The Lion

Little old Dotty Bennet had a lion’s head!

What a mane it had, too, and ferocious teeth, a real wild hunter that you’d think might pounce right off the wall and onto you. Adults, they say it couldn’t come alive if Doctor Frankenstein had done his best work on it, and things of that nature just wouldn’t happen around parts like these, but when we sat together as kids and thought about it, what other purpose could it serve if not to protect the old golfing clubs and baseball cards behind the front counter? The taxidermist had left its eyes open for a reason, hadn’t they? 

Eyes that never closed, but which we swore sometimes looked just a little drowsy - the jaw a little more slack and a little less mauling, just every once in a while, for being on watch so long for so many days must be very tiring, and eating people was no easy task either. Drowsy or not, the eyes and the mouth were open, and we knew it, and the lion knew that we knew it, and none of us stepped foot anywhere near it even on its drowsiest, jaw-slackiest day. 

And then, quite suddenly, a market somewhere crashed itself into another one, at least from the way the bigger kids were explaining it, and it was news all over; I didn’t see or hear it myself, but I imagined it must have been very big, if not quite a funny sight, a bunch of tents and farmer’s goods and homemade pottery all running up and hitting each other all at once and ruining good work from everyone. 

I didn’t know why, but old Dotty must have been involved somehow - the baker down Baptist Street must have been involved somehow - Jamie Cutrie, and her family, were all very much involved somehow - and we all knew that they were involved because the conditions of the market they’d been involved with had gotten them all very down, and suddenly they all left and the town was very vacant. 

I didn’t understand it at the time, but Papa was involved, too. It should have been obvious that he was part of the accident to begin with, the way his face looked coming home from work that day in the fall when they say that it happened, looking beaten up, and the way that his eyes got blacker with each morning like he’d been dragged off and beaten up again in the night. I didn’t know he’d ever worked in a market before, and as he bounced me on his leg, he told me that no, that’s not quite the way that things are, but I’ll understand when I’m closer to his age and hopefully things won’t be so bad by then. 

Well, things weren’t, at least not in the stock market sense, but a whole whopping of other things had gone wrong in the world in thirty years - another big war, a couple of big bombs, a little Russian satellite and a lot of littler kids with polio. Suddenly I was my father’s age when the depression hit him and I had gone through just as much, seemingly in half the time I was promised, only this time around nobody was there to bounce me on their leg and explain it to me. 

The world never stopped spinning that way, and it seemed to me that everybody was on edge for all sorts of their own reasons and I couldn’t blame them, but I did manage to find some normalcy in my work sometimes, stepping up as a marketing manager for a small law firm and shacking up, to the pleasure of my nostalgia, right down Baptist Street near where the old bakery used to be. The building is still there, never abandoned permanently but only temporarily owned by different folks, a red brick stepping stone towards better business elsewhere. 

My house, medium-small and incessantly stuffy, was my partial excuse for nightly walks. The rest was the simple urge to walk along next to buildings that used to be something else, like the bakery, but also other things, old grassy plots turned to shops and gas stations, and vice versa, and those old, puckered-looking houses along the old residential roads that I used to dash across at what felt like a hundred miles an hour, chasing after invisible fiends and visible friends, stressed out just a little because our parents were stressed out a whole lot, and the whole time never quite knowing why. 

Enough turns down enough roads got me further than I’d meant to get one evening, and in between houses I could catch some of the sky and see the sun starting to stumble over the horizon. Lights were coming on in houses  as I passed them and I picked up my pace a little, not afraid of the dark but not wanting to get caught up in it, but then. . . . 

Well, there it was, wasn’t it? 

Dotty Bennet’s little old store was still there. The sign was long gone but the windows weren’t, those big, floor-to-ceiling panes, and with the last light of day I could see my reflection in them just barely, illuminated by the sun to my back, looking in at myself, and like a kid again I stood wondering how much I’d go for in an old shop like that, who would buy me first and what I’d be good for if they did. As a kid, that answer was simple: household chores. I had cut grass for Papa, helped to build shelves, sold newspapers, cooked food. What else was there to do? 

The answer wasn’t so short-sighted anymore. I think back on it and maybe the answer is still stuck in that window somewhere, reflecting back at me but the light was too low for me to see it. Maybe I’m still perfectly blind to it. 

Before I ever found an answer, the sun finished for the day and over the top of the old curiosity shop, the moon was rising. My reflection was gone, and so I turned away from the store and the moon, already shaming myself for spending so much time wasted on nothing, nothing at all, thoughts not worth a dime to anyone, and still. . . .

Couldn’t I still feel the eyes behind me? Amber irises caught on the nape of my neck? An open maw of jagged teeth and callus tongue, and wasn’t it right there behind those windows still, all those years later, just in the door, down an aisle, over the counter, keeping watch over the things so special in their meaninglessness, golfing clubs and baseball cards? We’ll tell the children that it couldn’t come alive if Doctor Frankenstein had done his best work on it, and things of that nature certainly do not happen around parts like these, but the taxidermist left those eyes open for a reason, and what else was its purpose? 

I walked home fast that night, and haven’t been back since. The town isn’t so vacant as it used to be, but I’ll move along anyway, probably, the way old Dotty Bennet did, the way that the baker down my street and Jamie Cutrie’s family did, the way things do when a whole lot of tents and farmer’s goods and homemade pottery all get together and ruin a lot of good work. 

Maybe I’ll set up my own little shop one day, hopping along little red brick stepping stones towards better business elsewhere. Maybe the lion won’t follow me so much then. 

Maybe it always will.