Pet: Chapters 3-5

Jam stared in silence as Pet stood up from its crouch, its full length looming through the air.

“Sorry,” it said, a bag of broken glass clattering against a wood floor this time. “Still calibrating to this body, this world."

“What about now?” it asked, and the sound was a hand dragged across the taut skin of a drum, low and resonant and clear.

“What about now?” it asked, and the sound was a hand dragged across the taut skin of a drum, low and resonant and clear.

“I should tell her I’ve arrived,” Pet said, and Jam jumped up, a current of alarm galvanizing her.

It seemed incongruous in that moment for her to be facing down a seven-foot-tall creature with gold claws and bloody horns, but anyone who had ever seen Bitter lose her temper would probably agree that between Pet and Bitter, Pet was the less scary option.

Pet reached out to lift Jam, with Bitter’s obscene dead hands around her ribs, and set her aside firmly. “You will be safe. Don’t worry.”

Jam was expecting them to go unhinged, to scream endlessly at the thing standing before them, but there were a few moments of shocked silence instead as Pet stared at them and they stared at Pet.

Not taking her eyes off Pet for one second, Bitter stretched out a hand and blindly patted their duvet and pillows before finding Aloe’s arm and squeezing the flesh of his bicep.

Aloe glared right back at her. “My friend, vex if you want to vex. Me, all I know is that I am looking at that monster you painted with your own hands. Looking at it with my own two koro-koro eyes as it’s standing in front of us, and you want to come and say it’s not your fault? Try it!”

Her parents were fighting, yelling at each other in front of her, in front of Pet, who had pulled back into its aura of lethal, who was now a snarl embodied, danger that she had brought into the house.

Her parents were fighting, yelling at each other in front of her, in front of Pet, who had pulled back into its aura of lethal, who was now a snarl embodied, danger that she had brought into the house.

Jam squeezed her eyes shut, the dresser like dream-wood under her hands, all the sound blurring into one raucous whine in her ears.

They looked at each other, a silent understanding thrumming between them.

I don’t know yet, I am rife with unknowns, part of the hunt is to make the not-known known.

But Pet hadn’t moved; it just kept watching them with its implacable face, its weight loud loud loud in the floorboards, translating directly to Jam’s feet.

He bent her fingers one by one, cracking the knuckles. “For what? We’re both alive when we fight. We’re magnificent; we’re testing our aliveness against each other. How fast is your alive? How smooth is your alive? How hard, how resilient? We’re alive because we can be hurt; we’re alive because we can heal. I think it’s beautiful. It’s why I fight.”

She could feel Pet’s cool weight, indifferent to Bitter’s distress and Aloe’s anger.

It was calm even as her parents’ emotions spiked and ebbed, twisted and spat.

They both looked too brittle; she didn’t like it, the way fatigue was ringing their eyes in dark circles.

It was always crowded with succulents that Bitter kept buying at the farmers’ market and Jam kept trying to relocate into other parts of the house so they could actually use the table.

Its hands dangled, the metal talons dragging mild grooves as Pet moved to get comfortable on the floor.

The revolution had been slow and ponderous, but it had weight, and that weight built up a momentum, and when that momentum finally broke forth, it was with a great and accumulated force.

There was no twisting away from the repercussions that the angels brought, justice rising like a sun over the hill in a loud morning.

There had been so much counseling, so many treatment programs, so much rehabilitation to be done. So many amends to be made, the makings of how different justice could look.

Jam had heard stories of how horrifying it had been to see the truth of how many monsters there were in Lucille—the public ones, the private ones, the chameleons, the freestyle solitary ones, the charismatic smiling ones.

The stories seemed to scald her mouth.

She let out a breath, and tension she hadn’t realized she was still holding unfurled, an open petal in her shoulders.

She’d been worried that the house would feel different with what Pet had said, that maybe there’d be a malevolent thread spiking through the air and it would needle its way into Jam’s head and she wouldn’t be able to hold herself together long enough to find out where it was coming from.

“As opposed to alive meat?” Malachite retorted, and even the uncles all the way over at the table laughed.

Beloved gave the world a long-suffering look, and Jam leaned against a cabinet with a grin plastered on her face, watching them banter.

Her eyes moved from face to face in the kitchen, measuring the happiness that permeated their skin, their teeth, their air.

To be honest, Jam knew that at any other time, the idea of living in such loving tumult would’ve made Jam want to crawl out of her skin and leave her body behind for a little private silence somewhere else, but right then she was a little scared and feeling more alone than usual.

The thought of being surrounded by people, with all their worlds crowding out hers, of being swaddled with their noise—it felt like maybe it could be a comforting thing.

Beloved had sat down with her and Redemption during their first big fight, when they were thirteen, to arbitrate.