Steve Carr

THE BEASTS ON HUMMINGBIRD STREET

Just past dawn the motorized roar of a garbage truck awoke Liam out of a sound sleep. Using his knuckles, he wiped the sleep from his eyes and stared through blurred vision at the open bedroom window. It took him a moment to realize that what he thought he was seeing perched on the windowsill was a vulture. He blinked several times as he stared, mouth agape at the bird's small, pink, fleshy head, curved white beak and large body covered in glossy black feathers. He fumbled for his glasses on the stand next to the bed and hastily put them on. He looked back at the window. The vulture was gone.

“What are you doing?” his wife, Claire, said groggily. She was lying in a fetal position facing away from him on her side of the mattress. “You're shaking the bed.”

“There was a vulture on the windowsill,” he said.

“You're dreaming. Go back to sleep.”

Liam laid back on his pillow and glanced at the window several times before removing his glasses and placing them back on the stand. He closed his eyes, and to the sounds of a lawn mower chewing up a nearby lawn, drifted back into a restless sleep.

Awaking three hours later to the tolling bell of the alarm clock, Liam immediately sat up. The sheet with patterns of green ferns and bright red macaws was crumpled up on Claire's side of the bed. The bathroom shower was running and steam curled out from under the bathroom door. He sat on the edge of the bed and placed his bare feet on the cool, dark green linoleum. The yelling and screeching of children playing in the street poured in through the open window.

At first he only peripherally saw through his impaired vision the crocodile crawling toward him across the floor. Startled, he turned his head to the direction of the oncoming creature. The crocodile's mouth was wide open, its large, jagged, sharp teeth dripping with foul smelling swamp water.

“Claire!” he shrieked as he pulled his feet up and fell back on the mattress.

The crocodile smacked its tail on the floor, shaking the bed.

Liam scrambled over the forest green comforter to grab his glasses from the stand. He knocked them onto the floor along with the heavy brass clock that fell on them. He yelled for his wife again.

She came out of the bathroom with a towel around her. “What are you screaming about?”

“Don't you see it?”

“See what?”

“The crocodile. It's right there,” he said, pointing at it.

“Put your glasses on, Liam,” she said with exasperation. “You know how things take on different shapes when you don't have them on.” She walked around the room and kicked at the twisted dark green throw rug.

She picked up the clock and sat it on the stand, and then picked up his glasses. “They're broken,” she said as she held them up and gazed through the shattered lenses at her husband.

He snatched the glasses from her and put them on. Everything he saw was carved up into the shapes of the cracked lenses. It made him dizzy, but he no longer saw the crocodile. He took them off and got off the bed.

“The crocodile seemed so real,” he said.

“You've been really jumpy lately,” she said. “Now you're seeing crocodiles.”

“And a vulture.”

“Yes, that too. Maybe you should get your eyes checked again.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Your spare pair of glasses are in your sock drawer under your socks,” she said as she walked back into the bathroom.

Squinting, he scanned the room and then walked to the dresser and opened the top drawer. A brown and gray rattlesnake with diamond shaped designs on its scales, coiled among the socks, raised its head.

It's just my poor eyesight, he thought, but wasn't convinced. Beads of sweat popped up above his upper lip.

He slowly reached under the socks and found his glasses. As he pulled his hand out the snake opened its bright pink mouth displaying two sharp fangs and rattled its tail. The snake struck at Liam's arm, missing him just as he quickly withdrew his hand from the drawer. He slammed the drawer closed and fell back onto the bright red and blue floral patterned seat pad of a white bamboo chair. He put his glasses on and looked around the room. He saw nothing strange.

“Corrected vision,” he mumbled.

*

Sitting at the kitchen table, Liam stared out the glass patio door at the neighbor's back yard. The Patterson's young children were playing on their bright yellow plastic jungle gym. The boy was hanging upside down from one of the bars and beating his chest ape-like. His sister was sitting at the top of the slide casually whacking a stuffed Teddy bear against a bar.

Seated at the other end of the table, Claire said to him,“I need you to drop something off to Mrs. Hanshaw on your way to work.”

“Okay.”

He turned his attention to pouring cereal into his bowl from a box with a bright orange and white striped tiger on it. He formed a pile of the flakes and set the box aside.

“I may be home late,” he said. “There's a meeting with a client scheduled for late in the afternoon.”

Claire bit into a bear's claw and closed her eyes, savoring the sweetness of it. After she swallowed she opened her eyes and said, “That's okay. I'm going to be over at Brandy's house all day and maybe this evening, depending on how long it takes to help her hang some drapes and curtains, and stain her sun room chairs.”

Liam poured milk onto the flakes and then set the carton of milk aside. He glanced out the patio door. The children were gone.

Thirty minutes later he left the house carrying one of his wife's tuna casseroles to give to the elderly and homebound Mrs. Hanshaw.

Hummingbird Street, only a city block long and lined with ranch style homes, was busy as it always was that time of the morning. Men and women were leaving for work, children were going to school, and a cadre of landscapers, painters, handymen and utility workers were arriving. There was a low level steady cacophony of noise that rose up from the street and lawns.

It was unusually humid and the air was hazy and perfumed with the scents of freshly mowed lawns, honeysuckle, and vague hints of animal waste. His glasses repeatedly slipped down his nose and he pushed them back up onto the bridge using his index finger.

Jill Keaton was playing fetch with her Irish sitter puppy in her front yard next door to Mrs. Hanshaw's. She tossed the ball too far and it landed at Liam's feet as he entered Mrs. Hanshaws front yard. Balancing the casserole on one hand he picked the ball up and tossed it back to Jill.

“Hector has so much energy. I'm trying to tire him out so I can start my housework,” she said with a large smile.

Mrs. Hanshaw's car that hadn't been driven in months sat in her driveway covered in a thin layer of dirt. The white wicker chairs on each side of her front door were turned and tilted against the wall. He rang the doorbell and gazed apprehensively at a wasp's nest above her door as he waited. Mrs. Hanshaw was near eighty and because of a fall, used a walker. After several minutes he rang the bell again and then knocked on the door. When she didn't answer he went to her front window and stared through the plate glass into her living room. The sofa and chairs were covered in zebra print upholstery. Porcelain and ceramic animal figurines cluttered every available surface. Nothing was amiss. He sat the casserole on the rubber welcome mat and walked around the house looking in the windows. When he arrived back at the front door he found the casserole had been mostly eaten with scraps of it strewn on the mat.

He looked around but saw no animals other than Hector who had the ball in his mouth and was running around Jill's legs.

He took his cellphone from his pants pocket and pushed his wife's cellphone number. Speaking into it he said, “Claire, Mrs. Hanshaw isn't answering her door and I looked in her windows and didn't see her. I'm going to be late for work, so you'll need to call 9-1-1 and see if someone can come and get into her house to make sure she's okay.”

He put the cellphone back into his pocket and started down the walkway to leave her yard. Just as he turned to wave goodbye to Jill, the softball hit him between the eyes, breaking his glasses. It fell on the ground in two pieces. Momentarily stunned, he staggered backward a few steps.

“Oh my God,” Jill said as she ran to Liam. She picked up the glasses and handed them to him. “Did I hurt you?”

Liam blinked hard several times as his eyes adjusted to the loss of the glass lenses. He could make out what everything was, but his sight was blurry.

“No, I'm fine,” he said. He examined the glasses. “The lenses aren't broken so I can tape it together at work which will fix it until I get new frames.” He put the glasses in his pocket.

Jill did a complete turn, looking for the puppy. “Hector,” she called out.

Liam looked at Jill's blurred yard and then watched as a hyena carried the puppy clinched in its jaws as it ran around the corner of Jill's house. In the yard next to hers, an enormous, growling polar bear was in Mrs. Klusky's garden.

He grabbed Jill's arm and said, “You have to get in your house right now, lock your doors, and find a safe place to hide.”

She pulled her arm away. “What are you talking about?”

“There are dangerous beasts on Hummingbird Street and all of our lives are in danger.”

She looked up and down the street. A cable repairman was getting out of his truck on the other side of the street. Carl Mesner was putting cardboard boxes in the trunk of his car a few houses down and a man was mowing the O'Neil's front lawn.

“I don't see any beasts,” she said. “Have you been drinking?”

“I see them. When my vision isn't corrected I can see the deadly creatures, and they're everywhere, including in my sock drawer. I hate to tell you this, but a hyena snatched your puppy.”

Jill stared at him, aghast. “What a cruel and unfunny thing to say.” She whirled around and stomped off, calling for her puppy.

He took his cellphone from his pocket, and pushed Claire's cell number. As he ran down the sidewalk, frantically he said to it over and over, “I'm coming home, Claire. Why aren't you answering?”

At his front door as he fumbled for his keys he heard a roar. He turned to see a lion stalking the Thompson's nanny as she pushed a baby carriage down the sidewalk. Once inside his house he slammed the door closed and locked and bolted it. He then ran through his house yelling for his wife. In the kitchen, the back door was open. Claire's cellphone was on the patio bamboo table, but Claire was nowhere to be found.

*

When the hazy light of dawn shone through the basement window, Liam rolled onto his back on the air mattress laid on the floor. He scratched his stubbled face and smacked his lips, tasting the canned pineapple he had eaten the night before. He stood up, kicked aside the empty cans of green beans and fruit cocktail, and grabbed a hammer and screwdriver from the tool bench. He then climbed the stairs. He put his ear to the door, and hearing nothing, he unlocked it and stepped out into the hallway. The house was eerily quiet.

Holding the hammer and screwdriver raised and poised like weapons, he walked through the house. In the bedroom a warm breeze blew in through the open window. There were no animals in the room. He took his glasses from his pocket that were held together by duct tape and put them on. His vision immediately cleared.

He laid on the bed next to Claire.

She rolled onto her back and said, “Have you finally come to your senses?”

“I know what I see,” he said.

“Mrs. Hanshaw called and said she's returned home after being at her son's for the past few days and Jill found her puppy. The Patterson's children had been keeping it hidden in their tool shed.”

“But the beasts . . .”

“You imagined it,” she said and then rolled back onto her side.

Liam removed the glasses and put them on the bedside stand. He pulled the fern patterned sheet over him. He stared at the open window and watched a panther slink into the bedroom.

The End