Of course I could kill him. If I wanted to, I would not hesitate to unhinge my jaw around his neck, skewering his trachea with my tusks and locking my one leg around his torso, bleeding the life out of him. I could, with little effort, catch him unawares in the darkness of the parking lot behind his shop and bash out his brains with my club, polished with sesame oil and ringed with iron spikes. If I cared to, I could burn him with blue fire in his sleep, extinguish him into a pile of ashes within the space of a heartbeat. Or I could keep it simple: curse him with bad luck, breed tumors and broken bones and debt until he withers from the misery. I could make his wife a bitter widow, scar his children and children’s children with generational pain.

The goose does not understand. It wants to know why, instead, I sit year after year in the shop, leaning in a corner between the ice cream freezer and a shelf of cellophane-wrapped donuts, gathering the dust I was made to sweep, watching customers come and go with every sharp ring of the cash register. Of course I hold his insignificant mortal life in my gnarled palm. Of course I could snuff him as easily as flicking a finger.

Of course I can, I tell the goose as it glares at me in judgment. It wandered in through the open door, an unwelcome intruder from the neighboring park, and it now regards me with its soulless, beady eyes. It sees me for what I truly am. It makes its wish immediately. I sense the yearning of its request, the violence of it, the glee, as it waggles its fat haunch.

No. No, I will not expand to my true incredible size and crumble the shop apart with the old man and his wife and his customers in it; no, I will not explode the wrappers off of every delicacy for it and its fowl friends to feast on.

I can, I tell it right before the old man picks me up. I just don’t want to.

With a shout, the old man uses me to smack the goose twice before it retreats, squawking, out the door.

I do not understand this city. I do not see much of it during the day. I smell it off of the customers perusing the shelves: the mineral salts on their skin, the ancient creatures fermented, decomposed, and burned into the smoggy particulates clinging to their hair and clothing. Whenever the door opens, bell chiming, I peer over the shelves and see a smear of green from the park across the street. I hear engines roaring, children shrieking, waterfowl squawking and surely clogging their arteries with the very same crumbs sold in this store.

This city is loud, overcrowded, a cacophonic symphony with which I can never harmonize. I am a creation of simple villages: my twigs stripped from mountainside cedars; my fine bristles dried in persimmon summers. Sun-blistered hands had woven the norigae adorning my handle, a secret talisman and a reminder that I had once brought the fox-rains early with my sorrow and spilled gold from the hearts of gourds in my joy. I had once danced with heavenly maidens in the moonlight, raced the stripes off of tigers, and driven travelers into fits of haunted madness. I had once blessed the virtuous and cursed the wicked. I had once been revered. Worshipped.

Oceans apart from my homeland, displaced by centuries, I am now embedded in a crust of grime, thinned, my dry fibers meager and too brittle for use. My norigae is nothing more than a frayed rag, of which I no longer remember the original color. I have lost much of myself, nothing left within me but stale mischief and old, old stories. I admit I make a suitable addition to this city, this place that shouts too much and shares too much, that chokes too much and satisfies less than it should. There is hope in the human lives I observe, as well as woe: a craving for sugars, salts, fats, caffeine, and nicotine, for brief sparks of joy, to cherish the rainbow packaging before the innards are devoured. Then the packaging returns to nothing more than loud crinkling pieces of plastic, discarded in piles outside the store until the old man uses me to sweep them into a bin.

His wife scolds me for bringing me out of my corner; useless as I am, I can do nothing more than scrape the ground and lose more of myself. Parts of me snap and scatter, making more of a mess than when he started. Yet he stubbornly holds me, in spite of his wife’s frustrations, and continues sweeping, his thumb grazing the tassels on my shaft. I am sometimes reminded of his grandmother when he holds me, particularly in the creases of his hands. At rare times, I see a shadow of her mysterious shaman smile in his face.

Yes, I am a nostalgic thing, a useless thing, a thing with sentiment, a vestigial creature in this carved refuge of a home, just like the geese and the pigeons and the squirrels that harangue the store when they tire of their dirty pond.

This city will forever be strange to me, but it is still mine to roam.

In the evening, all is dim and silent. The old man and his wife lock up the store and retreat to their living quarters upstairs.

I emerge during the ripest time of night. My hands are always the first to appear. I pry them free from my wood, twigs sloughing and expanding into swollen knuckles that fall heavy onto the floor in solid thumps. I stretch my long, curled fingernails along the floor, flexing out my shoulders, then thrust out my chest, pulling forward so my hips and leg follow forth and burst free from the dry bristles. I somersault forward, and my head swells into place like the water balloons the old man fills for his grandchildren on hot days.

I catch a glimpse of myself distorted in the glass of the soft drinks fridge. I am a hunched abstraction of joints and muscle, built to grasp, to wrestle, to strangle. My reflection is oily black, save for the glow of my blue-fire eyes. I grin, and my tusks flash iridescent.

I am cramped between the aisles. I hug my single knee and tumble backward. Seeping as a melted pool of shadow through the building’s foundations, I breach the night with a triple cartwheel and land on the weed-ripped concrete of the sidewalk.

I stretch to my full size. In a symphony of crackles, I elongate my neck, my toes, my limber arms. I multiply flesh upon flesh, bloom bouquets of sinew and ligaments, cast a monstrous shadow that, unseen by mortal eyes, looms ever larger over the shop, over the neighborhood, over the city. I eclipse the watery moon and the starlight of low-flying helicopters. Dogs whimper in their shelters and alley cats yowl.

My back finally cracks. It echoes like a gunshot, and nobody panics because it is the nature of this city to hear gunshots at night.

I shiver in relief and shrink down into a beast, or a beast-shape: exposed gums, wide leering eyes, long man-fingers with cat padding. I drench myself in a shimmering coat the color of the night. Then I follow my nose.

I could, if I wanted to, traverse a league in a single hop, but I prefer to glide at a restrained pace: just fast enough to flicker in the corners of human eyes, to blur on security cameras. The streets in this sleepless city are locked at right angles. I make a sharp turn and pass through a karaoke bar. I smear my grin as static across the lyrics, my cackles reverberating through the microphones in shrill shrieks of feedback as young people, out late on a school night, clap their hands to their ears.

I rustle my way through the tents pitched along highway tunnels, toss lottery ticket confetti, drag my claws through paint-tagged billboards. I find my way to a freeway and race an overnight truck. Its bleary-eyed driver spies a flash of me in his rearview mirror, blinks, then drains the dregs of his coffee.

At a junction, siphoning from the exit leading to the foothills, I plant my large foot and launch myself over the palm trees with a howl.

I land on the rooftops, nothing more than the nuisance of a nocturnal critter as I skitter on hands and single knee across the shingles. I short-circuit Christmas lights lingering late into May. I carve a hundred hopscotch tiles into the blacktop of an elementary school. I harass an owl on a telephone wire above the glow of a gas station. A midnight employee dozes below; I send him a dream about his unborn brother.

At last, I arrive at my destination, the source of the intoxicating scent that has summoned me across the vast miles of this concrete desert.

Peppers roasting on a blacktop flame and steam puffing bubbles under cornmeal. Cilantro, tomatoes, and onions swimming bright and acidic in a vat of lime juice. Pineapple sugar sizzling, seeping, slowly, sweetly, over spiced pork.

The taco stand burns in the golden light of exposed lamps. A family stands behind a long folding table on the sidewalk—pressing hot flat disks of cheese and meal on a griddle, knives flashing, meat cleaving, radishes and sauces garnishing paper plates in plastic bags as the cash register clicks open and shut, all contained under two blue umbrellas. It is long past a reasonable time for a meal, yet the line of people before them meanders far up the street and around the corner.

I hide myself behind the bristled trunk of a palm tree and stand upright, less a fluid beast-thing and more deliberately man-shaped. I don a hat of woven mesh, clicking with dangling beads in the old style, tied fashionably under the chin with silk.

Something snickers.

I glance to the side and spy roadkill smeared in the street, just beyond the periphery of the stand’s circle of light. I smile a creature-smile on my man-face. I slide into this vast expanse of encompassing shadow, step after step until I stand directly in front of its flattened snout. It is a rat, maybe a possum, maybe neither.

“May I share in your amusement?” I ask.

It is too dark for mortal eyes, yet I can perfectly trace its delighted grin as its soft smashed guts coalesce, dripping together like condensation, its shattered bones clicking into place, its fur growing out coarse and long.

“You found me,” it barks once its tongue slides wetly into place. “And here I thought I would get the better of you this time.”

It leaps to its feet and shakes itself out. As it does, it becomes a raccoon, a snake, a crow, then finally sneezes and leaps upright as a person-shape with wild laughing eyes.

“It is rude,” I sniff. “To laugh at others. If you wanted to stay hidden, you should have kept your manners.”

It cocks its head. “I could not help myself. Not with you wearing that tacky thing.”

I adjust my hat with a scowl. “Hypocrite. I advise you evaluate yourself.”

It looks down and giggles at the layers of feathers and fur congealed to its legs. It sloughs them off as one shakes water off a boot, then flops into a bow.

“Does that satisfy you, oh ancient one?”

“Please,” I mutter as we cross the street. “You are far older than I. Not that you demonstrate the wisdom of your years.”

It barks another laugh, and I note critically how its mouth stretches back far too wide, nearly to the ears, and how it retains canines too long and sharp to pass unnoticed.

But I do not say a word. It never told me its name, nor where it came from, yet I know this friend of mine is indeed much more ancient than myself—much more ancient than most myths that continue to exist in this world. It could choose to appear more human if it so desired. It simply does not want to, a sentiment I respect.

“What is recommended on the menu today?”

“Chicken mole,” it croons. “The aunt with the recipe has returned. May she be blessed for the remainder of her days.”

“Rooster flesh,” I wrinkle my nose. “You know how I feel about that.”

“Yes, crowing things are harsh on the palate,” agrees a voice behind me. We turn and find that two more of our kind have joined us, one fresh from a hunt and smelling of intestinal blood.

“Dessert,” it says with a nod at the stand. Then, “By the abyss, what are you wearing?”

“This was once considered quite fashionable where I am from,” I protest, and they all laugh. My friend places a paw on my shoulder.

“Perhaps you over-demonstrate the wisdom of your years.”

I feign disinterest by watching our companions arrive. One by one they creep softly from the shadowed palm fronds above, appear as fingers reaching up from within storm drains, or simply manifest from the mist. They slither, slink, and melt into their disguises, then step into line amongst the unaware humans. I recognize many of these kindred visitors. We, of course, have all passed each other in the night at one time or another—this city is crowded. But there are always new faces, new scents.

I understand that some were brought here as curse-objects or talismans, as I was. Others, as sacred vows or oaths of love. And others still were not brought here at all, but are of this land, birthed of it, bonded to the foundations that stood here long before the city was built. We all have our stories, yet we do not ask each other for them. It is not our place to interrogate, nor to take what is not ours. Ultimately, human fates brought us together for better or for worse, and our hunger unites us.

“The humans have their networks, and we certainly have ours,” hisses my roadkill friend. “Soon, we will outnumber them and displace good mortal customers.”

“Come now,” says a maiden with eyes as deep and cold as the blackest seas. “Is our patronage really so unwelcome?”

She bites into her mulita. Sauce drips down her mouth as she hands the cashier a wad of dripping bills. She grins, needle teeth stained red, and he grimaces.

My friend pays for our meal with a pile of scavenged quarters, then we separate from the crowd. We talk as we eat, speaking of things we have seen, what we have heard. I tell it about the goose’s morbid request.

“So much bloodlust in so ridiculous a creature,” I sigh. “Prayers for the breaking of bodies in return for sugar and crumbs. Perhaps, it too, has been corrupted by this city.”

To which my friend cackles and says, “I have met many such creatures on my travels and can assure you that they are hatched with spite in their veins.”

It then tells me about a new spirit in its neighborhood.

“It is one of those revenge-types—the wedding kind tied to gold. It has not yet learned the language of this land, but we found a common tongue. It told me it was bonded in rage to an ancient relative of its host but lost much of its fervor after inhabiting this city. Frankly, with the sacrifices made to come here, the family does not have much left for it to curse. It might even bring them a blessing if they decide to pawn off its vessel,” it chortles.

I think of the old man, how his hands tremble more each year, and the permanent arch to his spine where he broke it laboring in a stranger’s garden.

“I empathize,” I muse between bites. “After all, I am my host’s curse as well. I vowed to bring endless torment upon his father’s descendants. It only took one generation for all that righteous rage to falter.” I hesitate, then admit, “In truth, I only remember fragments of my true nature. Many of my myths were burned, lost. But I know that it is in my nature to keep my oaths. To punish deserving bloodlines. This idleness is dishonorable to my own memory.”

My friend’s face relaxes into a softer expression, and I detect a flash of its weight—of the centuries stacked behind its tone as it replies, “It is not within your control. Our rules do not apply here, in this land burdened with old sins, festering wounds. We are strays in another home, and thus each of our vendettas—our grudges—our histories and whatever authority we once held—have faded to the more powerful curses that raze this land.”

I understand what it means. There is no curse I could inflict on the old man that this merciless land has not hesitated to brandish upon him already. He has not slept well once in all the years he has been here. The life expectancy I had once detected in him has sieved away. I cannot break his body more than he already did while trying to put food in the mouths of his children, thankless beings whom the city claimed as well—they are warm with his blood but are outside of my grasp, and I cannot alter their fates as I can alter his. Despite this, I know where they all are. I know of the one who works in a towering glass building with stone floors, and another who is frequently overseas, and a daughter who dissolved into another family and never returned. My friend is indeed correct: curses more powerful than mine have entangled them all, and whatever forces dictate these laws have plucked them from my grasp, weak and long-detached from my homeland as I am.

I can only cup the old man, my last tether, in my hands and watch as the curses pile upon him, one after the other, leaving me no soil to stake my vow.

“It is the same for me,” my friend yawns. “For me, as it was for you, humans from another ocean brought their evils with them—so many, too many. But we persisted. We survived and became ever stronger. We bonded to bloodlines. We migrated with our hosts in their weary travels. I wound up here, as you did.”

It sighs. It does not often sigh. I turn toward its sharp face, more suited for a rascal smile than the melancholy gaze it carries now.

It opens its mouth, already stretching into a snout, and says, “There are times when I really do miss speaking in my mother’s tongue.”

It casts one last roguish grin at me before it slips, like fluid, into its new form—and all I catch is a flick of a tail and a twitch of its pointed ears before it leaps into a hedge and disappears.

I visit the old man when I return. As I do every night, I appear in his bedroom and hover over his face. He looks weariest asleep, his wrinkles more defined, particularly the creases around his mouth and forehead. It occurs to me that he is nearing the end of his life.

I have watched each evolutionary stage of his family in this building that was once a laundromat, once a dry cleaners, and is now a store. I preferred the laundromat best—a place for hiding places and secret treasures, a place of lost things, of found things, all captured in a foaming cleansing ritual. I did not enjoy the chemical smell of the dry cleaners, nor do I condone the hectic stocking, restocking, and the gluttony of the shop.

His children left when it was a dry cleaners and now bring their own children to the store. I doubt I will pass into their hands as I passed into his. They are creatures of a future I can hardly fathom, chattering in clumsy rambling slang, unable to understand the old man’s accent. I sometimes watch these grandchildren sitting on his stoop, drinking bottles of cold strawberry milk as they hunch over electronic devices.

The old man interacts with them fleetingly when they visit. I once watched him shuffle out into the sun with his back hunched nearly horizontal and replace new bottles of strawberry milk as they were sucked empty. The blood of his blood hardly looked up—they muttered, “Thanks hadoboji,” with their eyes fixed to the flashing colors on their screens.

He grunted. He turned.

Tell them you love them, I thought in exasperation. Leaning against the outside of the store, I urged myself forward until I fell with a clatter. Nobody picked me up.

“Tell them you love them, you fool,” I whisper now in the darkness as I hover over his face. “You, not long for this world. You will regret it. You, collecting regrets like baubles. You must leave some regrets for me to inflict.”

But he sleeps on.

I remember the day the old man’s grandmother made my broom, when she curse-bound me to her son, the old man’s father. Her mother had been stolen by the army’s men, her father buried in a labor camp, her brother forced into a uniform and sent to the front lines. She had been claimed by a man who forced his language upon her, a man stained with the blood of her countrymen, a man who left bruised fingerprints on her flesh and to whom she gave a son.

There is love for her son imbued in my frame. A strange love, like the kind held in strawberry milk. It is what had caught my attention in the first place, when she summoned, then ensnared me into this domestic fetter. There is beauty and care in the norigae’s pattern. There is also wrath in the knots, grief in the twigs that mourn their felled trees. The souls of lost song-giving creatures haunt my every dark crevice.

She had made me with hope. She had known that I could bless her son, protect him, if his choices held true. Instead, he had ripened into a traitor of the most despicable degree, one who accepted prestige and wealth in exchange for his people’s freedom. He had aided parasites from across the sea, ones like his father who slaughtered with fire and bullets, carrying with them the invasive spirits they brought from their land. Because of them, I lost my fox cousins, my heavenly maidens, my gentle villages. Because of them, smearing and warping my myths, replacing my stories with their own, I also lost much of myself.

The old man’s traitor father had died a miserable death, one I carefully machinated with all the vengeful power I possessed. The old man passed a lonely childhood, throughout which I bided my time and waited until he was old enough to inherit his father’s curse. He grew, married, then set off across the sea. When he took me with him, a most inconvenient burden among their meager possessions, he told his wife that I had been treasured by his grandmother and that he thus felt compelled to bring me. A most foolish mistake, for if he had left me, he might have escaped his penance. I waited to strike. I burned with mother love, with hatred.

Then I spent decades watching the old man scrape a humble living while giving every fiber of soul and bone to plant a legacy in a tongue he can barely understand, in a land that has done nothing but take from him.

I look at his hands, his bent spine, his wrinkles, and cannot, in righteousness, find his father’s selfishness within him. I cannot bring myself to punish him for the blood in his veins.

I do not give him any dreams tonight.

I trickle down through the floorboards and the cracks in the stucco until I pool into a spilled black fluid, slick and dripping down the shelves onto the floor. I coalesce into a putty-soft form and walk, man-shaped, to my corner. I squat down. As the sky outside lightens to a gray, portending the oncoming dawn, I shrink and narrow, sprout woody stems, curl further into myself until I am a tool once more, a bundle of sticks and reeds bound by a grimy talisman.

I awake to a sick thud—the crack of a skull. Then the softer sound of a body hitting the floor.

I first see the old man on the ground, then the blood pooling thick underneath him. There is a box beside him, one of the spare pallets of cans he keeps on a shelf. He, foolishly, had attempted to lift it down in his frailty. I can see the dent in the side where it hit his head, the long streak of rust-red in the cardboard. He lies unmoving. Another curse I had not inflicted.

I wait. I wait for customers to come in and make a lot of panicked noise. I wait for his wife to come downstairs. Then I remember that his wife is out visiting their daughter, something she had mentioned yesterday while running the register. I glance to the side and see the periwinkle twilight, the sign on the door. He had closed early.

There will be no customers, no wife. The old man is alone, and he will surely die.

I unravel myself. Rarely do I emerge during the day, yet I slink to his side and prod at his eyelids and mouth. He is breathing, but the puddle soaking into his hair continues to run. I remember his wife reminding him to take the white pills that thin his blood. He will not clot; he will not survive.

I reach out my hand to heal him. I withdraw. I reach out my hand. The norigae threads around my ankle constrict, cutting painfully.

I am bonded to the same blood that pools out of him now. I am an arbitrator of vengeance. Just as I have over these many years, all I can do is watch. I cannot bless him.

I can only curse him.

I look to the chips, then the stack of newspapers on the counter. I look down at the old dying man. I look to the park.

I’ll do it.

It answers immediately. A giddiness, an avaricious malice.

Bring more. I tell it. Many more. This is too much for you alone.

I see them through the glass, a gray and white swarm flying low through the dust. The flock lands and screams at the glass.

I stretch out my hand, and the door flies open.

The geese descend upon the shelves. I snap my fingers and every plastic package bursts open, raining crackers, cookies, gum, and chocolate upon the linoleum. Every refrigerator door shatters as carbonated drinks explode from their containers in sticky geysers. The once-orderly store becomes a pandemonium of unholy screeches as dozens of savage beaks destroy and devour. Everything falls apart: the racks, the shelves, the cash register, the stack of newspapers.

Then I set it all aflame. Blue fire erupts upon every surface and blazes throughout the shop. Just to remind myself I can, I sculpt the inferno into pouncing tigers, then winged horses, then fleets of dancers. Sparks scatter into spring petals; each crackle echoes with drumbeats. The cinders taste of mugwort, caramel, and feathers.

The geese shriek and swarm for the door. They put out their own flames, trampling each other in their panicked escape through the narrow opening. I watch them take flight and rise above the store in a spiral buoyed by the scalded air.

I compel the blaze ever higher, consuming the apartment above. Utter destruction engulfs the building. Nothing will survive this. Perhaps not even I. But he may.

I cannot bless him, yet I make myself large and crouch over the old man. I cradle his head. I cannot bless him, yet I already can hear sirens, the shouts of passersby ogling this apocalyptic spectacle of smoke, flame, and trumpeting fowl. They will find him. He will live to struggle another day in this terrible, beautiful, delicious, overcrowded city.

“Finally,” I say. “I have cursed you.”

The old man coughs, and I watch his eyelids flutter open. He stares into my creature-eyes. Weakly, slowly, he smiles a shaman smile.