hitched. Robotic, only smoother.

He watches everyone, studies them like a fine-toothed lab scientist. Old men pushing carts of recyclables and trash. Old women hauling micro-fiber bags of groceries and garbage. And the young, stationary and stagnant, advancing nil.

He acts like a sentry with wolven teeth.

Often said of him, “on okhotitsya.” He is hunting.

----

“I live,” in the sunken chest voice of an aging boy, he speaks and stares at the young girl, spinning irises spent without a blink.

The girl lifts her head from her arms a little and sees him, there, in her periphery, perched atop the stair one behind her. Pointedly, unflinchingly, staring at her. “What.” She expends little breath but all defense upon him.

“I live,” he says again, without hesitation, fingers in constant movement at the end of long, bare, white arms, “because you made it to be.”

The glinting grill of a mean looking city monster, a public and obese bus, flashing flat and cold yellow eyes upon his face. An imminent end, he stared a madman’s stare at the sleepy pear-shaped driver.

And then the girl had appeared. In the warmth of a late afternoon summer storm, glinting liquid diamonds, the scent of wet asphalt, she just…appeared.

The girl had grabbed him, grabbed his arm, the denim collar and the chain about his neck, and pulled him back from a designed end. Effectively pulling him away from Death.

And condemning herself to the absolution of his covets.

She was young flesh, as pale as running suspicious in the darker shadows would tan fair skin. Eyes wide with a subtle yet charging fear that narrowed refined her sight. Dirty clothes revealing fine feminine assets. A hostile demeanor.

Upon spinning into her and grabbing her throat, upon her eyes, he loosened his grip and felt her pulse against his palm.

And here they sat, upon Aztec stairs of the city library. He with lycan eyes upon her, and she with the unwanted keep of a distant loony.

“So what.” She breathes as all other street children do, a constant drag of chemical, all dependence and no salvation.

His head ducks beneath a loose-arm wingspan alit by his knees. “So,” from his chest, “I know.”

“You know what?” She snaps and instantly regrets it.

For his hand has seized her with a hawk-talon like grip. His head only lifts as she gasps pleading for air, ferocious, cruious eyes devouring her whole as she looks upon him. He breathes as heavy as a pneumatic compressor and swarms down upon her.

“I know you don’t want to.”

----

Her eyes open in a shuttering, slow wake. It is the sensation of warmth and comfort on her temple, though oddly stagnant and repetitive, that summons her.

He perches there, beside her, above her, his hand repeating the same tiny course of human connection again and again. His palm upon her neck, his thumb sweeping downy hairs flat across the hairline behind her left ear. He is not present in his eyes, yet. Until he feels the difference in her breathing. Then is he there.

His pupils swing long, slowly, down, on to her face.

It is cold stare, but possessed.

She winces, jerks, and struggles upward to sit, upward into frigid November morning light. Her back to a brick wall, trapped for he is too close. “How long have you been there?!” It remains the only question she can ask.

His head moves only slightly, but his mouth and brows tell a story in subtle, subcutaneous movements that eat her alive.

He breathes in slowly through wave-parting razor sharp lips.

“Six hours, seventeen minutes, fifty-nine seconds.”

His eyes do not move now. She stares, watching for the tiny connotative back-and-forth of the irises, signifying human life within.

But they are as still as death.

He appears hungry and hunting, his hand following her movement, but now cleft upon her collarbone, thumb still moving a comforting pace against the line of her jugular and the flesh-covered bone of the small of her throat.

“You,” he pauses long and it worries her, “you must eat. Come.”

In one fluid movement he rights himself, standing, taller than the towers of manmade concrete and steel that surround them. Her fragile wrist in his hand, pulling her up with him.

She is afraid to move, afraid to breathe, and now afraid to blink lest he be out of her sight for even a second.

She doesn’t trust him. She is afraid of him.

But she knows no other alternative.