“Badass. Where did it come from?” Zee asked in a hushed tone.
“I’m not sure, but it seems she may be our first guest,” Maxime said.
I rose to my feet and looked between them. Hope sparked in my chest, and I needed to hear it again before I got too carried away. “So we’re doing this? We’re actually doing this?”
“We’ll do a final vote once Silas and Ash get here, but I cannot imagine a scenario in which we walk away.” Maxime offered a fangy smile, and I felt my heart leap.
I lunged at both men before me, wrapping my arms around them to draw them into a tight hug. “Thank you! Thank you for including me.”
“We couldn’t do it without you, Wolfie,” Zee said softly.
When I let go and leaned away from them, I scanned the area again, trying to picture it the way Maxime did. It was… it was going to be incredible.
Maxime announced, “Welcome to Creature Comforts Inn.”
Bowen
Present
Sitting alone on a park bench was my favorite part of the day. Mostly because I wasn’t alone, but I could finally let my guard down and not have to pretend to be polite or pretend to care about small talk. Small talk was exhausting, and I never really knew how to shift the conversation to something more interesting, especially when my attention was often divided. How could I focus on the trivial words of a person when there were far more interesting conversations happening around me?
Except… I couldn’t let anyone know I was hearing a conversation no one else could. I’d had to learn that the hard way. Sure, it was cute when I was little, talking with imaginary friends, until I knew things I had no right to know. Once I moved into my teenage years, it was less cute and more, “there’s something wrong with him, he needs medical help.” I went alongwith it for a while because maybe Ididneed help; I mean, who doesn’t? After several different medication regimens, where some dulled me not just to the voices I heard, but to everything, and others only enhanced the intensity of it, making the world too loud to focus, I decided to keep my mouth shut and pretend I was just like everyone else.
I only heard human voices, not animals. Nope, definitely didn’t hear the squirrels laugh and tease as they chased each other through the bushes, or the cat that told me his tale of woe at only being fed once a day, or the birds that loved to talk about the best places to get crumbs and scraps of food. None of that. Just regular, boring, small talk from humans who never actually spoke their minds, and who I couldn’t figure out what they actually wanted.
The thing about animals… they don’t lie. Some of them were tricksters and tried to get you to do what they wanted, but they didn’t lie. At least not to me. Especially not once they knew I could understand them. Unlike most people, they genuinely seemed pleased to see me and didn’t simply tolerate me. Any time I met a new animal that discovered I could hear them, they would get so excited they couldn’t stop themselves from sharing all kinds of information with me.
Deciphering what I heard from them didn’t come easily. It wasn’t that each squawk or squeak had a corresponding word in English. There was noGoogle Translatefor mourning doves or mountain lions. Itstarted with impressions, basic instincts, and emotions that were conveyed, but the longer I spent listening and interacting, the more I could pick up.
Now, after twenty-six years of listening, I had a pretty good handle on most land animal languages. Water life was a bit more challenging; it was like hearing it through a distortion filter. It took a great deal of concentration to pick up the simpler concepts, but the more complicated communication they tried to convey was just beyond my grasp.
On a bench near the duck pond was one of my favorite places, at least in the city, where I didn’t have to pretend around people. I put an earbud in my ear, not that I had anyone to call, but I wore it in case someone saw me talking to myself. My lips stretched into a smile as the familiar V in the water formed, pointing directly to where I sat. A few minutes later, the beautiful mallard duck with iridescent green and blue feathers on his head hopped onto the shore and zoomed toward me, his little webbed feet slapping delightfully on the cement.
“Bowen!” the duck quacked with enthusiasm. It was always funny to hear the way each animal interpreted my name, but they loved using it. I think it made them feel special, like I honored them by sharing my name.
Pulling a bag of peas from my messenger bag, I threw a few on the ground. “Hey, Bill. It’s good to see you. How are youdoing?”
Bill snickered in his duckish way, amused at the name I’d given him. Many animal names were hard to say properly with a human tongue, though I tried when I could. Bill, like many others, seemed to find a lot of humor in having a human name. “Good. Water good. Boats little. Sun good.”
He chittered as he scarfed up the peas, talking through each bite, and I looked out at the water. It was calm, and the sun shone off the surface. Being a weekday, it wasn’t as busy as the weekend, meaning fewer people and fewer paddle boats stirring around the water. A good day for the ducks, it seemed.
Another V formed in the water, and a few more ducks popped up. It wouldn’t take long for me to be surrounded. They always seemed to sense when I was here. Bill, the mallard, looked up at me and tilted his head. “Bowen good?”
I sighed and gave a nod. “Yeah. I’m fine. I don’t know, maybe, maybe not.”
When the other ducks reached us, they each greeted me with happy wags of their cute little duck butts, and I threw out more peas. Bill came closer and nipped at my leg, drawing my attention down.
“Not good?”
There was no reason to play it off the way I did in the many human conversations I tried to end as quickly as possible. “I don’t know. I’ve been feeling weird, I guess. Like,really antsy.”
Bill looked at the edge of the grass under the bench, and I followed his gaze to see a trail of ants streaming in the crack of the sidewalk toward the grass. “Ants?”
I chuckled and shook my head. “No. Not ants. Antsy, it’s like… restless, like you need to do something but you don’t know what.”
This feeling had been stirring in me for a while, but I couldn’t place what was causing it. Nothing had changed recently; no new job, new partner, oranything. Nothing new, but this feeling churning in my gut.
“Bowen swim.”
