Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
I have a pair of green shoes but you can’t see them, as the dress was tailored for an Amazon and I am quite dainty as a human. It drags on the floor as I walk. And since I have worn the prom dress dozens of times, the hem is torn and ripped and discolored from the muddy roads.
I affix my golden antlers to the top of my head next. Having twenty-two points makes them quite heavy and so I have to tie the leather string under my chin, which holds them in place very tight. Tight enough that I’ve developed a callus there.
Next come the blocks of wood. In my real life I had paws for feet, but my imagination was not resourceful enough to come up with a way to simulate paws, and so I must settle for hooves. Or blocks of wood, as it is.
Finally, I put on the fur coat. It was the only fur in town—I looked everywhere. Stealing into houses at night, checking closets. I scoured every shop and, indeed, this was the only one. It’s leopard. Real leopard. But it’s also a hundred and twenty years old. I found it inside a trunk in the attic of an abandoned house. I know it’s real because it came with papers and photographs of some man on safari a long, long time ago. It’s moth-eaten and missing large patches of hair along the insides of the arms and… well, pretty much everywhere. It’s basically a skin at this point.
But one works with what one has. And this is all I have.
I check myself in the mirror one last time, and then, satisfied with my delusion, I grab my broomstick scepter and leave Eros and his apartment behind.
Downstairs the bar is empty, but out on the streets there are many humans going about their day. They like to rise early, for some reason, and they open up the shops. There is a coffee shop, and a candle shop, and a car mechanic’s garage and other stupid places like that, which all require a human to attend them.
Some of the humans take their cars and leave the town. They go to work in places called Bedford, and Windber, and Somerset.
I’m fascinated by this tradition. Leaving town to work. How interesting.
Of course, neither the monsters—of which I am one—nor the god can leave Savage Falls. There is a fog around the town. A magic fog that traps us in a cloud of nothingness should we stray too far outside the city limits.
Humans though, at least the ones who live here, can just go on down the road like it’s nothing. Of course, there’s always a bit of a challenge finding their way home once they leave. Which is why the human population has dwindled down to a mere couple dozen since the monsters came to town several months ago.
What happens to them out there, I have no idea.
I don’t actually care, either.
We had humans in Vinca. They were a middle-class species, something far below the royal beasts such as myself, but certainly higher up than the peasant chimera like satyrs, or even the wood nymphs, who—while certainly desirable for the wood wine they produce, which can be used to open magical doors—are a lowly, inferior class of magical person.
I wish that the wood nymphs were not here. They are a part of my history that I would rather forget. If they were making wood wine, I would reconsider my opinions of them. But they are not.
So, as part of my delusion, I cancel them out. I do this by wiping my mind of all thoughts and saying the words, ‘You shall call me queen!’ on repeat, whenever one looks in my direction. I give my broomstick a bang on the ground to punctuate my madness. Typically, they shoot me a concerned look, but quickly redirect their attention elsewhere.
I’ve done this to everyone in town at this point so I’m mostly ignored as I walk up and down the same four blocks that comprise the tiny downtown area of Savage Falls.
Of course, I do interact with the dragon-girl so as to continue my bubble bath transactions, but other than that, I’m happy to be the town eccentric who is ignored.
However, this general acceptance of myself—which feels so fresh and invigorating each morning when I put on the costume—typically becomes exhausting and monotonous by late afternoon.
I have doubts. And regrets. And I feel like something is crushing me from the inside out.
This crushing thing has no name, nor do I fully acknowledge it. One equals the other, after all.
I push it down and hide it in the dark spaces where it belongs.
Not because it’s evil, though I have done many evils in the name of this crushing thing. But because it is painful. The kind of painful that might break a lesser, weaker person right in half.