But the duck ate no part of either fox. Perhaps wary of a trap. That the foxes might come free from the inside out, might somehow conquer it postmortem. That the foxes still spoke to one another when dead, voices floating in the air, seemed a desecration by the duck, but Moss could not be sure. All that seemed sure is that Charlie X hated the foxes. Or had once hated one fox.

Of the broken wing, the best that could be said is that the wing left a smile upon many a neck and torso. But never on a face. For the creature could in a motion reminiscent of some awkward bat unfold and unfurl and extend.

The wing by will locked in place. The edge knife-sharp and serrated. It with willful industry and psychotic intent vivisected and hacked apart scavengers as large as men and larger. With a zigzagging approach once taught perhaps but now as automatic as a stitched pattern.

Then came the sliding in a wet and separated slump to the dust, the dirt, the scavenger forever caught in a bloodstained, anguished look of confusion at the method of its own ending. Until the sun and smaller scavengers still did their work and turned the anguish into a smile. Because dead things felt only love for the universe.

Sometimes, the duck would distract with the voice of your beloved dead, plucked from your mind, and then dig into your brain like a worm or grub, and try to live in there for a while, eating out your thoughts until you were a husk that twitched and slobbered and spasmed in the sand. At which point, reduced to harmlessness, the duck would stab you with its beak wherever best to place a spigot. Bleed you out while eating you alive.

There came then, Moss knew, in some victims, the heights of ecstatic experience. A lightness that carried the mind off into the clouds to look down on the twisting and shaking mess of carcass without worry or care. Despite the pain that had arrived before that moment.

Oh happy memory for Charlie X, who had no memories anymore. Oh, happy days of youth evoked by the duck. The one he’d nursed back to health. The one he’d been given as a gift. The one he’d rescued from a zoo. The one he’d kidnapped at a park. Depending on Charlie X’s mood, the story changed, on a sliding scale of the sentimental that Chen could map to the cruel.

The one he’d told Chen about even as he created the demonic version, no space between the molecules of air that shouted Lie! and those that flowed from his mouth to tell what he thought was the truth, in that moment.

Who knew what was truth and what was story?