Enough with the rain, the overcast, the dogs—before the cold cripples the city, I’ll be fully moved out. I will leave before it’s too late, before it gets its way with me.

*

When I came here two years ago it was the cusp of spring, and the way the cold was stringent and quiet was wondrous. The monotony of the city didn’t bother me; the sun felt warmer when it graced the corner of the townhouse I shared with the Polish roommate I found on Craigslist, where I huddled eight, nine, ten hours a day punching characters into a machine. 

In a few months it was summer, then fall, then the novelty palled. I was left with the inadequacy of my jackets, leftover from California, the cool draft echoing in the spaces I was ushered into—under my duvet, its density foreign to me, by the nook where I’d curl up and imagine I was inhabiting a different city—and the stark routine of my life, Sisyphean, each day’s progress undone by nightfall. I had no friends in the city back then, no lover, no family. I knew no one.

I found the beast waiting for me between two sparse bushes in the park, across the bench on which I’d sit and sketch and stare out at the water. It was late afternoon, the sun had just set, and I spotted no one in the park, no one it could’ve belonged to. Exacting red eyes met mine. What did it want? What did it think I was withholding? I felt suddenly perverse in my too-bright, too-expensive puffer—it was the first thing I’d bought with the luxury of my upgraded paycheck, the reason I’d come to this city in the first place—and as I stalked away, stuffing the notebook I’d repurposed as a sketchpad and later lost on the way back, I felt its stare on my body still, laving across nylon and denim like the eager tongue of a savage mutt, tasting prey. I picked up my pace.

It’s appeared to me many times since. At first, it was nothing more than a blip among the trees, retreating upon my delineation of its shape and texture. Then, I’d find it peeking out of the shrubbery, manifesting earlier in the day. Most of the time, it seems to me like bestial matter jammed into a four-limbed mold, its haunches smaller than the rest of its body, something unmistakably canine in the structure of its face. But under the rain, it looked like a rotting dragon fruit, its pelt sticking together in leathery clumps, and in the rare afternoon, it is a sunspot, engulfed in flames, writhing, scurrying as it registers my approach.

Last night, as it stalked toward my parked car, I wondered if I was dreaming it up, its unusual bravado. I wasn’t; it had learned where I live, somehow, and it had been waiting for me. Afraid though unwilling to admit it, I left a generous distance between us as I got out of the car and hoped it wouldn’t come closer. 

The glint of its teeth tipped me off first. Then, ink, blotting the air. I ran.

*

“She’s never liked dogs,” Beatrice clarifies on my behalf. A man in a Hawaiian shirt slips behind her chair to avoid an overflowing tray. Check, please, I mouth, squiggling my fingers. A chorus of squeaky rattan chairs muffles his response, and as he leaves, presumably for our check, I watch the newly arrived group settle in, shrugging off cardigans, draping quilted cross-body bags across their laps. A golden leaf, braided into honeyed hair, catches the sunlight. 

This place, which I found on a list for the Best Brunch in the City, feels transported from a different time in my life. After college, propelled by a mysterious desire to set ourselves apart, Beatrice, Shri and I divvied up furtively who we were to be in relation to Los Angeles. I’m still in love with the sun and brunch, Shri still keeps up to date with the latest fashion, his closet a perfect sampling of Melrose, and Beatrice still fills her time with yoga, spin, pilates, barre, boutique exercises that would squander my savings in a week. Being skinny and tall and half-white, Beatrice has always received the most attention between the three of us, but especially after yoga, spin, pilates, and barre. Today, she’s predictably flawless in a fitted pantsuit and a symmetrical bob cut, not a single detail of her person amiss. Even the roots of her hair, revealing her original color, seems artful and intentional. An enamel replica of The Chariot hangs from her neck, accentuating her lithe frame and signaling her avarice for our adolescence.

“I hate dogs,” I further clarify.“

You what?” Shri swivels dramatically in his seat, creasing his red linen shirt around the waist. His double-hooped earrings—a new feature of his person—jangle with the movement. His perm bounces along in small, tight circles.

“Why?”

While Beatrice influences her circles of consultants, Shri micro-influences a “rapidly growing” online community. His hair, also dyed, is dappled instead with reckless highlights. Once, back in college, realizing the next morning they’d tied in their quest to drink each other to the death, Shri spent the whole day pouty and reclusive, Beatrice, jilted by his leaving her on read, ran up three flights of stairs to his dorm and challenged him to a tiebreaker, a sniff of vodka away from throwing up herself. 

I shrug. “They hate me.”

Beatrice looks confused. “Why?”

“I don’t know!”

“They can smell your rotten core,” Shri answers for me. I flick a crumb of breading at him. He brushes it off his shirt. “Kidding. Why do you think they hate you?”

“They won’t stop yapping around me.”

“Hm.” “They chase me out of parks and stuff, too.”

“I think that means they love you. They want your attention.”

“One time a chihuahua bit me.”

“Doesn’t count,” Shri says. “Chihuahuas are evil rodents. Satan’s little pets.”

"I’m traumatized,” I say. “And you’re not taking me seriously.”

“I can’t take you seriously,” he says, slurping up what’s left of his matcha latte. “Who hates dogs?”

“A lot of people,” I counter, turning to Beatrice, as though she would have an estimate, tucked neatly into her breast pocket, of all the people in the world who share my aversion. 

The man in the Hawaiian shirt returns with our tab. Stretching over Beatrice and swatting her slimy fingers away, I snatch the bill and hand him my card.

“I got this,” I tell them as he walks away, a flair to my words, my lips cocked.

“Thanks,” Shri says, unconcerned. “Tip well.”

Beatrice sighs. “I’ll get dinner,” she says.

“You flew all the way out here.” I peer down Shri’s cup of matcha. He steals it back from me though I saw that it is empty. “Let me have this.”

She waves me off. “So, you had a run-in with a stray last night.” She looks me up and down, assessing any damage I might’ve taken. “Are you hurt?”

“Not a stray. A dog-like thing. Kind of like the Beast from the Disney cartoon. What’s it called?” 

“Beauty and the Beast?” Shri chimes.

“Exactly! Like him, but without the anthropomorphisms.”

“How do you forget Beauty and the Beast?” Shri says. “The Beast is like, half the title.”

“Whatever.”

“You were really drunk last night,” Beatrice says, after a pause. 

“You don’t start hallucinating from alcohol, Bea.”

“Well,” Shri cuts in, looking up from his phone, “what else were you on?”

“I need to leave.”

“Brunch?” Beatrice pinches her lips when she frowns. Last Thanksgiving, when Shri and I stayed with her in New York, I found a pack of collagen masks by her sink to Plump and Smoothen! the side of her lips. The discovery of such a niche product is still less stunning to me than that of Beatrice’s beauty as something requiring maintenance and effort.

“The city.”

“Heard San Diego’s nice this time of the year,” Shri says. “And, hey, don’t you know someone who lives there?”

“Actually, I’ve been thinking about L.A.”

Beatrice steers her gaze toward the food, what’s left of it. Shri frowns.

“Why?” Shri says at last.

Why? “Things were easier then. We were happy.” It seems obvious to me. 

He sucks in his cheeks. Then, exhaling, he says, “Fuck L.A.”

Beatrice thumbs her necklace. 

“Enjoy the rest of your day,” our waiter says, returning with a copy of the receipt.

I smile, if a little awkwardly, back at him. “Come on.” I jerk my head at the door after I’ve tipped and signed. “I’ll show you where I ran into the beast.”

“Do I really want to know?” Shri grumbles.

“Sure you do.”

*

I’m pointing at a spot beyond the window. “Behind the cherry tree,” I say. 

In the rearview mirror, Shri squints. “The cherry tree?” he asks.

“The spindly one.”

“They’re all spindly in the winter,” Shri says.

“Should a cherry tree be spindly?” Beatrice says.

“It’s a young cherry tree!” I cry. “Ugh, nevermind.” 

“You never told us what it did to you,” Beatrice says.

“Nothing, but who knows what might’ve happened if I hadn’t made a run for it?” I signal to merge back onto the road and continue driving the three blocks down to Beatrice and Shri’s hotel. We’d planned on sightseeing after brunch, but Beatrice has some light, apparently Saturday-appropriate work to wrap up, so it’ll just be Shri and I until sunset. The park and its lake are most beautiful then, and Beatrice promised to join us for a walk. 

Suddenly, Shri is screaming. “Holy shit!”

“Jesus—” I slam on the brakes. In tandem, the three of us lurch forward then crash back into our seats. “What?”

“Don’t stop! Drive!”

“What’s going on?” I ask, confused though obliging him.

He’s slinking in the backseat, evading observation.

“The dog,” Beatrice says. She shakes her head, corrects herself, “Your dog-like thing. Does it have red eyes?”

I blink, riddling her question.

“Go, go, go,” Shri pleads.

"Shit,” I whisper, understanding, stepping on the gas.

*

In their hotel room, I stuff my hands in my pockets to keep their quivering from Beatrice and Shri. Beatrice instructs me to leave my things on the side of the foyer, against the closet, then tells me to make myself comfortable on the couch at the end of the narrow room, flushed against a pair of sliding doors leading to the balcony. They’re staying in a double queen junior suite Shri’s most likely wiled Beatrice into paying—not that it would’ve taken much wiling. Beatrice is generous with her money; she probably thinks of it as penitence for her job.

“You think it followed us here?” Shri starts.

I sit on the couch, then realize I forgot to set my purse on the spot Beatrice pointed out. I hope she doesn’t notice; Beatrice can be peculiar about these things. “No way.” I hug the black, bulking purse closer to my chest. “There’s no way it outruns a car.”

“Why is it so—” his hands tumble about, executing a clumsy routine “—big?”

 “Beauty and the Beast,” Beatrice recalls. “Makes sense.”

“Does it?” A full-body shudder overwhelms Shri. He flops onto the couch, down then sideways, his hair grazing my thigh. “It can’t be a stray. It’s way too big. Do you know how much food it takes to feed something that big?”

“Might be your neighbor’s?” Beatrice offers.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I relent. 

Shri slides down the armrest—Beatrice is dragging him by the ankles to make room for herself between us. She’s surprisingly affectionate, and even more surprisingly unbothered by her desire for affection, seeking it out without conceit. “What does it want with you?” she asks, her lips frowning. 

I sigh. “I don’t know.”

“Ugh,” Shri says.

“Ugh,” I echo.

“We’ve got a week to deal with it,” Beatrice says, after a pause.

“We?” Shri says.

Beatrice squeezes my hand. 

“Thanks,” I tell them.

Shri fumbles for his phone. Beatrice peers over his shoulder to steal a glimpse. Shri voices sounds of discontent as his eyes dart across the tiny screen. “A problem for Monday,” he says at last. Work, probably. They act out their charade: Beatrice soothes him, or attempts to. It comes off backhanded. Shri fakes offense though he should know she doesn’t mean anything by it. Beatrice apologizes. Shri tells her all the time she’s been spending with those “no good finance bros” has made her “glib.” Beatrice decides work is where she draws the line, and fights back. 

I sink deeper into the brittle couch—I imagine it’s lost much of its integrity over the years—their squabbling calcifying around me, like a warm blanket draped over my body. My hand slips into my bag, caressing silicone, hard metal, and flimsy paper, until, coming upon leather, I curl my fingers around the hardcover and tug it free of its confinements. I unclip a mechanical pencil from the book’s coiled wire binding—not ideal, but it’ll do. I flip open the book to a blank page.

I start to sketch.

A basic rectangle, an oval—my singular concern is imitation, the fidelity of my pencil to the scene before me. I spare some thought to composition, motion, perspective, but my hand grows weak with each second of hesitation, my pencil heavy. So I compromise. I have to start, somehow. 

Sometimes, rarely, I’m able to lose myself in the rectangles and ovals, to submit wholly. Today, a liquid feeling demands my surrender. I give in to it. Around me, conversation diminishes into birdsong, while on paper, shapes assume meaning: the soft slant of Beatrice’s hair—intimacy at unexpected turns—the length of Shri’s legs, stretching without end—abundance. The beast is a question, riddled. A problem, solved.

“Oh,” someone says. Beatrice. “You’ve picked it up again.”

“An endless cycle of restriction and indulgence,” Shri says, shaking his head. “Like an eating disorder.”

“Don’t compare her art to an eating disorder,” Beatrice chides.

“Not her art,” Shri says, for some reason offended. “Just her process.”

“That’s equally distasteful.”

I can’t bring myself to make the usual excuses, blaming boredom or stress. I don’t tell them the truth either: that I started drawing again one ordinary winter’s day half a year after moving to the city, consumed by an ineffable, paralyzing want, as a mountain on the verge of eruption waits for divine permission.

I simply command, “Sit still,” and they do.

*

We stayed in on Saturday—Shri and I begged, and given the chance to put in more hours at work, Beatrice was happy to humor us. We made up for any missed sightseeing on Sunday, which was tumultuous and exhausting but ultimately uneventful, and decided, for the weekdays, to meet up at the start of the day and after work. So it goes: I wake, appear online for eight hours, nod at my Polish roommate in the stairwell on the way to the bathroom, drink myself silly after work, and fall into a fitful sleep at the end of the night.

I didn’t used to dream very much, and when I did, I wouldn’t remember much of it in the morning. But I’ve been dreaming nightly the past few months, disjointed dreams of the past and present: Los Angeles and its empty skies, the shade of blue that marked my adolescence, my parents, propped against an idyllic scene from childhood, and more often than I’d like, the beast.

Always, in these dreams with the beast, I am running, and all around me is a stark black—hollow, I think, as the wind whistles past, yet so impermeable it’s hard to tell. Though I don’t see it behind me, though it is silent, I feel it on my heels, surely catching up to me. I don’t know why it is chasing after me, but I keep running. I don’t tire, though I’m made aware this is an interminable pursuit: the dog, of me, and I, of something unknown. My body seems to require neither rest nor sustenance—or, it does, and I’m accumulating debt I may never pay off. In any case, I don’t stop running. I don’t ask questions. Empowered by my own vigor, I run and run and run. On with the race.

In my waking hours, I am less forgiving, more skeptical. As I lay on the couch dreary-eyed, startled out of sleep by an incessant droning, I wonder again where I was headed in the dream, why I had to keep going down the path before me, if I was desperate, what for, why not. 

Rolling off the couch onto all fours, I rush to answer the door since Shri—it has to be Shri—refuses to lay off the buzzer. Through the peephole, I catch his face, and Beatrice’s too, stretched as the skin of an overcooked egg. Wordlessly, I unlock the door and let them in.

“You’re happy to see us,” Shri says, shoving past me to slip off his Birkenstocks. 

“You woke me up,” I say, yawning. “It’s seven p.m.,” Beatrice says, disapproving.

“I’m tired.”

She sighs. “These naps—” Her hand twitches, as though suppressing a gesture her public speaking coach—I don’t know that she has one, though it seems like something her employer would offer, as a perk—counseled her against. “You’re feeding into a vicious cycle.”

“Long day at work,” I explain, knowing it won’t appease her.

“What happened?” Shri shouts from the kitchen. I peek around Beatrice and past the stove to see him pouring himself a glass of water.

“Work,” I yell back.

“Wednesdays,” Shri sympathizes. 

Beatrice nods like any of this is relatable to her. Then, “Oh,” she says, sidestepping the blanket now pooling at the foot of the couch for my desk, above which I’ve hung a few of my pint-sized sketches. I haven’t decided if I liked being reminded of them at work. “You finished it.”

“What did she finish?” Shri asks, suddenly behind me. He squints, mutters that he can’t see, then stalks over to Beatrice. Bending down, he gasps as he takes in the sketch. “Is this from yesterday?” he demands with childish glee.

“It’s very… intimate,” Beatrice says, the tips of her fingers grazing the broken edge, where I’ve ripped it out of the sketchpad. I consider its intimacy: the picture is cozy in size and depiction, Shri’s head halfway on Beatrice’s lap, the two of them bickering, the blurred idea of furniture in the background something domestic. There’s an odd flush to her cheeks, faint but undeniable. For some reason, that takes me more by surprise than her question. “Is it for sale?”

Tomorrow, as I stare at the ceiling in bed, it is Beatrice’s color, suffused and shy, spreading outward from her blush, that I will return to. For now, I shout, “No!” to hide, poorly, my blatant embarrassment. 

“Why not?” Shri says. “I’ll chip in.” He elbows Beatrice. “We can take turns showing it off.”

“No,” I repeat. To assign monetary value to something I’ve created on a whim, for fun, for myself, feels pornographic. I wouldn’t know how much to charge, anyway, and what this might herald. I don’t want to think about it. “We’re friends,” is what I tell them.

Shri rolls his eyes.

Walking over, I pry the picture off the wall and offer it to Beatrice. “Here,” I say. Then, to Shri, “Work it out with her.”

“And if I don’t want to?” Beatrice asks, uncharacteristically petulant, as I head to the kitchen for the night’s bottle of wine.

“I can pay you,” Shri says.

“With what?”

“Crystals, good karma, whatever you want!”

“Money?”

Shri groans. 

I close the fridge gently, wine in hand, and continue eavesdropping. “What if you ruin it? Spill a cup of coffee on it, then what? You’re so careless,” Beatrice says. I can tell she’s about to cave. On my tiptoes, I reach for a tiny cabinet above the sink. Streetlight filters hazily through the windowpane between sink and cabinet. “Not true,” Shri says, probably gesturing at himself. “Look at my sweater. I’ve had it for three years. Look at it!” he insists. “Doesn’t it look brand new?” I grab three wine glasses, and with the back of my hand, knock the cabinet door close. 

I don’t catch Beatrice’s response. I’m staring, suddenly, into perfectly round rubies inlaid in a sheet of black. I blink; a strong gale rushes at the window. Glossy fur splays across glass, the threat of a wet snout encroaches, a glob of mucus hangs off two gaping holes. 

At this distance, the beast is unusually discrete: nothing more or less than a mutt. Still, I scream. When Shri and Beatrice storm into the kitchen, Beatrice checking the lock on the door next to the window and Shri squeezing my shoulders, the beast has fled, leaving only a trail of mucus slithering down the glass.

“You’re fine,” Beatrice says, shuttling me back into the living room. 

“The wine—”

“I got it,” Shri says. “Forget about the dog.” He pumps the bottle of merlot high in the air. Beatrice must’ve agreed to share the sketch. “Let’s commence the merriment!”

*

I knew, as a creak of the floorboards woke me up, that the beast has broken into my house. I sit up, my heart kicking in my ribcage, and follow the cool draft into the kitchen, careful not to wake Beatrice and Shri, who are still passed out on the couch. Shivering like an autumnal leaf, I hug my elbows as I circle past the stove. I notice the door first, then the cabinets, spices, appliances—unmarked, functional, everything in its place. 

Except, before the open door: the beast.

It’s ugly as I remember it, though removed from the dark cracks of the city, its menacing feels pretend, as if at another time, in the right light, it may even endear. Though contracted into tiny holes, its pupils mar the center of its red eyes: blood and flesh, not cuts of gems. What I’d once considered unnatural texture is simply its patchy skin, dry and muddled into overbearing globules.

Releasing the wall, my fingers hot from the strength of my grip, I take a step toward the beast. It mirrors my movement. We freeze. I force a long inhale and watch the beast’s eyes transform into solar eclipses.

“Hi,” I try. It doesn’t return my greeting. I don’t know what I was expecting. 

It resumes its approach—warily, I think, its sinewy limbs limned by the streetlights, which seem brighter now than earlier—while I remain at a standstill, wanting to run, wanting to stay.

“What do you want?” I try again, swaying on the balls of my feet. “Tell me. What’s the big idea, stalking me, following me home? Why are you obsessed with me?”

It stops at my feet. I retreat—one step. I force myself to stop. We stare at each other. The dog tilts his head, affecting an innocence completely divorced from the beast that lives in my head.

Laughter gushes out of me. 

“I guess I’m obsessed with you, too.” I crouch down, still smiling, my heels meeting the bony part of my thigh. “But I think you should let me go.”

“Shit,” Shri exclaims from the living room. I must’ve woken him up. There’s a flurry of motion before Beatrice is groaning, too. “Wake up,” he says, “it’s way past midnight.”

Desperate now that Shri and Beatrice are awake and bound to check on me, I demand, as if it were a Roman oracle, or a magic eight ball, an answer—the one I’ve been hoping, secretly, it was sent here to provide, its presence in my life more than just coincidence, because I am owed meaning, that it should appear on a deed in my name, a gift from the kind benefactors of the world.

“What are you doing?”

My gaze snaps toward the doorway. Beatrice—messy hair, rumpled clothes, still beautiful—frowns upon me. I curl my hands in my pajamas. The dog may not survive our combined scrutiny, not at this distance. We will ruin its mythology. 

“What’s that?” Beatrice says.

As I twist back around, my gut shivers, hopeful, then clenches. The dog is gone, as I feared, but on the floor where Beatrice is pointing is a small, dirt-streaked block the size of my palm. “I don’t know,” I reply. 

Frowning, I strain to make out the object itself—it looks like a plastic-encased notebook, buttoned close in the front like a teenage diary from the aughts—along with Beatrice, along with Shri, newly emerged from the living room, the three of us huddling over this small unknown, overcome by some emotion into inaction. 

“You’re always trying to prove yourself—”

“No,” Shri says. 

“I’ll get some paper towels,” Beatrice says.

“It’s fine,” I say, tugging it closer with a finger. Shri yelps, Beatrice recoils. “It’s probably harmless.”

“Germs,” Beatrice shouts, scurrying to the counter. 

“What is it?” Shri demands.

I crane my neck, my chin juts past my knees. With clumsy fingers, as though performing surgery on an infant doll with my mother’s tweezers, I unclip the diary. It falls open to a random page.

“A sketch?” Shri says. 

“Yeah,” I say, just as confused. 

A quiet scene fills the page: two shrubs, in sharp relief against the fading expanse of a lake. Strange composition and subject choice, overall kind of funny looking. But I like how the sun dives through the clouds, reflecting on the lake in a circle. The world, captured in its strange honesty, is vastly peaceful.

“Here,” Beatrice says, handing me half a roll’s worth of paper towels. 

“Thanks,” I say, watching as the white sheets land on the sketchpad.

Pushing them aside, I notice something between the shrubs—a botched erase? On my knees, I bow down for a closer look. 

It’s an amorphous black cloud, level with the shrubs, desiccated. 

“Oh my God,” Shri mutters.

“Oh my fucking God,” I say, meeting his gaze.

*

“Make sure your kitchen door is locked,” Beatrice says. 

“It’s locked.”

“Please,” she says. “Double check after we leave. For my sanity.”

“I will,” I assure her. “Want me to drive you?”

“Drunk?” Beatrice says, horrified. 

Shri gives me a thumbs down. 

“Just trying to be nice.” I extend my arms. “See you tomorrow.”

“See ya,” Shri says, coming in for his hug. 

“Bye,” Beatrice says, smushed into my neck. 

I wave them off, closing the door as they step onto the pavement. Officially, the kitchen door was wide open and the sketchpad lying mysteriously on the floor when I stumbled in for water, moments before they woke up. Shri doesn’t seem to care, but I don’t think Beatrice believes me.

I walk back into the kitchen to stand by the window, considering. The world looms before me: the future, quiet and wondrous, hugs the curve of a streetlamp; behind it, the suggestion of something insidious. In the distance, civilization emerges in a glimmering spray.

I pad up the stairs and into the bathroom. I brush my teeth. I leave the door unlocked.

——————————————————
——————————————————
Belgia Jong is a writer and programmer based in California. This is her first publication.

ART FEATURED
Howie Good
Riddle of the Sands
collage