#Which is why I’m constantly vigilant not only about the kids in the playground; but also the area outside the playground

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

If watching true crime has taught me anything; it’s that the criminal justice system very often does jack shit about obvious cases of child abuse, and only takes it seriously after the parents kill the child.

[sending-the-message]

Dead Coyote by Ilunibi

I did not grow up in a nice area. Housing projects, regardless of where they are, are rarely ever “nice.” And, of course, in rough neighborhoods like that, you learn from a very early age who you should and should not go around and under what circumstances those dangerous people are safe. You learn how to make friends with unfriendly people, and you learn the delicate dance of walking on eggshells in the face of folks who’d gut you for the twenty-bucks in your pocket. Most importantly, though, you learn that not every villain is a villain.

Take Dead Coyote for instance.

No, I don’t know why we called him Dead Coyote, but being a kid? I didn’t really care. I knew he was an addict, I knew that he dealt drugs out of his apartment by night and sold pirated DVDs out of the trunk of his car by day, and I knew that he was Honduran, which I only knew because he’d throw a shit fit if you called him Mexican. I also knew that my mom warned me a thousand different times to never, ever talk to him because he was a disgusting junkie, but it was hard to miss him because he always seemed to linger around the basketball courts and playgrounds. My neighborhood friends had just gotten so used to him being around that they treated him like a statue, but me?

Well, I guess I was different. I thought Dead Coyote was just the most fascinating guy in the world. He was taller than my dad and he was skinny as a rail, but I’d seen him get in fights and I had never seen him lose. He wore his hair like a character in a Mad Max movie (which, admittedly, was probably because he didn’t take care of himself), and he was covered in tattoos. Swirls and skulls and weird, squiggly symbols and bugs and flies and maggots and devils.

That’s how I ended up talking to him in the end. Here I am, just barely into fourth grade, and I plopped right next to him on a bench at the basketball court, pointed out one of the symbols on his arm, and asked, “What’s that?”

He looked at me, looked at his arm, looked at me again, and narrowed his eyes. After a few moments for him to figure out that I wasn’t some drug-induced hallucination, he cracked a smile.

“Oh, uh. That’s a Pentacle of Solomon.”

“What’s a Pentacle of Solomon?”

“Uh,” he drawled, his eyes hazy. “It’s, like, a thing I found in a book once. Don’t worry about it, princess.”

And so began an unorthodox friendship.

I know it has to seem odd that a little girl would strike up a sort of sibling relationship with the twenty-something neighborhood dealer, but I was a weird kid, an only child, endlessly curious, and painfully lonely. I didn’t really fit in with a lot of the neighborhood brats, my mom worked constantly, my dad was in jail, and I spent the majority of my time as a solitary latchkey kid who’d come home from school, let herself in, and spend eight hours trying to keep herself from dying of boredom. I didn’t really register Dead Coyote as a danger despite my mom’s many warnings anymore than I paid mind to her pleas to not leave the house while she was at work. I was young, I was invincible, and Dead Coyote was a way to pass the time without feeling completely alone.

Even though we got a lot of weird looks, I kept visiting him during his daily vigil at the local playground. I’d ask him about his tattoos, he’d give me vague answers, he’d ask me about my day, and I’d regale him with stories about the mean girls at school and the boys I had elementary school crushes on. He tried to teach me Spanish curse words, I tried to teach him what every individual Pokemon did, and in general? We got on pretty well. In a way, it was kind of like having an older brother or, if nothing else, having my father back.

It became ritual to drop my books inside my door and run straight back out to meet up with my new friend, but eventually, there was a hiccup. There’s always a hiccup.

It was one of those crisp fall days that seems almost perfect, where it’s not too hot, not too cold, the sky is clear, and everything just seems so vivid and alive. I rushed home, literally threw my backpack in the door of my apartment and watched the contents burst out and scatter across the floor, locked the door behind me, and bolted for the playground. I wanted to show off a new Pokemon card I was proud of, and also ask him for the bajillionth time in months about what a Pentacle of Solomon was. He still hadn’t told me.

The problem was that when I went to the playground, it was empty. I ran around the rickety wooden swings and checked under the slides and equipment, but the most I found were ants and broken beer bottles. So, I ran to the basketball court and, while I could find a couple of Dead Coyote’s regulars, I couldn’t find the man himself. It was weird and it felt very, very wrong, and my thoughts raced to whether he’d finally gotten arrested or, hell, finally gotten himself killed. Did he overdose? In my panic, I interrupted his regulars’ game to ask if they’d seen him, and my anxiety only peaked when they told me that, no, he hadn’t really come out of his apartment all day.

Now, you’ll think I’m dumb, but I knew where Dead Coyote lived. Sometimes, when mom was late getting home and I was too scared to be by myself, I’d slip over to his apartment a couple of buildings down and stay in his living room to watch TV. Since mom had a beat-up car that banged like a metal band, I’d always hear her coming and be home before her. I know in retrospect that I was basically asking for trouble, I know it’s weird that I could identify his regulars because I’d watch Who’s Line on his couch while he was dealing heroin in the kitchen, and I know it seems really weird that a grown man would allow that, but I was nine. I just knew I was scared at night, he was scary, and he’d protect me until mom got home.

So, I went to his apartment. I banged on the door. I yelled into the crack between the door and the jamb, I climbed up on his trash can to look in the windows. The entire place was dark except for little dots of glow that seemed to zigzag around the living room. Candles, I later realized, bright red like Christmas lights, flickering and dancing in the pitch black. I assumed that if candles were lit, it had to mean he was in there somewhere--it’d be a fire hazard if he was gone--so I banged on the window and---

Something grabbed me. Not from the inside, but from behind, an arm hooked around my waist and dragging me off the trash can. It toppled over with a loud crash, I let out the shrillest scream I think I’ve ever managed in my life, and I heard this awful, smug laughter from behind me as I was hauled, kicking and shrieking, around the corner of the building. It felt like all of the light in the world disappeared as I was carted down into the alley, the sun and the street a distant memory.

Then, my captor threw me down. I heard my back pop as I hit the brick of the building and my vision was blurred for a few seconds. When the world came back into focus, though, I could still see two sets of legs, and when I looked up at who they belonged to, I was both horrified and relieved to see that it wasn’t Dead Coyote. Relieved because, well, I didn’t want to think he’d hurt me and horrified because of who it turned out to be.

You see, every neighborhood (even the good ones) has the folks that you don’t want to run afoul of. Unless you’re their level of nasty, there is no possible way to ever endear yourself to them. There’s bad eggs with cream centers like Dead Coyote, and then there’s rotten pieces of shit like Joseph Shepherd.

Joseph was an eighteen-year-old punk who only felt alive if somebody else was hurting. He was the guy who once threw me in front of a bus and chased his ex-girlfriend down the road with a flask of battery acid because he thought it was funny. This was the type of person who legitimately should be locked up and the key conveniently lost. His friend? I had no idea who the fuck he was, but if he was with Joseph, he wasn’t anyone worth knowing.

“Well, well. Looks like we have DC’s little piece of jailbait, eh?”

Joseph stooped down to my level and yanked hard on my shirt. My back roared in pain and I turned beet red when I noticed him looking down the front.

“A little underdeveloped, but the fucker’s a freak anyway. Maybe he likes ‘em like that.”

“I bet she’s tight, though,” his friend offered, and that’s when I saw something in his hand. For a second, I thought it was a gun but, no, it was worse. It was a knife. One of those cheap little hunting knives you get from seedy gas stations. All I could think about from that point on is how much more awful stabbing would be compared to getting shot. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around the much more obvious implication.

I was nine. I never got the birds and the bees talk. I didn’t understand.

There was some more discussion, but my memory becomes a brief blur around this point, like a watercolor painting gone terribly wrong. I remember being jostled, I remember something wet on the side of my face, and then I remember hearing a loud howl of pain and a thud. The next clear thing in my mind was watching as Joseph’s friend hit the ground with a squall, eyes rolled into the back of his head, frothing at the mouth like a rabid animal. His hands curled into his chest, his legs spasmed, then his entire body began to convulse. Joseph began barking curses, but I was more worried about fixing my shirt.

What can I say? It was a lot to take in. I could only process so much. I didn’t leave the house expecting to get molested by a man who’d have an epileptic seizure in the end.

I mean, it was a seizure… right?

If it was, the world wound up seizing, too. As I found my land legs again and pushed myself up to my feet, the earth began to quake and the walls of the building began to tremble. The sun went dark and reality itself began groaning in agony. It was like listening a thousand chanting voices trying to drown the other out, as the air grew thicker and a rancid stench began to fill the air. For some reason, though, it didn’t affect me; I could feel the noise making my bones buzz and I could smell that awful smell, but Joseph was the one who was sliding to the ground and crying. He was the one whose eyes were bleeding, whose body was shaking, whose neck was twisting around like he was trying for a part in The Exorcist.

And he screamed. God, the things he screamed. Things he saw that were invisible to me, of stilt-legged owl beasts and dogs with rows of teeth like sharks. Men in armor with fanged horses. Goat-headed women with twisted horns decorated in bones.

Odd as it was, I was more scared of getting hurt than watching him get hurt, more scared of him than the ghosts he thought he saw. I ignored the pain shooting through my back, turned tail, and ran for the light at the end of the alley like it was relay dash toward the pearly gates. Tears streamed down my face as I turned the corner--maybe, maybe, if I knocked a little louder and screamed a little more frantically, Dead Coyote would answer his door--and I swore up and down and all around that I would never, ever leave the house while mom was at work and I would not stop running until I got home.

Except, I hit something as I rounded the building. After stumbling over Dead Coyote’s spilled garbage, I ran dead into the actual Dead Coyote. I was sobbing, he was surprisingly sober, and as a crowd of neighbors gathered around to see what the noise outside was about, he stooped down and grabbed me in a bear hug like a real big brother and kept telling me over and over and over that everything was okay. Everything was fine.

He sat with me when the police came after he, surprisingly enough, broke his own personal code to call them. They found Joseph and his friend passed out in the alley with no sign that they had been seizing or bleeding or screaming or crying. They were just out like lights, lying in their own vomit in between the buildings. I was told that I was lucky, because it was probably some kind of drug overdose that made them lose consciousness at just the right time, but I know what I saw. And I know what Joseph thought he saw, because he told me, shrieking, every last detail. And even as the police gave Dead Coyote an accusing glance as they drove my attackers off into the sunset, I somehow knew in the pit of my soul he wasn’t the villain in all of this.

“Hey. Princess.”

I looked to him curiously, eyes still puffy and wet. He was chewing his bottom lip and looking straight ahead, rapping his fingers against his thigh in that fidgety way he always did. His other hand absentmindedly combed through his hair before he gave me a sideways glance and nodded towards his apartment door.

“I think it’s about time I teach you what a Pentacle of Solomon is.”