Olive's monster was stuffed under a floorboard in her bedroom, and recently it had made it clear that it wanted out. Olive couldn't remember when it had become clear there was something under a floorboard in her room, but she supposed it was right around the beginning of her periods; her mother kept stating with conviction that her menarche was a sea change, whatever that was. It was something that changed everything, apparently. Periods were like political assassinations or natural disasters that leveled your house. Her mother never used small similes.
Olive was young for periods and a bit old for monsters: she was ten, close to eleven. Young for menstruation, but she found that despite her strident and well-meaning mother's declarations she didn't feel the still-irregular bleeding was all that bad. It required neatness more than anything, and Olive was up to that. She could ask anyone, literally anyone, including strange librarians and teenage cashier boys, where she could get some pads and not feel embarrassment. Her bedroom monster was much, much harder to talk about, and she'd stammered and blushed practically orange and started but then stopped too many times to count until she finally told her family about her monster. Their reaction was much more like the reaction she might have expected from a less liberal family when she'd brought up her first period: there was blushing, and loudness, and hushing, and after that there was a quiet talk in the living room about what was appropriate for her age now, and about how she shouldn't bring up monsters while people were eating. This arbitrary rule- one in a sparse but regular line of arbitrary rules that adults would toss out at children when they weren't sure what they were saying- was, to Olive, a signal to never speak of it again.
The monster was growing, though. She kind of felt that the monster first made itself known around her first period, but she knew that it was getting larger because it was starting to press up against the floorboard. She had felt a sort of trembling at first, while she was laying in bed. She'd gone to sleep and didn't think about it until a week later when she heard the sort of squeaking one would expect of nails in walls being stressed in a high wind. It was calm and boring outside. She got up to investigate this, and when she stood to look at her door frame there was a push from underneath one of the floorboards, which was suddenly loose. She stamped, and heard the squeaking again. The floorboard smoothed back to its' previous flatness and she got no more from it that night, despite standing just beside it for a half hour after that.
Later- a few days- she came into her room after school and she tripped on the floorboard, which was canted. The ones around it were trembling. She stood up and breathed to slow her heart (her mother had taught her that after noticing Olive's tendency to stop breathing when she was frustrated,) and then jumped on the floorboard with both feet. There was the pulling squeak sound as before, and the floorboards moved in sympathy. She felt bad right away, and lay down on the floor, her abdomen pressed to the part of the floor that was shifting.
"I'm sorry." she said. The whining stopped, and so did the trembling. Then, it stayed silent for two weeks. She doubted her own perceptive powers, since whatever she'd apologized to may not have existed. She carried a light confusion with her. When the two weeks was up she was laying in her bed, not sleeping but not awake, when she heard the nails straining again. It was louder, there were more nails involved, so she got up and this time she lay down on the floor, like someone would lay down on the ice to rescue a friend who's fallen through it.
It was the right move: she saw it right away. It was pressed underneath her floor, in what must have been a crawlspace. She could only see a shoulder or rump: she saw an expanse of long hairs on a body that was broad, and the color was distinct even if nothing else was- the pelt was silver-brown. This, of all things, struck her as being weird, so she crawled back to bed, keeping low to the floor as she did, avoiding breakthrough (hers or its.)
This became pattern. Nighttime- not sleeping- stretching iron noise, whining- slipping onto the floor- pressing an eye to the cracks in the floor to see a thing, some sort of thing, some...monster? It was a non-human, but other than that it was just...alive. There was the possibility it was cute. She determined to find out if it was, so she took a small hammer from one of her parent's tool boxes and she started pulling up the floor in pieces. The process was rewarding but slow. She would prize up some part of a board and see something that looked like a shoulder blade, a long skinny bone beneath the long-silver-brown, and then put it back. The monster whined, a small little whine like the whine of a very young puppy. She murmured to it as she did this, though not because she was feeling maternal or particularly caring (yet,) but she didn't want anyone to come into her room or even near it to listen at the door. She was careful about her careful parents, who might stumble upon her breathing secret in an attempt to make sure Olive herself was OK.
The boards came partially up and then went fully down, one every other day or so. She saw so much long silvery-brown hair that she realized the hairs were feathers, then realized that it was a mix. There were limbs, basic arms and legs and something else that were either wings or extra arms. An afternoon about ten days since she'd started there was an eye looking right at her from the new hole she created. The eye was perfectly round and it was the color of muck. Olive thought it beautiful. She thought it perfectly beautiful, utter and complete like the circle made with a sextant.The creature, looking at her with either perfect or compromised vision depending on how many eyes it ultimately had, whined lightly. Olive heard a plea in it for the first time.
She began to pack the next day, which was a Saturday, which was a good day for it. Her mother and father were whining about their own things (Olive thought of her house as Whining, as if that were an Estate name with her mother and father Lady and Lord Whine) and therefore weren't paying much attention to Olive's rustlings in the closet with the suitcases in it. At one point her father yelled through the ceiling, generally toward her room:
"What are you doing up there?" His voice was gruff. He sounded gruff when he yelled, though he swore that he didn't feel that way nine times out of ten. He was simply trying to be audible, he'd said.
Olive had been packing some long underwear from a skiing trip they'd taken the year before: she wanted to prepare for cold, but was forgoing the bathing suits, since she could swim in her underwear when the need arose. "Moving my desk!" she yelled back from the top of the stairs. She hoped that wasn't overdoing it: furniture moving was maybe demanding more attention than she wanted, but saying "nothing!" would have been a more obvious lie. She waited, and heard her parents talking and using her name. She would miss them after she left, but there was no question for her about whether freeing her monster and leaving was the right course for those up to the challenge. She used the word "challenge" to describe to herself what she was doing. She put in the long underwear, the sweaters, the extra socks and a pair of pretty shoes, since they were new and she couldn't bear to leave them, gathering dust on the patent and the new buckle like everything else would. She packed all of her hair ties in a box and then that box in a box- boxes were useful no matter what your life circumstances were.
The monster rustled while she packed but didn't make any noises. It was Saturday, the planned-for Saturday, so she waited on her bed for her witching hour. She'd intended to make that traditional- starting at midnight on the dot- but fell asleep on her bed, slumped from a sitting position. She woke up startled: her creature (her Creature, she thought) had finally made a noise to wake her, the clever thing. So. Olive stood and crept down the hall, peeped through the conveniently cracked-open bedroom door, getting a lovely, assuring view of the 'rents sleeping off their customary Saturday bottle of red. Her mother's arm was laying on her father's chest, and her father's head was turned toward her mom. Olive decided it would be all right to miss them when the time came, whenever that was. She decided to let the homesick tearing happen once she was free of said home. She crept back to her room and dropped to her knees and dug her fingers under a floorboard- the floorboard- and pulled. Her Creature waited, its' breath held as far as she could tell.
The board came up easily. She spied the beautiful muck-colored eye watching her and it hurried her, so the next one came up easily, and the next. She had been worried about making noise and waking her lightly potted parents, but everything was pre-loosened by her Creature's back or chest or four arms or whatever; the beast itself was slowly revealed in long rectangular strips. It was incredible, literally incredible! It- her Creature- was covered in that glossy brown-silver feather pelt (the feathers were so fine they looked like hair whenever it moved) and it had three of those eyes. The arms, or wings, remained a mystery no matter how many floorboards Olive pried up: each time she thought the arm/wings would resolve into either arm or wing there was movement and the picture was lost. She was smiling and crying as she squinted into the sub-floor gloom to get a final understanding, but it just evaded her.
Finally the- Olive's- monster was free, It only had to stand and step up onto the remains of Olive's bedroom floor, near the bookshelves where there was still someplace to stand. It did, with coaxing. Still no resolution about the arms or wings- It was keeping them behind its' back, holding them behind Itself and sticking what might be described as its chest out. It looked nothing like a 'chicken in that position. The girl's wish that It look recognizable vanished, which was for the best. She looked at the (her) Monster and the Monster looked at her. The perfect triangle of perfectly round muck-colored eyes were warm, wettish as if misted over with some tears. Olive was frightened and paralyzed with unexpressed affection for a while: her Creature!
The thing blinked, It's eyes in tandem, and Olive moved. "We have to leave now" she said aloud, to herself, but the Creature moved out of the way so she could grab the duffel bag of her father's that she'd packed. It was too big for her- she hadn't considered- but the Creature leaned down (It was tallish) and spiked one of Its' appendages through the straps. Olive thought: it's a wing! Then she doubted it. She went to the window and slid out, turning to help her Thing but the Creature had somehow changed Its' mass and had moved through the sash easily. She watched It re-configure to Its' true size, and It was twice what it had been in Olive's room. She smiled up at It. The three eyes blinked and watered, unused to fresh air. Then It reached again with Its' arm-wings and pulled Olive herself up to sit on Its' back.
She sad with her legs cris-cross applesauce, a nursery prompt that she would never abandon. She looked around at the roofs, at her window, at the headlights in the distance, and then her new Beast pushed upward. Olive at first thought that the Creature was getting taller all of a sudden, but: they were flying. The Creature (Friend, thought Olive) was flying with Its' wing-arms, the superfine feathering waving in the air, kind of forming into long whiskery fingers. It was frightening- there were heights to consider- but it was also awesome, so that she was too excited to stand up and look straight down at what she was leaving. She felt great. She felt scared. It was confusing.
Her Friend brought them down in a forest preserve that was a few miles from her house. She knew it from her pre-Creature ( Friend, thought Olive-to-self) days walking there with the abandoned parents. This may have been during a summer, though she was unwilling to swear to anything just then. She sat on her Friend for what must have seemed a long time to It, and It shook the girl off; Olive landed hard on her butt and side and let out air, nothing coming out of her but a long wheeze. The Friend looked down at her with Its' unblinking night-brown eyes and sensed her lack of oxygen, or so she presumed: It leaned down and blew in her face with warm and eyewatering exhales until Olive put her hand to Its' mouth. It kissed, or it slurped. She couldn't tell.
The girl had thought to bring a sleeping bag, which was fortunate because it was cold and lucky because it was one of the more sturdy weatherproof kind. She offered it to her Friend because she'd been taught that it was polite by her mama. It did not take her up on the offer so instead she lay down in it herself, and the Creature (Friend? thought Olive-to-self) lay down on top of her. She was crushed, she was being crushed, she must be being crushed, this is what it feels like to be crushed...Olive thought these things on top of each other before she dreamed. In her dream, the Creature and she were flying still, over unrecognizable territory (not that she would know what was recognizable and what wasn't, ) but the fine silver-brown feathers that formed into fingers were touching her. They were gliding over her skin, under her overly heavy clothes; they touched her arms and neck and shins and chest (including the enlarged nipples that she kept hidden in largish t-shirts.) They tickled, or alternately chafed, or made a sucking noise, and she couldn't keep any of the sensations or sounds straight in her head.
They woke up the next morning- well, Olive woke the next morning with an entirely different noise near her ear: the Friend was making a chuck-whhirrrr noise on her right but when she looked she couldn't find It. She rose and put on her shoes and then went to find It, before even having her morning pee. She walked down a path that she thought she knew but that looked very different than what she remembered. The chuck-whirr noise grew so she followed, ignoring her bladder, ignoring the traffic sounds from the far-off highway that came on the wind, ignoring the wind. It took her to a copse, then a small gulley surrounded by trees where the Creature was half-buried in peat and old leaves, whirring and chucking from the back of its' throat. Olive spoke to It.
"What are you doing?" she asked her Friend, and It answered by continuing Its' noise. She looked around the hole it had dug for itself. The soil wasn't like what she'd seen in the area before: it wasn't like the playground dirt she'd sifted in her earlier years, and it wasn't like the dirt she had crept on when she went behind some bushes with a boy she knew from said playground, later. Then it was safe enough to practice kissing, and she sifted the earth as she did so. She had a basis for comparison. The Friend's dirt was different, so she reached out to sift it; when she did, her bladder let some but not all of its' tension go. Her pee made the weird dirt at her feet congeal, almost instantly. Olive looked at it, some of the dry earth still in her hand, and the Creature changed its' noisemaking.
"Ssssrrarrarrarr," It said. It was calm as the most peaceful lake Olive could think of. Its' eyes blinked, one at a time, a triangle. The girl was calm when she bent to pick up the new mud she'd made of the weird dirt and her own urine, placid despite the slight look of revulsion on her own face. She didn't notice her face, was the thing: she was noticing the mud, how it held the shape of the inside of her fist, how it was better this way than dry, come to think of it. Her Friend kept making the new noise, and she kept shaping it; she fell to her knees to try to get more and when she saw it wasn't enough she pulled down her pants and peed on the gulley floor until she was empty. Part of her knew she was gross, more gross than she had ever been, probably- and that was including her infant days, which she knew to be tremendously gross if her mother's vivid stories were anything to go by- but most of her liked the mud and the texture. Most of her liked the way she could make things with it.
She looked at the Friend, or Creature and It looked at her. "SSrrraaaarrah-arr" It said. She nodded in agreement and leaned down into the strange, blue-black, pungent, fantastic mud at her feet. She started squishing it into something...it was person-shaped, this thing she was making, and though she didn't feel it at the time it looked remarkably like a parent: it was a likeness of her parents, made into one, with her mother's wildish hair and her fathers perpetual hat. She molded on a likeness of a cardigan her mother wore constantly, and she put a little slate in one of the hands about the same proportions of her father's cell phone. She hummed while she did it.
