Hazelthorn

by C.G. Drews

Once upon a time, a door was unlocked and a monster slipped out of its ivory tower. The garden did not step into him, but rather stepped out of him.

“I’m only a monster because they made me monstrous.”

He is a wild thing, a ravenous thing, an untamed thing, and there is no one to tell him to be quiet.

Only Laurie stood in this garden as a child and cut himself open and wished for a friend with full understanding that it would be monstrous. And he didn’t mind.

“What if you’re wrong? What if this is all I am?” Evander hates the way the words tear from him, unsteady and wet and so close to a snarl. “What if the worst of us is the only part that’s real?”

All he says, his voice soft and reverent and broken all the way through, is, “God was stronger than me when he made Adam and didn’t fall in love with him.”

This is the place Hazelthorn was taken from, severed, where he lost who he was and tried to force himself to fit a skin that was never his. He thinks, perhaps, he is meant to be feral and loud and sharp and angry.

“I don’t want anything out there in the world anyway. We can still live in the house—I know it’s wrecked, but I don’t mind sharing my room with a tree.” “Am I the tree?” Hazelthorn’s voice is a little flat.

He thinks it is true, what Laurie said. Once the garden has a taste, it wants the rest.