Slashback

18

Cal

Nine Years Ago

It came when I was in bed for the night.

A tap at the trailer window, harmless. It could’ve been one of those giant summer beetles. They were everywhere this month. Then one more tap, soft, like the beating of a moth against the glass. They were out this summer too, some as big as your hand. They left a shimmering dust against the glass every night.

I looked up from where I’d been pounding my pillow into submission, not worried. As the years pass, you forget the things you should remember. Forget promises made. It wasn’t a moth, but it hung in the window all the same—the Grendel outlined by a bright full moon, its skin scrubbed even whiter by the lunar glow. The narrow face, the slanted red eyes, the thousand needle teeth bound by the same gleeful grin I remembered from Junior’s attic. This time it wasn’t here to only watch. It tapped again and it spoke, the voice the same too, the gargle of glass wrapped in a serpent’s complacent hiss. “Mine.”

Three years was a long time.

Nik had saved his money. He had college now and his plan for our future. The wheels were in motion and finally we were leaving Sophia. He was the happiest he’d ever been and I’d gotten to see that. That was something to be grateful for. I’d gotten to fucking see that. He would be all right eventually. I hoped. He’d miss me, more than anything—I knew that. I knew my brother. But afterward, in time, he’d have a life, a real one. Normal. That was something he wouldn’t have with me in it. No goddamn way. That’s the way it was and I’d known that long before I was eleven. Long before I was fourteen.

A hand with spidery fingers and black talons exploded through the glass, the nails hooking into my flesh. It hurt and I was scared. I was so damned scared, but I held on to it: three years was a long time. Three years had been long enough for Nik to be happy.

“Time to go home,” the Grendel crooned.

Three years.

I’d had my big brother for three more years.

A serial killer had almost taken that from me. A Grendel had given it back, but nothing is free. I’d known that all my life.

“Time to go home,” it reminded me with a laugh as it snatched me through the window, all my struggling and screaming less than nothing to it.

Three years.

I hung in the night air, terrified, my sweatpants wet with piss, feeling the sanity pour out of me like water out of a pitcher, but despite it all . . .

I thought it was worth it.

It had to be worth it.

It was for Nik.

Two years later when I escaped the Grendels to come back through my own hole in the world and found my brother still waiting, I knew it was worth it. And the years we had coming to us after that, each one we’d take for our own no matter how hard we had to fight for them, run for them, rip the world apart for them, they’d be worth it too. We’d find that life I’d wanted for Nik. We’d have friends we could trust with the truth someday. We’d have the not quite normal but normal enough for us. We’d have all of that, no matter what we had to do to take it for our own. That’s what we did, Nik and me. That’s what we always did.

We survived.

And that was worth everything.

Lions didn’t play to win. Lions didn’t play at all.

Lions survived.

—Niko Leandros