bring it on home

    Take me home. Not this home, the other one. A cityscape takes its shape. Burning barrels burst from the soil, which itself hardens, blackens, is pavement. The treeline is a sheetmetal wall decorated with profanity, art, aggression. It's a backalley of paper thin people prowling the night. The street lies to my back behind the buildings, announcing itself with tired tires on wet cement, honking constructs, and that particular smell that you know so well you don't know you're smelling it. And at the edge of all this, leaning against the frame, Corwin Davis exhales a cloud of smoke between his lips, his pupils coursing, dodging unseen projectiles. He looks naturally overdressed, in my estimation, shaped to fit the threads. His teeth outshine the darkness. Playfully misshapen and missing in two places.
    The trees are gone but the birds remain. Let's grab their chirps in our hands and bring them down to street level, broaden their range of pitches, add some period-ready vernacular. You know the kind I mean, daddy-o. Wait, scratch that, that's not right at all. Fill in the blanks yourself, goddammit. You know where the corner flips, how the potato flies, the color of the sun at night. How to a butter a bagel, and so on.
    The birds are not birds, just to be clear. Some of them are women, and those ones are wearing glittery dresses that double the light and drag Corwin's shimmering eyes to them as if they were in the same photograph. It's not that he watches them, but that they belong in his vision, moving, standing, dancing, talking; whatever they do, they are there inside wherever he looks, and where he does not look they are not there. Their hair flips and shouts, and when it does he twitches with either delight or anxiety.
    He is waiting at the club stairs being himself. Or some version of it. He wants to be innocuous but can't manage it despite all the practice. Down in the dark, though, the paranoid types (you know the ones I mean) say he practices witchcraft with his horn. An auditory breed for the audience. And when he got right down to it in the recesses of his own soul, he couldn't say that they weren't on to something. In the sweat, in the light, in the dark, there was something that captured them and held them. But if he were casting a spell then it was on himself as well. But there was no way to communicate this distinction to the sort of folk who'd accuse him of it. So he kept quiet when it came up, kept on casting spells and stayed far away from the ones who distrusted that magic.
    They weren't the types who went to a seance anyway, except for the occasional undercover journalist; and you could point out their type from across the room. In a cloud of unbelongers, they belonged too well, like they'd just been to the costume shop down the street.
    Next to him, immediately to his left, Roland was a beast. He watched his own feet and growled. I want to stress right now, though, that the sentence before the last sentence was not literal. Cause we may meet some beasts later on. That could be confusing, I realize. So yeah, Roland was a beast, but not the kind that is a beast. His fangs did seem to be longer than normal, but it was just a trick of his smile that looked just like now as if he were tugging something heavy up through the floor. Exaggerated by his tendency to always be looking down at his feet no matter what he was doing. On a crosswalk, sat at a piano, watching the ball drop in Times Square, playing hopscotch, no matter, he was looking at his feet on all occasions, probably with that same fangy smile on his face. At least often enough that Corwin would've bet on it if he were in a betting mood.