Maybe Just A Bite

012

            Knox and his parents lived in entirely too different worlds. They'd carted him off to boarding school at the first possible opportunity, far away from the little cabin they resided in a scraggly forest by his father's beach. His mother was a nymph tethered to thin trees and sparse vegetation, and it was close enough to the ocean for his father to visit. The cabin was a new development, a shelter built entirely for their human child. He'd spent his formative years there, vague memories of tiny feet sinking into warm sand and his mother's ever impassive face. His father wasn't around as much, off doing whatever it was sirens did, but Knox had been scared of his pointed teeth, the hissing lilt of his broken English. Knox's human vocal cords couldn't produce the harsh clicking and sharp noises of siren language, and it wouldn't have done any good to know it anyway, so they'd learned English for him.

It was later, when he was older and in the few weeks of in between, when school session had just let out and it was too soon to stick him in summer camp, when he would reside in the cabin and look at his parents who might as well have been strangers, that he found the books. They'd argued after he'd went to bed, the crescendo of his father's rough voice and his mother's wispy tones had woken him, and he'd stared at the painted ceiling as he'd listened, counting the flowers his mother had made in careful brushstrokes and unending time. He didn't know what they were arguing about, never given the opportunity to learn their languages, but the sinking feeling in his gut figured it was about himself. He had no point of reference to think it would have been about anything else.

It had quietened abruptly, the voices cut off by the slam of an uncaring door behind them. He had held his breath, waiting for five seconds, ten seconds, a minute, an hour before carefully standing, pushing his blankets into a crumpled heap at the end of his bed. He ventured into the rest of the cabin on light feet, trying to remember which boards creaked from when he'd been home briefly for winter break. No one was in the cabin, and it was too dark to see their figures outside. Knox was ten, and he'd watched a horror movie with his bunk mates about a cabin in a dark secluded area just like this one. The structure settled often, groaning and creaking of the wood against the foundation, strange knocking noises that were easily rationalized as branches knocking against the walls. It was nighttime though, and there were no streetlights like there were in human towns, no other buildings on their stretch of land. Suddenly the creaking seemed more sinister, now that he was alone, images of the movie coming back to him. He shivered at the thought of the first woman who'd been killed, a blond lady who'd been gossiping on an outdated telephone, her fingers twirling through the looping wire that connected the receiver. Carefully curated shots of a looming, shadowy figure had creeped behind her, and she'd been stabbed in the back before she'd even had time to scream.

Knox had felt unreasonably scared then, alone in the darkness of his parent's home, and he'd fled to the room his mother slept in when he was there. It was empty, save for her bioluminescent fish that cast a bluish tint across the space, and Knox crawled underneath the bed, wrought with a sudden fear of the dark and an overactive imagination. It was dusty under the bed, and his knees dug into the various buttons and paintbrushes that'd been forgotten there, but he felt marginally safer. There was a pile of books shoved into the corner, but it was too dark to read the words. He'd fallen asleep there that night and had woken to his father's glowing green eyes and clawed hands digging into his shoulder as he dragged him out.

A couple of days later, he remembered the novels hidden beneath the bed, and he'd snuck into her room again to look at them. There he found titles about raising a human infant and English workbooks. They'd been well worn, scribbles in a different language filling the margins and sticky-note tabs of different developmental stages. Knox hadn't known what to do with the warmth in his chest at the knowledge of the abandoned books.