⸎
​
♪ Currently playing ♪: Prokofiev’s Peter and The Wolf March.
​
______________________________________________________
​
I’ve been shadowing Shark Teeth for sixty-three steps now. (The trick is to step only when they step, but make sure the sun isn’t behind you. Patience is key. Don’t ever get too giddy. Time your moving to coincide with their every pivot or lurch. Wait until their guard’s down to pounce.)
​
Shark Teeth is a skinny thing,
gaunt and famished by how taut his pale skin looks
stretched over his bones. His mohawk rippling with streaks of purple.
I can hear him licking his parched lips as he approaches Tchaikovsky, who is currently lounging in the shade of a smashed ATM licking her hindparts.
​
She doesn’t know to be scared,
and the drooling scabber can practically already taste
barbecue wolfchops on his tongue.
​
______________________________________________________
​
“C’mere volfy volfy volfy,” he hisses high, slicing a meat cleaver
through the air as a whistle slips through the gaps of those
ridiculous slivered baby fangs. Tchaikovsky rolls over, oblivious.
Unimpressed and unintimidated.
​
The lone scabber hangs his blade over the snowy pup’s fur and for the first time since the scabbers’ arrival now I remove my mask, chunking it wide right.
Watching Shark Teeth watching it roll. (It is then I catch the snatch of grey in my locks—a rogue strand I’ll be sure to excise later like the cancerous tumor it is.)
​
He is slow to turn (he, like the wolf, oblivious),
but when he does a mild laugh rises up through his throat.
​
Scratchy little cackle that slips out as he’s wiping snot from his nose.
“Well isn’t this just the Island of Pups…what have we ‘ere?”
Again he’s tracing that rusty cleaver through the air, forming figure 8s.
“I didn’t think there were any of you left. More meat for us, ‘ey?”
He flashes that jagmouth at me, trying to wield what might pass for others as a disconcerting, pulse-quickening countenance.
“Whadya say, child—you wanna keep me warm tonight?”
​
Now I lift up the spittoon I’ve been lugging along.
​
Prop ripped from Stormer’s Cove, filled to the halfway mark and
sloshing with dark liquid.
I sling it back before heaving it forward, drenching the baffled scabber.
“Sure,” I agree to his proposal.
​
It’s a few seconds before he can smell it. By it, I mean fate.
​
“Goodbye, Shark Teeth.”
​
______________________________________________
​
Then, it’s as if the lighter magnetizes directly from my palm to his as he attempts to block what’s inevitable. I watch him dripping liquid skin, melting in front of me. I do not move. I do not budge. Do not blink. Just watch those flames dancing—a hundred wild tongues licking while his face bubbles, grisly goo oozing from socket and nostril. Skin dripping from skull.
Charred flesh smells a bit like a cookout, as one might expect,
but also reeks of metal and must.
Semi-coppery, with a sweet acidic tang.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Which is to say, his head is one that won’t make it to the welcome pikes.
​
At least Tchaikovsky has the good sense to find a new spot now.
​
She shimmies away, tail tucked between her legs,
wearing a faint dusting of ash over her silvery pelt.
​
___________________________________________
Three down . . . One left.
​
⸎
