From what I could tell, the creature was a combination of all the animals, stitched into one terrifying pet of Frankenstein and put on wheels. One alert dog ear and another ear from a floppy elephant framed its part-bear-part-alligator face, complete with the sort of black glass eyes favored by taxidermists and toy makers, one of which seemed to be pushed from the inside out, giving the eye a precarious dangling effect. Its feet were webbed and orange like a duck’s, and jutted out from a torso lined with enough types of animal skin to decorate a 1970s bachelor pad. Both spiky and soft, it had paws like tiny translucent hands. Just looking at it made me feel slimy and itchy at the same time.

“You sure are,” Cal said, walking around it in a slow circle.

“Stay where I can see you,” it said, and Cal jumped back in front of it, saluting.

“What do we call you?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter, as long as you call me!”

“Excuse me?”

The creature blinked, an action I wasn’t expecting and didn’t enjoy. “You requested humor.”

Cal laughed. “We did, didn’t we?”

“What is your name?” I clarified, my voice more hesitant than I would’ve liked.

“Security and Information Pod Number 64221H.”

“We’ll call you Felix,” Cal said.

I looked at her.

“It was the name of my first pet.”

I couldn’t imagine when she could’ve had a pet; a puppy wouldn’t have exactly fit in around the barracks. But now was not the time to mention that.

“I thought you were the one in charge?” Felix asked, looking at me.

Cal laughed again.

SILAS

EVEN NOW, WHEN SILAS remembered Sarah Kelly, he remembered her tongue first. In high school, she was the only girl he knew with a tongue ring. She said she got it pierced in New York City, in a dentist’s chair on the sidewalk on Saint Mark’s Place. But everyone took what Sarah Kelly said with a grain of salt. She played with the tongue ring constantly. If she was concentrating, she would push the ball end out her pursed lips and roll it back and forth like a lighthouse beam, the fake diamond catching in the classroom’s fluorescent lights.

“You know why she got that tongue ring, don’t you?” his friends jeered each time she walked by. After weeks of this routine, Sarah stopped walking and turned around. The friend who said it hooted; the rest quickly looked away. But she locked eyes with Silas.

She held out her hand like a peace sign but palm inward, and gave one exaggerated lick in the air between her two fingers, from the knuckles up.

They didn’t give her shit after that. But they did start inviting her out.