Dreadful

by Caitlin Rozakis

He wondered which had come first, the conviction that women would treat him with disdain or his apparent determination to treat them like they would before they could get that far.

“Guh.” Ah, monosyllables, his old friend. They would always be there, even when all the other concepts of fundamental linguistics deserted him.

“You’re not quite what I expected,” she said at last. “Is anyone?”

He scrambled backwards, all flailing legs and hands, like a particularly ungainly crab. The kind of crab other crabs would pick on and refuse to choose for their team in crab games.

But that part didn’t feel like him. If it was part of him, he didn’t want it to be.

The bag had wiggled itself off the desk and inched into a corner twice before he’d jammed it into a wooden chest. Now the chest quivered occasionally.

He thought of small girls armed with fireballs and wondered if it would make for a safer or more terrifying world.

“So who’s the real Valevna, then?” “Who’s the real anyone? When does who you’re pretending to be stop being a pretense and turns into who you really are?”

“That’s where this is going, isn’t it? You need someone to sneak into his rooms. You need a hero. There’s only one hero in this room.” “You’re a chicken,” Gav pointed out.

The arm, like Gav remembered, ended at the wrist. Instead of a hand, Xaxus had grafted on a brilliant blue tentacle. The moat squid arm curled in the air appreciatively. “Isn’t it a delight?” Xaxus took Gav’s inability to look away as a token of appreciation.

“I’ll bring squid!” piped up Grrribeetle. “No,” said all the adults, immediately. He looked crestfallen. Then he perked up. “I’ll make spooky noises in the dungeon?” “Much better,” Gav said.