The Pretentious Eccentric

By - J.R. Harrington.

1. Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, Lamb in Wolf’s Fur

In the forest, you are a wolf. You run between the tall oak trees and dig holes in the moss. In your den with the other wolves, you are regarded as strange. The other wolves don’t lie near you—they say you stink of sheep. At night you howl the same as they do, and your paws mark the same rhythm on the forest floor.

The other wolves go out hunting and they leave you only scraps of their kills. You become nothing but skin and bones. Your sleek fur becomes ragged, and you itch day and night. Still, you stare up at the moon and long for it. You wonder what it tastes like. You imagine it’s delicious. You think of tearing it apart with your teeth, swallowing the bits and pieces. You imagine how you’d glow, after eating the moon.

All the other wolves would howl at your beauty, and maybe then you would feel peace. You dream of songs the moon sings, the ones only wolves can hear. In your dreams you prance on the white face of the moon. In your nightmares the darkness encroaches upon you. Space is cold, but the shine of the sun was enough to keep you alive, keep you moving so the cold couldn’t catch up to you. But inevitably the darkness comes.

In the morning you go to the sheep pasture. Nosing through wool in the gutter, you become a lamb. Prancing forward, you follow the flock. You find food, and they don’t notice how you smell of wolf. You’re finally fed, and your wool shines with it.

The shepherd is confused at your appearance, but welcomes you. The sheepdog growls when you come too close. Some nights it lets you lie next to it in the field anyway. You grow to love that dog, or the wolf part of you does. The sheep part of you prefers the shepherd. Somedays he comes to the field and crouches in front of you, running hands over your wool and smiling down at you.

As a wolf, it was rare that you saw a man, and you would sooner bite off his hands then let him touch you. As a sheep, you reveled in it. It was like the moon, that touch. It shone on your wool and through you, to your amorphous soul. Now you spent your days just waiting for the shepherd to come, eating clover blossoms and wondering when you’d see him next.

At night you looked up and noticed the stars more than the moon. They seemed so much more unreachable, but they were so small in their distance. Smaller than the clover blossoms in your stomach. You didn’t think about eating them. You thought about them as shepherds, leading the way. You hoped that they would tell the shepherd where to find you when you slipped out of the pasture to go be a wolf again.

You shed the skin of the lamb at the edge of the pasture and slipped back into the forest. You were sleek and powerful after the days of eating good in the pasture. You felt big enough to devour the moon, so you climbed the hills up to the cliffs. Once you got there you found the other wolves, howling to it. You leapt from the cliff, and you soared for a while. But a wolf like you could never reach the moon.

2. Victorian Dandy

There is a vase of lilies on your desk. They fill your study with a floral scent as you write the stories of each passing fancy. You write love stories that could have you strung up in the gallows, and you keep them to yourself—unpublished chronicles you hope will be found once you’re gone and shared among many.

At night the lilies smell different than in the day. The one pinned to your chest is wilting as you prowl the streets. Each night you find a man to walk with in a tavern, and you chatter like starlings. Usually you do more than just chatter. After, the men look right through you, like you’re a ghost. You never see them a second time.

The man beside you is as upright and proper as they come, but you are not. Your wolfish gaze catches on bare glimpses of his skin, and he knows it. He revels in it, in fact, but you say nothing of the like. You met at a tavern and are already far too drunk to be so couth—but he seems to be having no trouble.

The next morning you wake up in an open grave. The one beside you houses last night’s man—you help pull him from the dirt. He thanks you, and smiles, and he’s even more handsome in daylight. He walks you home, a perfect gentleman, and you go back to sleep and dream of him.

The next night, he finds you. You walk together again, through the park with all the flowers. It’s summer, so every plant blossoms with sweet scents. You sit on a bench and just talk. You don’t know where he lives, just that he’s something like you, something that cannot be tamed. Like many of the men you know, he doesn’t wear it on his sleeve. This night, when he walks you back to your home, you take your lily from your breast and tuck it into his instead.

You only ever talk, and it’s never enough, but somehow too much. In the daytime you write poems for him, and in the night you sneak them into his pockets. He never says a word, but he always grins when you meet him. There’s a wolf in your chest that longs for more of him, but you can’t ask for fear of being denied what you want.

Learning just what makes him tick is the greatest experience of your life. Each night, you grow closer. You tell him stories that burn in your chest, and he traces his hand along your skin like a tentative spider. A moth lands on his shoulder, and you tell him that’s a bad omen. He doesn’t seem to care. You walk him home that night, and he lets you inside.

The wolves in your heart want to feast on him. In passion, you let them. Carving open his chest, you find his heart and take a bite from his soul. You loved him, but now he’s gone—and a wolf like you could never eat the whole moon—could never get away with biting chunks from its bedrock.

So you make a trip back to those open graves you slept in together, apart but not distant. Once he’s buried, you lie down in yours and set loose your blood, waiting to die beside him.

3. Priestess

You stare at the sky every night smoking cigarettes. You long to howl and eat the stars like the clovers you weave into crowns, but instead you sit in silence and contemplate. Much of your time is spent in silent contemplation, and you think your God likes that about you.

The moon reflects in your eyes, refracting like a new star made just for you. Fire molded in His hands, to a new pinprick in the sky. As His priestess, you think you deserve your own star. Though maybe you should just be grateful for the insights into His personality.

Your God is kind, first and foremost. He forgives past gritted teeth, sets aside His rage and lets it fuel Him until it fizzles out into numbness. Your God is often numb, but you suppose that’s what Godhood does to a person. You know He used to be a person, but that doesn’t stop you from worshipping Him.

He tells you what you used to be. A wolf and a sheep in one, you are something of a rarity. He finds that interesting—if He didn’t find you interesting, you wouldn’t be His priestess. Your God has a strange distaste for your worship, but He doesn’t offer alternatives.

The sheep in you loves Him as your shepherd. He is a fierce protector, a man who isn’t afraid to do what needs to be done to protect His flock. He tells you He saw you, in those old lives, as a dog. You were a strange creature, but He let sheep-you lay with Him, though He had the duty to protect the flock from wolf-you.

He didn’t tell you what became of that version of yourself, but you can tell by the silence around the matter that He doesn’t like the end of that story. He tells you that you have your love of stories in common with Him, and that yours have always had bittersweet endings.

He sees every moment of your life and loves each second. He tells you tales of his time as a moth, drifting about and observing the world through the smallest of eyes. He says He enjoys that form the most, that it’s the shape of His soul. He tells you that yours changes shape every time He looks at it.

You feel airy, like something that flows through the world. Sometimes you can feel it, the energy in the wind—you sing to it, and it sings back. You feel its tender caress on your skin and think of the soft edges of a moth’s wings, flickering against your cheek. The air in your lungs is part of you, and so is that God you adore.

You let Him pick you apart and listen to his insights. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it frustrates you so much that you hate Him, briefly. You can never stay angry for long. The wolf in you imagines snapping at the moth and swallowing it whole, taking that holiness for your own.

You sit on the edge of the cliff and feel the wind wrap around you. You kick your legs in the air and look out on the world, knowing that you could conquer it. You have many loves, but the world is the widest one. The way the wind moves everything entrances you, and you wish to be one with that wind. You sway, and sing, and dance in tune with it.

But one misplaced step, and not even your God can save you now.

4. Pretentious Eccentric

In the quiet moments you feel ill at ease, so you make a CD and a playlist and listen to them nigh constantly. The only thing worthy of interrupting your music is the sound of clattering keys, or your own voice singing along—you struggle to remember the lyrics, but you still sing, high and keen.

The moon is above you and the sandy dirt below your feet shatters with each step you take. The world is a beautiful place and you, too, are beautiful. You, too, are part of it all, a piece in the grand machinery of this beautiful world.

The crickets in the night sing of other lives, you listen with a smile. There is blood and dirt beneath your fingernails, and the roses don’t grow as well as you’d expect. Your perfectionistic tendencies don’t translate to real world success, especially not where your garden is concerned.

Everyday you create something new, and find yourself miserable when it doesn’t come out as you planned it to. Flowery language rots in your hands, simpler structures taste of mold on your tongue. The colors on the canvas always turn out muddied, the only color you can mix with accuracy is that of blood.

You’ve died a thousand times, and you know it. Some thousand sins committed, and you can never escape them. Each night madness crawls into your bed, chips away at the polish you’ve worked so hard to apply. You are the culmination of those thousand lives, and you are nothing if not contradictory from it.

You are hardened from battle, soft when you should bite and bitter when you must kneel. You are a stranger to everyone and a friend to very few. You are the knife, and the wound, you are bleeding, you are cruel. Each day, something new makes you cry—you can hardly tell where the tears come from. Joy and sorrow taste the same on your lips.

You are everything and nothing at once. You speak the words of a man with triple your education and wear the dresses of a girl with far better breeding. A pretentious girl, an eccentric man—what you are, no-one could understand. Or at least that’s what you tell yourself at night, left alone in your room, to console yourself from the fear that they’re all afraid of you.