"Psychopomp"

 “I think we hit a deer.” My ears rang, or maybe it was the hiss of the airbags deflating. My face felt numb. It was like the memory of the last few seconds had been snipped right out of my head. Lyla was yelling at me, then something was in the road—something with big, black shining eyes. I didn’t remember braking. Did I hit it head on? I had no idea how long we’d been sitting there.

“There are no deer on the island of Montreal.” Lyla managed to sound snarky even with her teeth chattering in the shock of the aftermath of the crash. The remains of the passenger seat airbag sagged into her lap.

“There’s wild turkeys on the island—why not deer? Besides, we’re in the middle of nowhere.” To one side of the winding road was a wide, grassy park with well-spaced trees and small flowerbeds, and beyond that, Lac Saint-Louis, or maybe Deux-Montagnes. Never remember which is which. To the other side was a two-story grey house with a well-manicured lawn and garden and an actual turret bulbing out of its façade.

“Baie d’Urfé is not the middle of nowhere, Reese.” Lyla, who grew up in the West Island, was always annoyed by my NDG snobbery, but I didn’t see what was so great about the suburbs. There was nothing out there but McMansions, McDonalds, and apparently, deer.

“I’m getting out to check.” I fumbled with my seatbelt, finally hearing a click. The door opened easily enough. “Stay in the car.”

I stepped, spluttering, into a cloud of moths, attracted to the car’s headlights. They caught in my hair, their cloth-like wings brushing my face. It was a ridiculous amount of moths, even for the suburbs, even for late on a humid August night.

There were no other vehicles on the road. The SUV that was behind us before the crash had vanished. Did it just blow past our accident and not even stop to help? I didn’t see the cyclist either. The breeze off the lake was stiff, so I untied my zippered hoodie from around my waist and slipped it on. Delaying the inevitable.

I approached the front of the car with slow trepidation.

“That—is not—a deer.” Lyla, predictably, had not stayed in the car. She always needed to be right, even when there were more important things to think about than winning an argument. “What is that?”

With its round, furry body, for an absurd second it looked like a capybara, or a beaver. But it was too big to be either and didn’t have a rodent’s buckteeth. Its eyes were massive, bigger than those of any real animal, wide and angled like a horse’s eyes. Its face was oddly rounded, with a kind of snub nose but no real nostrils, only a mouth that hung open, some dark liquid leaking out. Its chest heaved—it did breathe, whatever it was, and it was alive.

I didn’t answer her. Anything either of us could have said would have been pure speculation. My brain was in overdrive, trying to come up with an explanation. It was someone’s escaped exotic pet, some South American animal I’d never heard of. It was a weird robot. It was a prank, and someone was in the bushes filming all of this for TikTok.

But the road was completely silent, except for the creature’s laboured breathing. And suddenly, I was cold. Shock could cause that, I thought, going through the list of symptoms. We’d covered this just the other day in training.

Of course it was shock. Except that the creature’s breath had started to fog, and it was August.

“We should call animal control,” Lyla said. She sounded confident, like she always did when she was super wrong.

“What’s animal control going to do about a fucking cryptid?”

“It doesn’t look like any cryptid I know. It’s probably just a… deformed groundhog,” she said, looking at the creature’s rounded bottom. Its legs were proportionally much longer than a groundhog’s, though still short for its fat body. And they ended in cloven hooves, except instead of two sections, each hoof had three, with a middle piece longer than the two others.

“It’s the size of a golden retriever!”

  “Well we can’t just let it die here!” She pulled out her phone, but the screen was dead. She pressed uselessly on the power button, then took off the case and inspected it. “It was fully charged. Did it get damaged in the crash?” At that moment, she stepped into the glare of the headlights and I noticed she’d been damaged in the crash, a thin trickle of blood oozing from the side of her mouth like she’d bitten her lip. Like the creature’s blood.

The creature’s breathing was getting even slower. It blinked blankly up at me as if it felt nothing, but its legs were stiff and trembling. I took out my own phone to call 311 for information, since I didn’t think this was a police-level emergency and I didn’t know the number for animal control. Only my screen was blank too, the phone dead. I looked around, and it took me a moment to notice that the street was black, truly black, outside the white-blue pool of the car’s headlights. The streetlights were out. There were no porch lights, no lights inside the houses—it was one in the morning, but there ought to be signs of life—someone up late watching television or some nightlight in a kid’s bedroom. But there was just us, the moths, and the slowly dying creature.

“I’m going to get help,” I announced. It seemed like the only possible thing to do, given that there was no one around. “Maybe there’s someone in one of these houses with a working phone.”

“You can’t leave me alone!”

“Well then come with me. I’m not going far.”

“We can’t leave it alone.” Lyla knelt on the ground, taking the creature’s head in her lap. Its body shuddered, and a light whine escaped its throat. It was the first sign of consciousness it had shown, but its eyes were still glistening and blank. She gently stroked its fur, which was brown and longish, rough-looking. Lyla always had more compassion for animals than made sense, strictly speaking. She was the type to love a pet so much she couldn’t bear to put it down, even if it was suffering. This animal clearly wasn’t going to survive, and I thought maybe we should put it out of its misery, but something about its strangeness stopped me. It seemed like the only creature of its kind.

I squatted beside her, sitting on the sidewalk. The concrete was frigid, as if it was mid-winter.

“Do you feel like the temperature’s dropped?” I asked.

Lyla nodded, stretching out a hand. I touched her long, slender fingers and found they were like ice. Wrapping my hand around hers, I stuffed them both in the pocket of my hoodie.

“Reese…” Lyla whispered, her voice sudden and urgent. “Look at the moon.”

I turned my eyes from the creature’s breathing, which had slowed even further. The moon was low in the sky over the lake, its reflection long and drawn-out on the calm waves. At first, I almost didn’t realize what was wrong—I looked, I expected the moon, I saw the moon.

But the moon was not the moon.

A blue and green planet hung bright in the sky. It looked like the Earth from a distance, but the continents were wrong, their shapes unfamiliar. White clouds swirled in large vortexes on its surface.

“Lyla… I don’t think this thing is from here,” I said.

She didn’t answer. There wasn’t really an answer she could have made.

The creature shuddered. I put my hand on its neck, feeling its rough fur. Its eyes shone, and I could see myself reflected in their blackness, my face a mask of love and terror that had nothing to do with the animal, shining back at me alongside its fear. A few last, panicked breaths shook its frame and then it exhaled, a long stream of air, and did not inhale again.

We sat. Lyla’s hand felt inanimate in mine. In the distance, the waves lapped on the shore. That, and the moths, were the only sound. The idea of speaking started to feel taboo, like the moment should not be broken. It was the creature’s space, the creature’s time, and we were just passengers in it.

The moths began to land on the animal’s side, a few at first, and then many. They flitted into its eyes, its open mouth. They grew so thick they began to coat it. I tugged Lyla back, stepping into the middle of the sidewalk. We watched as more and more moths covered the creature’s hide. The fluttering of their wings grew so loud it was like a rushing river.

The mass underneath the moths seemed to deflate. To shrink. And I realized, after a few minutes of watching them swarm, that the sound I was hearing wasn’t their wings. They were eating the creature. I thought that we should run, but my body only sank to the grass, taking Lyla with me. A moth landed on her face, in the blood by her mouth. Up close, it wasn’t like any moth I’d ever seen. It had large mandibles and no antennae. It had a single set of downward-folded wings, not doubled ones. I forced myself to reach up to swat it away, but it fluttered off on its own, as if her blood wasn’t food.

It wasn’t from here either.

It took a while, but the moths ate the whole creature. I didn’t know how long we sat there. The sky started to lighten. The strange planet moved across it, revealing our own moon in a sliver behind it, like an eclipse. Somehow, I knew that once that planet set, I would never see it again. Yet watching the creature’s death had filled me with a kind of awe I couldn’t describe, not like the amazement of fireworks or mountains but a realization of just how strange it was that I was alive at all.

“We can never tell anyone about this, can we?” Lyla asked finally, when the creature had been reduced to a black mass on the pavement and the moths began to fly away in small clouds.

“No,” I agreed. Across the water, the planet hovered just over the horizon, its visual proximity to the low line of Île Perrot making it seem artificially huge, until it finally sank down and disappeared. One by one, the streetlights began to blink on, even as the Eastern sky grew lighter. A car passed by us, slowing to rubberneck, but there was no longer an accident for them to see, just two awestruck women sitting on the grass.

“I can’t believe you killed an alien.”

Lyla had a way of ruining everything by opening her mouth.

I understood two things in that moment. That whatever relationship Lyla and I had was completely and irrevocably over. And that after this, no one else on Earth would ever understand me.