First Born (5 page)

Dehydrated from the previous night’s libations, she slurped water from the kitchen faucet. On her way out, she gazed into the front hall mirror. She looked like a deranged, hung-over cheerleader with hot pink hair bows. A swollen nose, two fading black eyes, and a raw burn around her neck, completed the look. She tore the little bows from her hair. The “Vegas girl” pink on her nails made her cringe.
Justifiable homicide
.

A thought occurred to her. She smiled revealing a jagged white nub in her pink gums. Her top canine was growing back.
Okay.
Things had reached a new level of weird.
I will not cry.
On a positive note, now she wouldn’t need a trip to the dentist.

Stepping out on to the front porch, she felt her throat tightening as her anguish began to build again. She forced herself to close the door on her grief. With each step toward the immaculate manicured lawn, she breathed a little easier.

A primitive pull began in her stomach calling her to fling herself down and roll with complete abandon on God’s emerald carpet. A quick shake of the head set her straight.
This is not my body. These are not my urges.
The birds’ ethereal singing overpowered her sensitive ears as it reached rock concert decibels. She spotted a chipmunk across the street perched on the neighbor’s wicker furniture. Each hair on the creature’s face was discernible.

Snatching her hood over her head, she shoved her hands in her pockets before taking off at a brisk clip toward Myrtle Street. Seeing a chipmunk that close-up had disturbed her. She sneezed from the pollen that blanketed every surface like a fine layer of snow.
I will get my life back.

Halfway to her duplex, Lily panicked. People were dying around her and her house was a crime scene. She couldn’t explain her current condition or control it. Various
COPS
TV episodes shuffled through her mind, feeding her paranoia.

A blaring siren crescendoed behind her.
The cops!

Before she realized it, she was in Shih Tzu form zooming across a random yard chasing a rabbit. She stopped herself before she yapped up a lung. Lily was even more discouraged when she realized it hadn’t been a cop car, but an ambulance. She had ditched her human form for no reason and lost Frank’s clothes.

I need help.
She figured she could catch her twenty-two-year-old brother, Seth, at work.

* * *

Seth worked as a security guard at the Colony Square, a complex that housed a hotel, office space, residential condominiums, and a retail mall. In reality, he was a glorified receptionist with the looks of a bouncer dressed as a Catholic schoolboy.

His uniform consisted of black Dockers pants, a white collared shirt and a maroon blazer with a security insignia on the front. He wore his dark blond hair all one length that came to his chin. Seth derived most of his looks from their father’s Belgian side of the family with a hint of their Chinese grandmother in the shape of his eyes, although they were blue in color. At some point, he had adopted a type of swagger to his gait. Her best friend, Katie, said that the combination screamed male stripper. She had scowled at Katie, but in private had laughed at her accuracy.

Lily sighed. She was entrusting her precarious life to her flaky younger brother. This transformation apparently was decreasing her cognitive abilities.

Seth’s behavior in the last several years had been erratic. Gentle by nature, he didn’t make it past one year in the army. College hadn’t worked out well for him, either. Since then he had sampled numerous career paths.

His reaction to her current situation was difficult to predict. Despite his macho façade, he was a latent cat lover who couldn’t resist a female in distress. She was definitely distressed.

The half-mile dash to Peachtree Street went by in a blur. She crouched in the grass, problem-solving her infiltration of the complex. Doors presented a challenge when you were nine inches tall.

She dashed into a section of the revolving doors behind an older gentleman who was keeping a tepid pace. He didn’t continue pushing after he cleared the entrance, which left her trapped in a claustrophobic triangle of glass. While performing a bass solo operetta, she pawed the door. It didn’t budge. A woman came in behind her providing the needed shove. She shot out on her butt, skidding across the lustrous marble floor like the star in “Shih Tzus on Ice.”

She recovered herself in time to spy on her brother. He was flirting with a young woman, regaling her with stories of his high school football days. He omitted the fact that he was a benchwarmer. Dad had wanted him to be the big football star, but he never had the killer instincts. From the conversation, she learned that the woman worked at the radio station situated in the next tower over.

Once the female DJ sauntered over to the elevators, Lily darted across to Seth. He was still watching the girl, a salacious grin painted on his face. She finally nipped him in the ankle to get his attention.

“What the fuck...over.” Seth had been using his walkie-talkie too much.

Perhaps biting was not the best way to make her introduction. He peered down at her. She held her position at his size eleven feet. Behind the colossal counter, she remained hidden from the throng of people dashing through the lobby.

“Little Dude,” he said puzzled.

She wagged her tail. “Seth, it’s me Lily,” she said in her gravelly voice. Seth didn’t scream or run. However, he did tilt his head and look at her as if she were a monumental boil on an ogre’s butt. She had a bit of a speech impediment with the underbite.

“You got something stuck?” Seth placed her over his upturned forearm as if she were a baby whose airway he needed to clear.

“Seth!”

He became perfectly still with her head held upside down, her tiny Shih Tzu body straddling his arm.

“What?” After placing her on the ground, he bent way down to study her.

Forcing herself to slow down, Lily tried again. “It’s Li...leee.” She realized it came out like a video on slow-mo.

“Whoa.”

“That Phil guy attacked me and I turned into—”

“An Ewok!” His eyes searched the lobby to see if anyone was looking. There was a temporary lull in the traffic. His calm acceptance was unexpected. He picked up the desk phone while looking straight ahead.
What the hell is he doing, calling for back up?

“Lily, I’m going to talk into the phone receiver so I don’t look like a crazy person. Are you okay? Tell me what happened again. I can’t understand you very well.”

She smelled a Dunkin Donut’s egg and cheese croissant. When she pawed at his leg, he took the hint and halved his sandwich. She gobbled it down. Essence of spearmint lured her to the garbage can. She perched on hind legs peering into the cornucopia of delicacies that awaited her, including gum.

When she looked up, Seth was staring at her. “Aren’t you something?”

She didn’t have time to be embarrassed. “Phil hit me!”

“Phil Miller?” he hissed.

Just then, he reached down to shove her further under the desk while addressing a guest to the complex. When the coast was clear, he continued. His expression had changed drastically. His nostrils flared, his mouth a tight line, he looked at her. “Lily. Why on earth would you go out with that loser?” Seth had worked briefly with Phil at European Dreams.

Lily looked down at her paws. “He emailed me through the online dating website and remembered I was your sister. He would email me funny quotes each morning or sweet poems. I didn’t know he was like that...” her voice cracked.

When she looked up, Seth’s mouth opened and closed as if he was struggling to ask the question.

“He tried to...but I
defended
myself.”

Seth exhaled. With tears in his eyes, he patted the top of her head. “What are we going to do?” he asked.

Lily held her frustration in check. If Seth didn’t stop crying, she feared she would start and she was not a pretty crier in her current form. Or in any form, for that matter. He looked scared, like the ten-year-old little boy who had accidentally broken Dad’s prized gas grill. Of course, that incident had been her idea. All of fourteen, she had formed a hypothesis. Being the devious heathen that a ten-year-old boy is, he had been more than happy to follow the scientific procedure and test the two hypotheses: 1) a bottle rocket lit in a closed grill would burn a hole clean through the attached grill cover, or, 2) said lit bottle rocket would merely blow the entire lid clean off the hinges with minimal damage to the actual cover. The outcome was not what they had expected.

“Lily,” Seth asked, drawing her attention back. “You okay.”

“Do I look okay? I’m a freakin’ wappy dog.”

“Happy?” he asked softly.

“What?”

“You’re
happy
like that?”

She tried to achieve a “y” with her tongue, but it wasn’t working. “Wappy! Wuf, wuf, wuf.”

“Keep it down someone’s going to hear,” he said shoving her further under the counter. He looked at her in deep concentration. “I get it already, but I wouldn’t call that yappy.”

“Humph,” she said, quoting Larry.

“Where have you been staying? Are you safe?”

“Larry’s house on one-sixty-eight the Prado in Ansley Park. They’re close to Piedmont Park.”

“Ansley Park?” Seth asked for clarification, every muscle in his face strained with concentration.

“Wes. And they don’t know I’m a girl. I had a close call this morning. I woke up naked in Frank’s bed.” Seth wrinkled his nose. “Oh, and my dog name is Tashi.”

Seth snorted. “Sounds like the playmate of the month.”

She gave him a soft growl before relaying her predicament to him about not being able to control her body or perform the simplest task in dog form not to mention there was some weird man in black somewhere who creeped her out. She didn’t know who he was or where he’d gone, but she had a feeling she would see him again. She finished with the idea that she could stay with Seth.

“You can’t stay with me,
Tashi.
You said yourself that Detective Simms saw you at Larry’s. Detective Simms and Lieutenant Lake have been tag teaming me with random drive-bys.”

As she started to protest, Seth’s buddy, Reggie, came back from his break. She nipped Seth’s ankles trying to convey that Seth needed to get rid of him.

Reggie gave her a disparaging look. He was a stickler for the rules and wasn’t convinced that it was okay for a pretentious businesswoman to have left a dog for them to watch while she attended a meeting.

“It has an uncanny resemblance to a transvestite that kept hitting on me at my brother’s bachelor party,” said Reggie. “Plus, did it just bite you?”

Seth shrugged. Lily nestled closer to his legs and whimpered.

“What the heck was that? Does it have asthma?”

“Oh Reggie, you hurt her feelings,” whined Seth.

“Whatever. It can’t understand me. Dude, it’s a dog!” Lily watched Reggie eye Seth as if he had been doing vodka Jell-O shots for breakfast.

Curling up at Seth’s feet, she snuck pitiful looks through her long eyelashes. By lunch, Reggie had come around. He plopped her in his lap then fed her chicken wings. He applauded her unladylike belches. She suspected that her malocclusion caused her to swallow a lot of air, producing belches of which a sailor would be proud.

Reggie was an immense black man with an attractive bald head. She found herself mesmerized by it. When Lily began to lick it, Reggie giggled in a guttural way. He tasted salty and sweet, like saltwater taffy. Seth yanked her away from her devotions to his head. “Jesus!” he said. She couldn’t help it. Dogs explored things with their mouths.

After lunch and the licking incident, Seth relegated her to the hiding space by his feet. Feeling safe for the first time in days, she drifted off to sleep.

Some time later she woke up in a storage closet wearing her brother’s maroon blazer. It came down to mid thigh. Standing up abruptly, she bashed her head on a box that was hanging off a shelf overhead. It set off a domino effect of paper products raining from the shelves.
Wonderful. My very own ticker-tape parade.
The room was about the size of her mother’s walk-in closet at home with items stacked high on wall shelves.

Seth had taped a note to the blazer—just like kindergarten when the teachers would pin notes on their shirtfronts before sending them home to their parents.

Tashi, phone in pocket.
She retrieved Seth’s cell phone and dialed the number on the note.

“Colony Square, this is Seth.”

“Hey it’s me. Where the hell am I?”

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yes, thankfully I’ve lost my fur coat,” she said while yanking Seth’s jacket more tightly over her chest.

“Uh huh. I’ll stop by there in a few minutes. Sixth floor, right?”

Ah clever boy, now I know where I am.
“I’ll just hang out here and weave myself a thong out of toilet paper.”

“Ooo-kay. I’ll see you in a few,” he said, a chuckle in his voice.

After hanging up, Lily looked around at the paper products and bottled chemicals while considering her options. Her friend, Katie, came to mind. The news team had interviewed her last night and she had been inconsolable. The two friends had graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta campus together. Katie worked at an ad agency in Buckhead. She was a trustworthy friend, but Lily didn’t know how she would explain herself if she called. Plus she wasn’t sure her brother’s cell phone was “secure.” Why were the police so interested in Seth? Did they think he was responsible?

Driven by his comment about the police, she accessed the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
online to read about the investigation of her attack and Mona’s death. She was impressed she got internet on the phone inside the janitor’s closet.

Lieutenant Lake stated that they had new evidence explaining the occurrences the night of the incident, but they were not disclosing details at this time. Phil Miller remained hospitalized.
Humph.
Mona had perished three days prior to Lily’s attack. Lily’s stomach did a somersault. She was lounging next door eating pizza and watching ultimate fighting while her neighbor had expired.