On the day that my friends and I went searching for the Catawonga, I lay in a field of cotton-spun dandelions and roasted in the evil gleam of the sun. It was one of the dog days of summer, when all the shadows are golden and the day never ends, it just runs languidly outward like a paint smear. The sky was the pristine blue of a hydrangea flower, without a cloud in sight. Every so often Eliot would leap up excitedly, claiming he could see a cloud forming, but it always was a plane or a trick of the light or a runaway dandelion waltzing through the air.
Chris grabbed Eliot’s ankle as he went to jump up again and shoved him back onto the grass. “There’s no goddamn clouds!”
“Language!” Eliot looked mildly offended.
Chris snorted. He was a football player through and through, with the huge shoulders and temper to match, so I quickly got up, in the hopes of heading off any confrontation.
“I’m bored. Let’s go play catch or something.”
Chris started to agree, but paused. A dangerous light came into his eyes, and I was immediately afraid. According to Chris, his ideas were brilliant. According to literally anyone else, they were insane. Like when he’d suspended the school weeb, Peter, from a tree branch to see if the squirrels would eat him. Peter had hung there like an overweight flag for six hours.
“Have you guys heard of the Catawonga?” He stared straight at Eliot as he said it. “I heard that it lurks in the old fairgrounds and eats the bad children who wander off. It’s got the eyes of a snake and it ties the bones of its victims into its fur. Little Will’s cousin saw it, and he says it has claws like… like…” Chris fumbled for the right word.
“Knives?” I suggested.
“Yeah, knives.”
“There’s no such thing! It was probably some animal.” Eliot didn’t sound very sure of himself.
Of course I knew about the Catawonga. Everyone in my town did. The stories were many and conflicting. In some, it was a great dragon who hoarded the skulls of children and only brought them out during rainy nights to admire them in the light of the moon. In others, the Catawonga was a great man-beast abandoned by his family, bitter and afraid of the world. But always, it lived in the abandoned fairground, and always it was very, very, hungry.
In my town’s hayday, people came from all over the world to see the famous Grenadine Circus, open all year round and fun for the whole family. But that was a long time ago. What I knew about the circus came from old geezers clustered around creaky folding tables telling stories about their youth. Everyone knew that half those stories were made up and the other half might as well be, but I had always been fascinated by the circus. Or, rather, I was fascinated by the way all the adults treated it. The Catawonga was not regarded as some harmless legend for the little kids to tell when they were warm and safe around the campfire. To my parents— to the parents of all the kids I knew— the Catawonga was real, and the circus was to be avoided at all costs.
“The Catawonga isn’t real.” Eliot said this again, more firmly. “Probably everyone freaked out about a cougar or a tiger or… a really hairy person.”
“We don’t get those around here.” I hesitated. “Well, we do get hairy people, but I’ve never seen any predator bigger than your ugly baby sister.” The last remark was directed at Chris.
“Right, everyone shut up. I’m going to the fairgrounds, and y’all are chickens if you don’t come.”
Under the dire threat of being called chickens, Eliot and I followed Chris as he confidently strolled away.
My town was given a name by the twenty-somethings who lived there, the ones who were too old to be satisfied with tiny lives, but too young to accept that big lives were meant for big kids born in big cities far away from people that believed in the Catawonga. The twenty-somethings called my town “Satan’s Soul,” because it was so small. My friends and I made it to the fairgrounds in less than ten minutes.
Vines twined up the poles that held up a sign which proudly proclaimed, Grenadine Circus! It was barely recognizable. It had decaying wooden things that might once have been stalls, ground covered in leaves that crunched with every step, and anthills. Lots and lots of anthills.
Chris smacked his meaty palms together. “Let’s go hunt us some Catawonga meat.”
Eliot rolled his eyes.
We walked into the circus together, because when we actually got there Chris didn’t seem all that keen to go first.
Eliot trailed his fingers over a row of half-submerged cages. “I wonder where all the animals went when the circus shut down.”
There was a crashing sound to the side. Eliot and I looked over to see a half-exposed basement with a ladder leading down into it and Chris moaning at the bottom.
I rushed over, sliding down the ladder and grabbing at Chris. “Dude, you good?”
He started crying, great sobbing gasps that gradually transformed into hysterical laughter. “You should have seen your face!” Chris stood up and dusted himself off, pleased at his prank.
I sighed and turned to leave, but growls from the back of the room stopped him.
“It’s probably… the wind. It’s the wind.” I did my best to sound sure, but nails scraping along stone undermined my words.
“That’s it, I’m out.” Chris retreated up the ladder.
“Chicken!” Eliot yelled at his back. “The Catawonga isn’t real.”
The growls got louder.
“The Catawonga isn’t real.” Eliot’s face was pale. “And I’m not leaving. I’m not a chicken.”
I tried to pull Eliot away, but he stood his ground.
“The Catawonga isn’t real!” Eliot screamed it into the back of the room, as if he could wish the shadowed shape moving at the back of the room into non-existence. “The Catawonga isn’t real and we don’t get predators here and you aren’t allowed to be REAL!” He bellowed the words out as if some tiny, important thing was about to be broken and that was the last thing he would ever say.
I glanced at the shape. It was just a lump of shadows in the corner. I grabbed Eliot’s arm and decided I didn’t want to see it move.
I talked to him calmly, projecting what I didn’t feel. “Eliot. Come on, let’s go. It’ll be okay, Eliot, we have to leave now.”
Growls bubbled from behind me. “Eliot, move.”
Eliot’s face went pale. He pointed over my shoulder with one trembling finger.
The bear was rather pathetic. It lunged for us, but only made it halfway, banging its nose against the ground and whimpering like a petulant child. The bear’s fur was falling out in patches. Its eyes were covered with a milky white film, and it sniffed the air, trying to find us. All those years of being endlessly crammed onto bicycles and paraded around like an oversized dog followed by years alone in the fairgrounds had taken their toll on the creature. Despite that, it was very big and very obviously hungry.
“But we don’t get bears here,” I said stupidly.
“I told you.” Eliot whispered. “I asked what happened to the circus animals… now we know. I told you so.”
I grabbed Eliot by the arm and pulled us both out of the basement. As we scrambled up the ladder, I glanced back. The last thing I saw was the faded red collar around the bear’s neck, a last remnant of Grenadine Circus.
Eliot and I met Chris by the edge of the grounds and told him about the bear.
“I guess the Catawonga isn’t real. Just some dumb kids making up stories about a bear.” He sounded disappointed, even though he had run away from the bear like he had bees in his pants.
“Yeah. I guess.” I was relieved.
Something moved in the trees. The wind died down suddenly, and I could just barely hear a scraping that sounded like long, long claws sliding across concrete. The sound got louder and louder, built until I could feel the vibrations in my chest. There was a figure, inside the gates, large and bulbous with limbs protruding at seemingly random angles. One of the limbs held a limb hunk of meat that still had a red collar around its neck. It didn’t have a face, but something about the way it lounged there made it seem undeniably smug.
Chris wasn’t the only one who ran away, that time.
I never saw the Catawonga again, but as soon as I turned eighteen I moved away with no plan and no money. Eliot left too, but Chris stayed. He’d always been stubborn like that. On his twentieth birthday, he was found, headless, just inside the fairground gate.