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BENJAMIN felt the cycle concluding at last. He had bravely stood unguarded with the dark beast throughout the last several days. He had allowed it to do as it must. He did not shiver, fight or flail this time. He embraced the beast as a part of his world, and this time it had simply snarled at him for a few moments and dragged him only a short distance. Then, once it had had its fill of violence, it released him and moved along, down it’s well-worn track.

These kinds of events were cyclical in his world. BENJAMIN wished that they were not, and that he could have spent the past week making lots of money, or securing a new home for himself, or building a better life (one which he did not dislike so much). But alas, that was not the world that BEN had been given when he was presented this life. His world contained patterns and monsters which many other people’s worlds seemingly did not. The actress in the Hamptons, the banker in Manhattan. They had their own worlds, with their own foreign struggles, of this BENJAMIN was sure. But they did not know the beast that BEN knew. They did not have to learn, as he did, how to look the monster in the eye and – with a bottle of wine in hand and an authentic smile on their face – say the words, “Hello friend, where shall we be going today?” And while he often wished for a different life, with different kinds of monsters and cycles, what sort of recourse did he actually have?

He could defiantly reject his life, and end it. But he had seen photographs of those who had ended their own lives. In death, they had appeared anything but defiant. Their bodies slumped, disfigured, small. Small – small was the word on BEN’s tongue. Their deaths were such small drops in a bucket so large, and so tumultuous – their deaths meant nothing, in the grand scheme. Death is everywhere – it is the norm, the final outcome of all things, the balancing of the equation. No, true defiance lies somewhere in life, not death. Defiance against the beast was not capitulating to its most expected outcome. Defiance was a warm smile, a gentle caress of its mangy, pestilent skin. Defiance was climbing onto its back and riding it down whatever trails and cliffs it wished to take him over, arms outstretched in an ecstatic release of its (purely decorative) reins.

The beast halted as it sauntered away from BENJAMIN. It turned, rounding a wide, lumbering radius through the soft, grassy soil along the side of its routine, dusty trail, leaving fresh prints in its wake. It approached Ben, as he stood awkwardly in the middle of its trail. The beast has certainly surprised him before, but this time felt different. This time, it felt to BEN as though the beast was offering him more than the seemingly inane destruction that he had become used to.

It drew close – BEN could feel it’s breath on his face. He could not tell if it was icy cold or blisteringly hot. The beast lowered its head, eye-to-eye with BENJAMIN, it’s golden green dinner plates staring through and between every pore and synapse of his being.

BENJAMIN looked away. He looked to the side of the trail where his checkbook lay, next to a drafting pen, and a notebook adorned with stars and a moon – all laying in the shadow of a ramshackle chicken coop. He glanced sheepishly back into the eyes, larger than his head. Benjamin knew not to turn towards the items on the side of the trail, though he unintentionally made but the slightest of turns with his torso – unwitting eyes might have called it an innocuous twitch, or the result of simple weariness. But the beast, with its great eyes, was not unwitting. It growled a low, guttural growl that vibrated in resonance with the cells and atoms and quarks that constituted BEN’s heart. Benjamin closed his eyes. The breath was definitely hot — he could feel it as he breathed it in through his nostrils, into his lungs. He exhaled. A living image flashed through his mind. A butterfly, with painted, translucent wings, fluttering and flapping vividly about his head, just inches from his face. And for a moment, as it hovered in the space that lay between the beast’s giant eyes and his own, he could see the vast bevy of images which had been painstakingly painted onto it’s wings.