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They stood up, craned necks.
She pointed across the river, but the animal was gone. It had retreated somewhere into the trees. She still felt its yellow eyes.
“I don’t see anything.”
“It’s there! Somewhere.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You probably imagined it. They’re really rare around here.I’venever seen one.”
“It was skinny. It looked sick.”
“Sick? How could you tell that?”
“Was it foaming at the mouth?”
“No, just skinny. And patchy. There was blood.”
“If it was sick, it would’ve attacked you for sure. That’s what my dad says.”
“It was all messed up,” she insisted. “It had teeth out the side of its face!”
All three of her classmates looked at each other before laughing. “What? Teeth where?”
She rubbed her cheek. “Here! It had extra teeth sticking out. Or something.”
Rolled eyes, heavy glances, giggles.
“Sure, okay. You saw a monster.”
“Not a monster, just a…I don’t know, super-messed-up mountain lion!”
“What-ever.”
Her heart cracked to survive such a thing, to do everything right, and have it shooed away like nothing. Imagination.
“I don’t care if you believe me,” she told them, told herself, holding back tears. “I don’t care what you think.”
But of course she did. She cared very much.
Years later, her father emailed her an article about a mountainlion killed in Idaho. Out of the side of its head sprouted an extra set of teeth and whiskers. A conjoined twin that died in the womb and stuck to its sibling, or maybe a teratoma—a tumor filled with hair and teeth and whisker, posited the scientists. A real mystery, said the article. Unprecedented.
She doubted her mountain lion could still be alive, so thought it might not be unprecedented at all. She pictured other such cats stalking the Rockies, elusive and beyond the belief of anyone who hadn’t seen them.
“Your old friend?” her father had written with a smiley face.
“A mountain lion’s one thing, but a cat with two mouths? Trick of the light,” he’d said at the time. “Stress. Not possible.”
Buried under her own stairs, in the yellow beam of those predatory round eyes, she heard the echo of her father’s voice.
“Trick of the light. Stress. Not possible.”
She blinked at the thing outside the vent, at its bare, bristled head. At its enormous yellow eyes.
You’ve lost it. You’re delusional.
The shape of the thing twisted. With that movement, it went inanimate. For a moment she couldn’t understand what she was seeing. Couldn’t process the mountain lion eyes going lifeless yet still staring at her through the vent. But then something clicked. It wasn’t a living, staring hunter, but a picture.
