The first chapter of my short story titled "The Corner Mountain." Speculative fiction, 15 pages.

1. There was a mountain at the corner of First and Water that no one else could see.
It was a worn-smooth, rounded, cold, gray thing, like a river pebble that has
forgotten how to be the size of a pebble, and has decided to make do with being the
size of a mountain instead. Shops sprouted from the base of it, blackbirds and oil-slick-
shiny grackles flew through it, cars parked halfway into it, and the vet clinic a little down
the road was completely eclipsed, except for the mildewed and yellowing marquee out
front.
Not that that stopped the middle-aged divorcees with chihuahuas or the co-eds with
tabbies or the old men with labrador retrievers or the distracted fathers with budgerigars
from walking in and out, some with concerned looks on their faces and most with pet
carriers or leashes in their hands. They walked in, vanishing through the side of the gray
stone wall, then sat in the waiting room, then moved to the exam room, where they
dazedly agreed with the vet techs who rattled off medication doses and diet changes
and cream applicator instructions too quickly to follow. Then they put their animals back
on leashes and back in carriers and cages, and reappeared in the parking lot, on the
outside of the mountain.
There had been an approximately six-month period of denial after Mossalyn Farrow
first noticed the mountain on the corner. She thought of it as 'noticing,' because she had
driven past that row of shops (and apparently, the mountain) as many times as she had
driven to school--from her family's home on the outskirts of town, past the bank, around
the corner with the post office, and onto Water, which would five minutes later deliver
her to her small town's proportionally tiny high school. She had driven past it over and
over again, unknowing, until one day it made an impression, like a bare plot of land off
the freeway that has been under construction for three solid years but which suddenly
one Tuesday morning has a fully functional medical complex on it.
Moss noticed it in the way she might notice an unaccountable bruise on her shin:
first, there was an unknown period of ignorance, then a brief moment of baffled scrutiny
during which she wondered idly: when had that got there? Then, after touching the
bruise and finding it very painful indeed, there was a tense, sustained moment of
concern, during which she wondered if she might have really, really hurt herself.

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Much in the same way that the only way to treat a bruise is to pointedly ignore it and
try not to bump it against things, Moss chose a different route to school and, when it
came time, traded chores with her brother, Charlie, so that he would take the family cat
to the vet for its checkup and latest round of vaccinations.
It was summer, a few weeks after Moss sat with increasing sogginess underneath
her graduation cap and gown, the tassel tickling her nose with every welcome breeze
across the football field. She'd spent the valedictorian's speech about promising futures
and progress and a return to family values focused mainly on her relief at no longer
having any reason to drive past--or avoid driving past--the corner of First and Water. But
then, all too soon, Sam had mentioned that it was getting time for a visit to the vet, the
one in the shopping center at the corner of First and Water with the dingy, yellowed
marquee out front. At which time Moss' stomach bottomed out.
Charlie turned skeptical, though quietly so, when she told him she'd rather mow and
trim the lawn in one hundred degree weather than sit in an air-conditioned lobby reading
out of date men's health and rustic-themed wedding magazines.
"You could take one of my books," Charlie offered, eyeing her.
"Hm?"
"A book--if you hate magazines so much."
Moss shrugged, put heavy gloves over her soft hands, and walked straight out to the
garage where the grass-caked pull-string mower sat dormant. Charlie watched her go,
then went about alternately coaxing and stuffing Nubs (short for Butternubs), their
perpetually angry ginger domestic shorthair, into the padded cat carrier.
Moss was already flushed and beading up by the time Charlie stepped out to lock
the side door behind him, carrier tossing and hissing in his left hand, long pink and red
scratches across his right. He also carried a book: a novelization of a campy science
fiction film. She wondered if the book was better than the movie, but didn't ask. Before
he left, Charlie brought out a straw hat that smelled not unpleasantly of sweat and grass
and put it on her head. He took a moment to adjust the blade height of the mower to
keep her from scalping the lawn, and then drove away in the hand-me-down Ford truck
they shared, the soft, forlorn tones of country radio almost harmonizing with Nubs' soft,

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forlorn yowls.
Moss waited, anxiously sipping the tooth-achingly icy water that Charlie had set out
on the back porch for her, for her brother and Nubs to come home. She had sent them
to a place she wasn't willing to go, and that realization had come home to roost right
around the time Moss finished mowing the backyard and started on the front. After she
had finished up the front, she stood looking down the road for a while, then circled
around with the weed-eater. She stopped and stared down the road a few more times
when her leading arm cramped under the strain of swinging the heavy gas-powered
machine back and forth and back again.
Unwilling to go inside without first seeing the beat up Ford in the driveway, she
dragged the garden hose around the back corner of the brick house, then set about
power-washing the caked-on mud and grass clippings off the mower's blade and
carriage. It was sparkling, almost the same fire engine red it had been when her father
first brought it home from the hardware store, by the time the Ford revved in the street
and began the steep climb up the driveway.
"Oh, thank Christ," Moss breathed through her teeth, and lifted her hand once to
wave before she cleared the driveway. "How'd it go?" she asked, when Charlie dropped
down from the Ford's cracked bench seat.
"It went," he answered with a shrug. "Boring as all hell, though--next week, you're
back on errands. Mower looks good."
"Ah," Moss said, and wiped a damp, grimy forearm across her chin to dislodge
whatever was tickling her. "Sure." At least Nubs, being the hale and energetic beast that
he was, shouldn't need another vet visit for a year. Maybe by that time, she could have
un-noticed the corner mountain; forgotten about it. Maybe whatever knock on the head
she'd taken to make her see it in the first place would have healed, and she could look
back on this and wonder if it had all been a dream.
Two weeks later, one of the Peterson boys from down the road was driving home
late after what he would later swear was definitely not a pasture party when he pulled
into the wrong driveway. Nubs was outside for his nightly mouse hunt, which until two

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weeks before had been on hold while he re-upped his vaccinations, and made an
untimely dash under the wheels.
Charlie sniffled a little, boyishly, as he buried the angry ginger in the backyard. He
used a large hinged box he'd made in shop class at the high school several years
before to hold the body, but took some time to singe "Butternubs" into the top board with
their dad's woodworking tools before wrapping the cat in an old seersucker towel and
laying the vicious creature to rest.
Their mother demanded--in a desperate tone that made Moss cringe--an immediate
replacement. A kitten, this time. But she was bed-bound and could not care for a young,
bouncy, high-maintenance pet, let alone enjoy having one. She had rarely even
acknowledged the self-sufficient Nubs, which had once been a matter of fact, but now
felt like a slap in the face.
Charlie refused--in the only way that he ever refused to do anything--when their
mother asked him to go out and find a new kitten: by saying nothing when he was asked
to do it, and then not doing it. Moss was less resolved.
"You know she's gonna do something silly if we don't give her what she wants,"
Moss said to Charlie several nights later, quietly, when she was sure their mother was
asleep. They were sitting in the living room, ignoring whatever sitcom was playing on
the television. It was only on to mask their hushed voices. "Better just get a new cat and
move on."
"Mm-mm," Charlie hummed as he split a sunflower seed precisely between his front
teeth. He dropped the hull into a napkin after he fished out the morsel inside. "'S'not
decent."
"Not decent" was the closest Charlie had ever come to telling Moss even
approximately what he thought of their mother since her illness had settled in. He had
never complained about moving back home to keep the house up, he had never said
much about the work itself, or the money troubles, or his nonexistent social life, and he
was especially quiet about their mother's frequent tantrums. The one exception: he had
quietly protested when Moss took an part-time job as a carhop to bring in extra grocery
money. Her tips weren't good enough to justify the time away and the gas money, he'd

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pointed out, and she had been persuaded to drop the job after a few weeks. Once her
brother eventually realized that Moss had sought the job out as an escape from home
life, she noticed that he started sending her to the public library a few times a week.
He'd give her the keys to the Ford (and sometimes a bag of prepared snacks and a
water bottle) with a request to bring him back "just somethin' good to read." Even as
tight-lipped and long-suffering as Charlie could be, Moss had begun to suspect that he
would leave as well when she either moved out or left for college. When the thought had
first occurred to her, she had been appalled, even hurt on her mother's behalf. Now,
three years later, she simply hoped that she was right.
Moss considered. Her mother's fits were a force to be reckoned with, even if that
force was restricted to an adjustable hospital bed in the master bedroom. They were
often easier to waylay than to weather. But Moss was still only seventeen; pet stores
and shelters ID'd before adopting out dogs and cats, so she could not go out as a free
agent and pick one up from a reputable source. They didn't have the money or time (or
the wherewithal, if she was honest about it) to take in a charity case, like the hardbitten,
rangy ferals that sometimes slunk onto the property. And if she were to answer an ad
online or in the newspaper, she could guess that Charlie would have some choice
words for her when he found out she'd gone alone.
She would wait, then, until Charlie had deemed the timing to once again be decent.
Moss and Charlie had grown up, seven years apart, on the outskirts of Brunnel,
Texas. As a child, Moss had wanted only to live in the big suburban neighborhoods
closer to the big cities, where all the houses were two-story and prettily identical and
close together. She was sure they all contained children her age who played in
comfortably-enclosed, patio-and-brick-path backyards and in the neighborhood pool
during summer. But instead they had lived, for her entire life, on a flat and sizable parcel
of land with one street to connect it in a straight line to what was technically a
neighborhood, though the closest houses were several thousand feet to either side, and
contained no children at all.
Across the street was pastureland, and beyond the backyard fence was what her

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family had always called the Back 40--presumably because it was around forty acres in
size--but Moss had never known for sure since it didn't belong to them. It was a wide,
empty stretch of grassland with only occasional breaks in the landscape: scrawny trees,
cavernous ditches that led to nowhere and served no apparent purpose, sometimes tire
tracks. Far in the distance, far enough to be nothing but a thin stripe of blue on the
horizon, was what might have been a small forest of oaks and evergreens, but Moss
had never investigated out that far. The most notable breaks were the handful of
massive egg-shaped shrubberies, standing easily thirty feet high with dense, almost-
black foliage that grew outward in all directions, all the way down to the ground.
Charlie had spent a week one summer helping Moss bushwhack a path into the
largest shrub, and she had played in the cool, shady hollows for years afterward. It
became her castle, and Charlie would sometimes come out to read while she baked
mudpies or collected bugs and rocks and rocks that looked like bugs. Fierce, battering
winds that swept across the open land were reduced to rustling breezes inside the
hedge walls, and Moss had often shivered at the amniotic tranquility of the egg-shrub's
innards. If it had been better at keeping out the rain, she might never have left it at all.
Moss didn't know when they had stopped visiting the castle, but she always
remembered her last time inside it. It was still there--the paths overgrown, a few
abandoned plastic toys sinking by degrees into the bare dirt beneath the lowest
branches. A small hand shovel with rusted blade and rotten wooden handle, a jar of
marbles, a disintegrating tarp that had served as a flimsy canopy. She had to crouch to
get into the opening they had carved through the outer foliage, only to find inside that
she'd grown too tall and long-legged to weave her way toward the central trunk. So
instead she sat hunched on a sturdy low-slung branch and thought about nothing in
particular, soaking up the lingering sensations of play, and didn't realize until years later
that she had been saying goodbye.
Moss woke to the sound of the doorbell, only to groan and roll over, flinching away
from the bright light streaming through her window. It was easily already noon, she
realized, cracking an eye when the doorbell rang again. She had been up late the night

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before, trying to calm her frantic mother after a lengthy round of taciturn silence from
Charlie...handling the fits somehow left Moss with a feeling like being hungover: head
aching, body stiff, and memory foggy with a faint but creeping sense of shame. The
doorbell rang again, this time followed by a rapid triplet cadence of heavy knocks, the
ultimate in impatient rudeness by Southern standards. And now Charlie did not seem to
be at home.
It was Saturday, a week to the day since Nubs had joined two finches, a turtle, and a
rabbit, along with any number of "adopted" horny toads and green anoles, in the
backyard pet cemetery. Moss thought back, blearily, to the argument of the night before
as she pulled jeans and a sweatshirt over her night clothes on the way out of her room.
Charlie had taken their mother's computer away after someone responding to an online
classifieds ad had shown up on their doorstep with a box full of flea-bitten, mangy
kittens--
"Ah, hell," Moss muttered, stumbling over the hallway rug as she pushed her glasses
onto her face. Now the doorbell had stopped ringing, which only made her run the rest
of the way from the hall to the front entryway.
A silver station wagon--rickety and rusted--was pulling away from the house when
Moss reached the door. She stood at the window and watched the car go, wondering
why the driver had bothered ringing the doorbell so many times and so frantically if they
were only going to drive off at speed. And she was pretty sure dump-sacking happened
late at night or not at all.
Still, though...
She swung the door open and looked down onto the steps. Then she closed the
door again, and locked it, but stayed where she was. She never knew how long she
stood there, heart in her throat, breath fogging the glass of the front door, hand white-
knuckled on the lock.
The only good thing about the mountain at the corner of First and Water was that,
implausible as it might have been, it didn't do anything. It didn't snort and chitter, it didn't
blink or shiver, and it sure as hell wasn't swaddled in dirty fake-fleece blankets that
rustled when it shifted its weight. It was a figment, and not a very elaborate one. It

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couldn't even bother with being tangible, or casting a shadow, or displacing any scenery.
To all appearances, its sole ability was to stand unremarkably at the corner of First and
Water--which was really the only way to stand at the corner of First and Water--and be
nothing at all.
By contrast, whatever was sitting on Moss' red brick steps was currently putting a
great deal more effort into being and doing. It was caged, the cage settled down into a
larger cardboard box, lined with streaked newspaper and baby blue fleece patterned
with chubby airplanes. It was a hard, opalescent white, and scaled--no, partially
feathered over scaly silver-green skin--and a sparsely pin-feathered and ridged tail
slithered and dragged dryly over the fleece blankets. Two wide obsidian eyes blinked at
her as a hook-billed mouth yawned. Three long spines connected by tissue-thin skin at
the top of it's arrow-shaped head flexed, flared, and settled back against its long neck
as the yawn tapered off. It hummed, a long, low thrumming sound, and settled down
again into its nest.
It looked as though an eagle had been crossed with one of the more exotic varieties
of lizard, then the terrifying result blended with various mammals to soften its features.
There were traces of--maybe a fox, or a fawn. In fact, as Moss stared down at it through
the glass, it did appear to have small, velvety antlers sprouting at its temples. But they
were red and pink and softly knobbed, like branches of coral. Two gill-like frills were
directly below, which Moss took to be ears, but the silvery membrane stretched across
the frills was smooth and unbroken, with no apparent passage into the skull.
It was roughly the size of a small terrier, though it sat up on its haunches to look at
her like a baby might: hind legs splayed straight out ahead of it, forelegs hanging limply
over its stomach while its tail continued to coil and uncoil for balance. Wings, scaly and
pin-feathered, appeared briefly as the thing preened, then melded back into the mess of
feathers along its spine.
"No," Moss breathed, and shook her head. She turned away from the implausibility
of it all, and pressed her mouth into a resolute line. She found that she was fighting
back tears, but she couldn't have said exactly why. "Nope. I live in Texas, and we have
hawks and deer and armadillos. Little green lizards that puff out their throats to impress

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their ladies and horny toads that squirt blood out of their eyes. We have possums and
snakes and spiders, and every once in a while, a panther. We have a few strange
things, but we don't have--" she resisted the urge to turn around and look at it again, to
try to classify it, "--dragons."
Moss pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose, wiped the steam off the
glass with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and walked to her room.
When Charlie arrived half an hour later with the groceries, Moss came out to help
him unload.
"I could have gone," she said. "Next time, just wake me up."
"Nah, I wanted to get out." Charlie shook his head. Moss didn't have to ask why.
"And you seem like you've wanted to be at home more lately."
That would probably change soon, Moss thought, if she was going to start having
hallucinations even at home. The mountain at the corner of First and Water seemed
relatively manageable now. She reached for a plastic bag of eggs and sandwich fixings,
but Charlie waved her away.
"I think there's a package on the front porch--I'll get this if you want to go grab that."
Moss' hands went clammy and her heart picked up a shallow, frenetic beat. She had
not been back to the front door since returning to her room the hour before.
"I'd rather not," she said quietly. "I was going to go out there earlier to get it, but I--I
saw a snake sunning on the steps. Couldn't tell what kind--didn't want to risk it."
"Really thought you'd know a copperhead from a coachwhip by now, Moss," Charlie
murmured. He looked a little disappointed, then pensive. She hoped he would chalk her
hesitation up to that peculiar teenaged phenomenon that sometimes turned lifelong
country girls into shrieking prisses when confronted with things they had seen and dealt
with any number of times during childhood, like snakes or ticks or sticker burrs. She had
seen several friends go through that stage during high school. Some of them were
changed permanently, becoming less and less willing to spend time outside, timid and
even terrified in the face of nature's messier qualities. For others it had only been a
phase, and they had eventually reconfigured into something closer to what they had

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been as children: pragmatic and unimpressed, with dirty fingernails, tough jeans, and
sensible snake-proof boots. Moss, for her part, honestly couldn't say where she fell on
the spectrum, but she could be damned certain that her friends had never had to deal
with invisible mountains and porch dragons.
Charlie stepped away, headed for the front door, and Moss felt another conflicted
surge of relief and guilt. She was doing it again, sending her brother to handle
something she couldn't. It didn't feel right--and what if--she tried not to ask herself the
question, and failed--what if there really was a freakish dragon-beast waiting for him on
the steps?
"Here, wait," she called after him, and he stalled at the corner of the house. "I'll bring
the shovel, just in case it's still there."
It was still there. The beast thing shifted in the box as they approached, and Ben
stopped short, tensed. Again, Moss felt a swell of relief, tinged with disbelief. Did he see
it, too?
"Aw, for god's sake," Charlie growled. One big hand swept out of a pocket to gesture
in irritation at the steps while Moss looked on in confusion.
Moss stayed quiet, desperately hoping she wouldn't have to ask what her brother
was seeing, since it was beginning to sound like it was rather more mundane than what
she was seeing. The beast drew back, hissing a little at Charlie's outburst, and ducked
behind the shorter cardboard wall.
"Did you give Mom her laptop back?" Charlie turned to Moss.
"No," Moss held up her hands. Charlie eyed her again. "Honest, I didn't."
Charlie groaned and scrubbed both hands through his short hair. "But, come on, who
the hell does this?"
"Whoever left it probably just got our address before you had a chance to take down
the ad Mom put up. I guess they just dropped...this off."
"Goddammit," Charlie muttered under his breath, then stepped closer, peering down
into the cage. "Well, whatever. Maybe she'll forget the cat notion if we keep this. Might
at least get some eggs out of it."

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"What?" Moss almost shouted. She wasn't quick enough to mute the shock in her
voice, and Charlie turned to face her, eyebrows raised and hands up.
"Whoa, I thought you liked chickens," he said. "And it's just the one. Better than a
rooster."
A chicken? A barnyard hen?
All the poise that Moss had kept tightly in her grasp for the last hour--and for the
previous months of driving past an implausible, intangible mountain--slipped through her
mental fingers as tears welled up again. She looked at the beast--at the chicken that
seemed, to her, like a beast--and shook her head.
"I don't want it," was all she could say. Charlie didn't look up, or he would have seen
her wiping tears away.
Charlie bent to collect the box. "Look, you said it yourself: Mom doesn't really want a
pet, she just wants to have a pet. I don't have time to babysit a kitten for her, and I don't
want to saddle you with it, but I'm getting tired of her throwing fits over it. Maybe this will
do the trick. And they're easy, remember?"
Moss did remember. She remembered the chicks--bitties, they had called them--her
father had brought home from the feedstore one Easter, dip-dyed pastel pinks and blues
like Peep candies. Moss had never much liked Peeps, but she'd still been disappointed
to find out that they would outgrow their downy pink and blue. She had named them
Pink and Blue, but had been conflicted when Pink had turned out to be a rooster, and
Blue a hen. But her father had said it didn't matter, and Pink had stayed Pink, and Blue
had stayed Blue, until both had eventually been carried away several months apart by
some predator or other.
Charlie carried the cage around the corner to the cool of the covered carport. Moss
followed, at length, and watched as Charlie dragged the old chicken coop out from a
tangle of rusting parts and tools lurking in the attached toolshed. It wasn't a pretty thing--
their father and Charlie had cobbled it together using scrap wood and leftover chicken
wire from their mother's latest garden projects, and in the years since being occupied by
Pink and Blue, it had fallen into even greater disrepair.
"This will do for now," Charlie said as he situated the coop, directing the run into the

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sunshine and leaving the henhouse portion in the shade of a towering wisteria. He
opened the coop gate, only for it to swing shut again with a loud clack. He opened it
again, and held it. "Here, bring her over."
Moss leaned down and, keeping her face well away from the cage bars, picked up
the cardboard box.
"Not the whole thing, come on. Who puts a chicken in a birdcage anyway? Just take
the top off and lift her out. Clamp her wings."
Irritation wormed past her fear and misgiving. Moss knew how to lift chickens. But
what she was looking at, to her eyes at least, was not a chicken. Still--Moss took a deep
breath--she was going crazy. In the face of the alternative (the alternative being that
there was a real dragon-beast in her backyard), the thought was a comfort. It meant that
the creature wouldn't feel how it looked. Even if she was crazy, she could still pick it up
like a chicken. She would feel its smooth wings and plump, fluffy breast, and maybe, if it
wasn't docile, the sting of a beak. And then it would kick and wiggle like a chicken (all
neck), and then it would hop into the run like a chicken, and finally, it would peck and
scratch and eat and crap in the coop like a chicken.
Moss lifted the top off the birdcage--the kind with white enameled bars and a little
plastic feeding tray, like the one they had kept finches in years earlier. The chicken-
dragon started, but didn't run or flap. Moss reached down, avoiding any parts, like the
long leathery tail, that could not be accounted for in a chicken, and put her hands stiffly
around the feathery torso.
It didn't feel at all like a chicken. A prominent ribcage jutted under her fingertips,
under the feathers, and when the creature squirmed, it was the squirming of a long-
bodied animal, with flexing obliques and a bowing, arching spine. Like Nubs had done
anytime they'd taken him to the vet. Its forefeet, which she hadn't been able to see
before, gripped her, hard, talons circling around two fingers on either hand. She felt it
pull forward, levering its weight against her, and suddenly a back foot was on her left
wrist. Hot shock raked over her skin, and she yelped, quieter than she meant to. It hurt
enough, scared her enough, that she had meant to scream, but her hesitation had
seized up in her chest, and the scream became only a muted squeak.

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"Come on, get her in there," Charlie was saying, unconcerned. "Before she spurs
you."
Moss all but bowled the beast through the low coop door, and sat down hard on the
grass, clutching her left arm. Three bloody lines were traced across her wrist, and she
shook as she looked down at it. It wasn't a cut, or a laceration. All she could call it was a
tear--a ragged-edge gash. Inside the tears, she could see red so deep it was purple,
and exposed muscles twitched underneath as her fingers hooked inward over her palm.
A hot, clammy flush rose in her skin; she was going to throw up, if she didn't pass out
first.
"Looks like she got you," Charlie mused. "Be sure to put some iodine on that--it
doesn't look like much, but we don't know how long she's been scratching around in that
cage, or what was in it before."
Moss only sat silent in the grass, knuckles turning white, breath quickening, heart
about to hammer out of her chest. The beast sat a few paces away, staring at her
through the chicken wire, looking only mildly put out as it preened its ruffled feathers.
Moss had yanked a few long, white spines out of its hide when she had thrown it into
the coop. They were still in-between her fingers.
Charlie took a picture of coop and occupant with his cellphone, said something
about showing Mom, and strode off, hands in pockets.
Once, when she was seven, Moss had fallen off her bike and scraped her hands and
knees. Charlie had picked her up, dusted her off, and held her hand (which she had
insisted he hold, even though it hurt) as he walked her home. He had cleaned her
skinned knees while she sat on the edge of the sink, crying utterly without grace or
restraint, snot running from her nose and tears streaking the dust on her cheeks. He
had made her laugh, and then swatted her a day later when she tried to pick the scabs.
During her first year of high school, Moss had liked a boy she had barely spoken to,
which is why she thought she loved him, and why she thought him to be a person he
was not. Too shy to say anything, she had given him a note detailing her would-be love.
Charlie had arrived to pick Moss up from school just in time to see the boy standing on
a bench, reading the note aloud to a circle of jeering compatriots while Moss stood by

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with her face in her hands. Charlie had dragged the boy off the bench and stuffed the
note into his mouth, and then the fickle onlookers had laughed at that instead of Moss.
A few months before she began to see the mountain at the corner of First and Water,
Moss had sliced her left index finger while cutting lemons. It was a deep slice, but
Charlie had produced butterfly bandages and ointment, as far as Moss could tell out of
thin air, and had sealed and wrapped the cut almost before she knew it.
And he was walking away now, with a casual warning to apply iodine to three horrific
tears across her wrist...
But she wasn't bleeding.
She could see the blood pumping underneath, coursing through the veins and
around the tendons that ran down into her hand. But it was undisturbed, uninterrupted--
exposed but functioning like an ant farm under a pane of glass.
So it was another hallucination...but the pain was still there, and real, and the skin
felt seared and clammy and dead where it flapped raggedly on either side of each gash.
She gritted her teeth, swallowed the lump in her throat, and pressed her right hand over
her wrist. Her stomach was already watery with nausea--if she looked at it anymore, she
was going to be properly sick.
Moss looked up to the beast, which looked back, gaze flicking from her slashed wrist
to her ashen face. It was sitting close by the chicken wire now, and put a forepaw
between a hexagon and plucked at it, idly, cocking its head at the jangling tones the
wire made when released. Moss looked away then, hating and blaming the beast, even
if it really was just a chicken, for everything she saw and felt and feared.
"Why is this happening to me?" she whispered. She was terrified, just for a moment,
that the chicken-beast might answer. Something glib or sarcastic or droll, like all the
animal familiars in the books her brother read. It didn't, and she felt her hatred of it
wane, just a bit. But not enough.
Moss rose to her feet, feeling flimsy and pale enough to be transparent. As she
turned her back to stumble inside, she chanced one last look, sizing the creature up.
Pink and Blue had grown up huge, even for setters, and the local wildlife had still made
them into dinner before a year had gone by. At its current size, this thing wouldn't last

15. / CORNER MOUNTAIN / 14
even a month, Moss reckoned.
She grinned, meanly, and slunk away.
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