Unnatural Creatures

“We should go,” Matthew said. He whistled, blowing air across the back of my neck. It was supposed to be a signal, secret code for when we couldn’t talk, but Matthew was always changing the rules about what things meant. “My mom’s picking us up.”

We sat on the train. It was still hot. Matthew cradled the Jenny Haniver in his lap. Crisp, bright sunlight fell through the windows and broke across the fake creature, picking out its pinched, desiccated face and crumbling tail.

I couldn’t believe he took it.

“Easy,” he said. “I held it behind me and when we walked out, I held it in front of me.”

“But, why?” I asked.

He wanted to see how it was made. He wanted to find all the seams and split them open, pry off the draping and reveal whatever it was hiding. Mr. Jabricot, he said, was a genius and Matthew didn’t understand a half, a quarter even, of the things he did. He held out the creature while he talked and I took it because otherwise he would wave it around, dragging eyes to our corner where I balanced a piece of stolen loot across my knees, surprised by its lightness and clean perfection. If there were seams, they were invisible. Up close, the thing looked like no one could possibly have made it. It looked more dead than dead.

“Don’t take it apart,” I said.

Matthew stopped talking. We both stared at the creature, beautiful and dry and impossible. “I won’t do it today,” he said. “And we’ll have to keep it at your house. If my mom finds it, something bad will happen.”

“She’ll find out about Mr. Jabricot.”

“She’ll ban us from the museum.”

“She’ll ground you.”

“She’ll say I’m a bad influence.”

“She won’t let us be friends.”

We ran out of bad things before we got to my stop.

My parents didn’t notice the Jenny Haniver. I carried it to my room while Mom was in the kitchen and Dad flipped from one version to the next of the evening news. We had a nice dinner: pasta and ice cream, a conversation about plumbing and neighbors that drifted past me, stuffed with people I didn’t really know.

“How’s Matthew?” Mom asked. She reserved washing the dishes for time to talk about things she thought were important. She scrubbed tomato sauce off a plate.

“He’s fine.” I stacked glasses.

“You’ve known each other for a while.”

“Yep.” I wiped a bowl dry and thought about the creature tucked under my bed and the way Matthew had looked at it, like it was the sort of thing he saw every day, like he knew how the pieces went together. Old hat. The usual.

“Well,” Mom said. She turned on the garbage disposal and let it roar through the kitchen. “I hope you guys are having a nice time.”

In the middle of the night, the creature woke me up. I could feel it lying there, under my bed, sending woozy thoughts of upside-down waves and vast, wet shadows with rows of sharp teeth seeping up through the mattress and into my sleep. I got out from under the covers and bent over until my knees touched the floor.

“Go to sleep,” I said.

I climbed back into bed and felt really dumb.

In the middle of a dream, one that involved the underside of waves and shadows with teeth, I carried the creature to the bathroom. It needed water, it told me. I shut the door, turned on the light, and filled the bathtub.

Not too cold, it said.

And I said, please?

It splashed water on me when I dropped it in, a pale shape that sunk and then darted sideways, growing fatter and more graceful as it made circles around the tub. Its scales were sleek silver gray, its body streaked and dabbed with black from the top of its head to the tips of its pliable, swishing fins. As it swam, the black drifted up and became a cloud of swaying hair. The creature rolled over in the tub and spouted water at me from newly plump cheeks.

This, it said, is the equivalent of laughing. At you. You should see your face.

In the middle of a dream, one in which I was wiping water off my face, Jenny Haniver draped her arms over the side of the tub and asked me if I believed in monsters.

“There are so many different kinds,” she said. “You have the ones that look like what we are, like me, and then you have the other ones. It’s hard to decide which are more dangerous. I guess you could make an argument either way.” She lifted one arm off the tub and held it up as if she were admiring the softness of her skin. Then she reached out, pinched a few strands of my hair, and tore them off my head.

“Ow!” I said. This was more than I signed up for. I was going to kill Matthew, if I ever saw him again. I was going to throw him from the Ferris wheel, have him eaten by crabs, feed him to the platypus, turn him in to the museum, turn him in to his mother, leave him alone—all alone—with a dried-out bit of fish and bit of monkey, freshly reconstituted into a beautiful monster.

Jenny Haniver took something thin and sharp from her own hair. A needle, curved at one end and straight at the other. She threaded it with a strand of my hair and pointed to her side where a split had appeared, a seam bursting open even though there was nothing coming through.

“It wears out,” she said. “That’s a good thing to remember.”

When I woke up, the bathtub was empty. It smelled like fish and there was a clump of long, black hair caught around the opening of the drain. Puddles dotted the floor. I cleaned everything up before my parents could get out of bed.

Matthew’s voice flew out of the phone and hit me in the ear. “You have to get over here! Mr. Jabricot has something new that he’s going to try. He says we can be there. We can help. We can be the first people to see it. Do you even know how amazing that is?” I could hear him breathing hard into the phone, blowing big, whistling breaths down the line at me. I was pretty sure this wasn’t secret code for anything, except for the fact that Matthew, if left unattended, would collapse from the thrill.

“What about the Jenny Haniver?” I asked. How do you tell your friend that his stolen treasure walked itself out while you were sleeping? Or dragged itself out, on two arms and a flopping, shredding tail? How are you supposed to tell anyone something like that?

“Don’t worry about it. Mr. Jabricot knows everything. He thinks we’re hilarious.” Matthew laughed and I could hear someone else laughing behind him. “Come on. Hurry up.”

How are you supposed to talk to the person who you used to think was your best friend in the world? “Sure,” I said.