A minor deity loiters in the parking lot outside the liquor store on Mannheim, where my ward works nights, scanning bottles of cheap whiskey and glossy packs of flavored cigarillos. This deity is a cagey beast. Upon his head he wears a crown of gnashing pitbull maws, all chomping and growling; the snouts are bruised where they’ve been bludgeoned, and it’s these repeated beatings that inform the deity’s twitchy movements. I sit perched on my ward’s shoulder, watching warily through the large windows rimmed with cheap LED lights as the deity paces outside, grumbling to himself and barking, always barking.

My ward, Danny, doesn’t see the deity; he sees only a man. Danny can’t see any of the deities that rule the outskirts, nor can he feel my claws on his shoulder blade as I perk up at the jangling of the door chime. The deity stutters inside clutching an opened bottle of Buchanan’s, and barks an aggressive appeal to have it replaced with a new one. “I can’t, I’m sorry,” Danny says. The maws growl as one; their deep reverberation shakes the shelves. I issue a sharp hiss in response, wings spread and ears flattened, standing my ground as Danny stands his, gripping the counter with a sweaty palm. 

We’re washed in relief when the deity recedes back outside.

When his shift is over, Danny locks up and trudges down Mannheim Road, the main artery of the outskirts. It’s a wide street with six lanes, traveled constantly by semi-trucks between the boundless decaying warehouses and the airport. The outskirts are a transient space; a place between the city and the world beyond. They’re a place to be traveled through, either by truck, or by freight train upon the sprawling tracks that cut up the streets, or by the planes lifting off from the airport, blinking overhead as they depart for elsewhere. The outskirts are braved by traveling businessmen, who stay only a night or two in the dilapidated motels that host evicted families and men who’ve been ousted by their women. The businessmen flee before their checkout time; they understand that this is not a place to remain.

Perhaps this instability is why the greater deities have constructed such a brutal regime for those that call the outskirts home. Once you plant a foot here, they will try to weld it to the ground. 

We pass a ramshackle tire repair shop buried behind towering stacks of used tires. This is where we turn for home; Danny resides with his parents and his little brother in a two-level strip of apartments just off the main street. Danny longs for his own place further into the city, but his take-home from Jim’s Liquor is not abundant. He mounts an outdoor stairwell to reach the upper apartments; there are two chains running up the steps that he doesn’t see. These chains lead inside of their cramped two-bedroom, right up to the shackles around his parent’s ankles. The lives of Danny’s parents have long since been claimed by the pantheon, though they live on in ignorance. My job is to help Danny avoid his parents’ fate—to shepherd him from the deities, and this dead tooth of a town.

Danny’s mother drags her chain across the linoleum as she shuffles over to the kitchenette. “You seen Kelvin?”

“What? No, I was working,” says Danny. His mother gives a look to his father, who’s sunken into the couch across the room. “What’s up with Kelvin? Where is he?”

“We don’t know,” says his father, popping the cap off a Pacifico. 

“You don’t know? How long’s he been gone?”

“Since yesterday.”

Danny throws the door shut and bounds back down the stairs, cursing his parents, and hoping they hear, then he starts back up Mannheim to scour the night for Kelvin. His parent’s chains trail off ahead of us, back to their captors.

The first place we look is a twenty-four hour McDonald’s on the next block. Kelvin and his friends sometimes haunt the lobby until three or four in the morning, the only place fifteen year-olds can escape the confines of their hostile and tumultuous homes so late. Seen from the street, the lobby’s only occupant is obscured by a translucent burger ad plastered over the window. Surrounded by bags of haphazard possessions, the figure sits head in hands—or maybe they’re praying. The tendrils of their wild hair sway above their head, reaching upward as if submerged. A lost soul, yes, but not Kelvin. 

Beside the McDonald’s, Danny’s mother’s chain leads inside the door of a Speedy Cash offering cash loans; a monstrous mechanical blob lounges atop the squat, square building, a great deity indeed. Within the heavy folds of its flesh, iron gears churn as, even at this hour, residents file into the fluorescent shack—Speedy Cash never closes. A pair of gears catches, and the resounding clack scares a flock of gulls into flight. The deity groans, and the gears churn on.

Years ago, when they were children, Danny waited with Kelvin on the curb outside of McDonald’s while their mother secured a loan at Speedy Cash. She often performed arcane tricks of financial management, the details unfathomable to Danny at the time, although he understood the basic idea: they needed money to eat for the week, but their father’s check wouldn’t arrive until Friday. What none of them understood was that with each hasty signature, their mother forged the chains that would bind her to the outskirts.

Just a whelp then, I chased flies near the dumpster while the boys sipped cola and contemplated the buzzing lot. Kelvin’s eyes followed the gulls soaring overhead. 

“You know why seagulls circle parking lots?” asked Danny. He could tell that beneath Kelvin’s aloof exterior, there was the budding brightness of a gifted kid, so Danny often used nuggets of knowledge to reassert his position as the wise older brother. 

“Why?”

“Cause they think it’s water. From above, the asphalt looks like a little lake.”

Kelvin’s round eyes, always expressive, melted into despondent consternation. “Why don’t they go to the real lake? In the city?”

Danny skipped a flat pebble across the asphalt. “I don’t know. ‘Cause they live here.”

Danny trudges past the McDonald’s, across trash-speckled dirt where the street lacks a sidewalk, and I brace on his shoulder against the onrush of a passing truck. Rising on our right is a four-story concrete lot offering overnight airport parking; Kelvin and his friends like to sit at the top and smoke. Danny strides up the first ramp, beside his father’s chain. The lot’s first level is almost empty, save for two undercover Ford Explorers parked side-to-side, facing each other so the cops can converse from the driver’s side windows. Stalking circles around them are two feline deities the size of buses; they have massive spotlights for heads, and one wears the end of the chain around its neck. This one twitches, and fixes its blinding gaze on Danny.

“Hey!” calls one of the cops. “Lot’s closed!”

“I’m looking for my little brother!”

“The lot is closed!”

“Have you seen a kid hanging around here? He’s fifteen, little shorter than me, and with longer hair—”

The twin deities sniff at the air; they recognize the scent of Danny’s father on Danny’s coat, which his father sometimes wears. Both deities rear back, tails twitching, preparing to pounce. I issue a sharp hiss in response.

“I’m not gonna tell you again,” says the cop, “You need to leave.”

Clenched fists and a raised jaw emerge, the fruit of Danny’s frustrated defiance; I can only hope he recognizes it was these beasts who planted the seeds. He takes another step forward, and I slink from his shoulder to the pavement to tug on the cuff of his jeans. The deities crawl towards us. At war with his own wisdom, Danny halts, taut with stillness. 

At last, shaking his head, he turns his back to the flood of light.

Danny mumbles curses as we retreat down the ramp. As we’re starting up the street, a thick puff of smoke is blown from the top level of the parking lot far above our heads; Danny’s shoulders ripple with tension under my feet, seething at his brother’s reckless abandon. He turns and strides with purpose towards the lot’s rear. 

Kelvin, I’m noticing more and more, seems to be hardening into his father’s mold. Danny is much more his mother, always taking responsibility, always picking up the pieces; in fact, she’s been up and down Mannheim more than a few times in search of their father, who went out drinking and never came home. The ecology of the outskirts is cyclical.

Danny mounts a chain-link fence; it’s just tall enough that, if he leaps from the top, he can clamber onto the lot’s second story to bypass the cops and their prowling deities. Danny’s limbs retain the memory of climbing onto the rooftops of metalworking shops and warehouses when he was Kelvin’s age, a popular pastime among the boys of the outskirts. He makes the jump, his basketball sneakers gripping the rough concrete of the banister, and jogs up the winding ramps to the parking lot’s peak. 

A group of boys, ages varying, lounge in the corner, blowing smoke towards the starless sky; their discarded bicycles litter the ground. I recognize myself in a scaly creature the size of a beagle, lying limp beside a boy digging the child safety band off of a plastic lighter. I call out to my kin, and he raises his shopworn eyes only long enough to communicate his disdain—for me, or his ward, or the planes roaring overhead, I don’t know. Kelvin isn’t here.

“Where’s Kelvin?” Danny asks, huffing with anger and effort.

“What? I don’t know,” responds one of the older kids, stifling a cough. “I ain’t seen him since earlier.”

“When?”

“Like, a few hours ago.”

“Did he say where he was going?” The boys shake their heads; one of them erupts into a coughing fit. I can sense the deities perking up downstairs, anxious to pin something beneath their claws. Perhaps it’s good that Kelvin isn’t here. “If you see him, tell him his brother wants him home. Now.” A few half-hearted nods. “Which way was he headed when he left?”

“Towards the bridge.”

The Mannheim bridge rises in a great arc over a river of train tracks; freight trains lie dormant in the railyard below. Far beyond, the city skyline looms with promise. His whole life, Danny has been enamored with the faded imprint of these skyscrapers, craning his neck towards the window each time the 330 bus heaves itself over the bridge to peek at the grander life waiting for him when he finally escapes the outskirts. With each passing day, it’s getting harder to believe he ever will. 

Danny stops at the bridge’s apex. There’s not much of Mannheim left to walk before it essentially turns into a highway, skirting the airport’s runways. We gaze east, pressed to the bridge’s chain-link barrier; windows alight, the skyscrapers buzz with a palpable aura of exhilaration, like a song that’s just audible but too remote to recognize. Danny exhales, leaning all of his weight against the barrier, and the thin rods of steel creak.

I was born just like this, right here on the bridge. Danny was a toddler, Kelvin six months in the oven. Danny’s mom had taken him to the deli on the other side, where the old guy behind the counter always gave Danny a free sucker with his cheese sandwich, and loaned his mother packs of smokes when she couldn’t pay. They were strolling home, Danny clutching his mother’s hand back across the bridge, when the city skyline got caught in his eye, and he’s never been able to get it out. Just like that I was clutching his tiny shoulder, a stalwart infant flush with divine purpose.

Somewhere back in the tangle of Mannheim, the maws of the dog-deity howl in unison. A glimmer of sea-green catches Danny’s eye below, in the metallic murk of the railyard; squinting, he recognizes it as Kelvin’s bike.

He bolts down the bridge, then scales a fence beside the shuttered gun store and navigates a strip of dead overgrowth to emerge onto the tracks. Danny’s heart is racing with worry– why the hell is Kelvin’s bike down here? At first, it seems Kelvin discarded the bike and ran off to who knows where, until Danny sees him. He’s slumped in a railcar, cradling an open bottle of cognac. A railroad spike has been jammed in the door’s track, keeping it open.

“Are you okay?” Danny asks, climbing to Kelvin’s side.

“I don’t know.” His speech is labored. My skin crawls as I notice something new about Kelvin– two pointy nubs, the beginnings of curling horns, are poking out from the sweaty hair on his head.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I don’t know.”

Danny lifts Kelvin beneath the shoulders, trying to bring him to his feet. “Get up! We’re going home.”

“I’m not,” says Kelvin, fending Danny off. “I’m leaving.”

“Where the fuck would you be going?”

“I don’t know. Not here.”

Danny grips Kelvin’s hoodie, renewing his effort. “You think you’re gonna ride in this boxcar like a fuckin—”

“Come with me.” The words were sudden, as if the idea just struck him. Kelvin’s round, childlike eyes, trapped in his maturing face, express an urgent plea.

“This is ridiculous.” 

“Please. I can’t stay here.” And he’s right. The outskirts are changing him—soon he’ll be something else entirely. 

“I can’t leave!” Danny cries. “I can’t fucking leave, Kelvin.” Danny collapses beside his brother, exasperated.

“Why? Why can’t you, though?” Kelvin’s voice wavers, almost crying. 

Danny slumps, head between his knees. I peer over his shoulder, and deflate. From Danny’s ankle trails an iron chain, leading right into his brother’s hand.

---

Nick Zenzola is a creature under observation in Chicago, IL, who enjoys lazing beneath a heat lamp, exploring the nooks and crannies of his enclosure, and occasionally writing slipstream stories with a focus on the experiences of the working class. He’s had a story in Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose, which received a Certificate of Merit from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, and an essay in the annual Writers’ Showcase run by Fountainhead Press.