The school day hadn’t even started yet, and Leroy was already exhausted. Dealing with lessons was easy enough, but people? Leroy was an introvert for a reason.

Making his way to the edge of the schoolyard to watch the mist and the trees through the chain-link fence, Leroy found himself fixating on an old fire lookout tower and pondering it until the bell rang. He’d grabbed a tourist pamphlet on a little excursion the other day and had been scouring it for any information about the town he could find. Something about the town made his spine tingle and body chill whenever he looked at the horizon for too long.

The pamphlet insisted that this was normal. Old towers and chilling horizons were common in this town, apparently.

Whatever was moving in the brush over there sure wasn’t, though.

What kind of creature was black and white like that? Too big to be a skunk, and out in broad daylight, too. It moved with an odd gait, like an animal with paralyzed hind legs dragging the lower half of its body behind it in order to get around.

Two pairs of purple-gray eyes watched him from the ferns just beyond the fence, widening in something like terror when they made contact with his. Leroy caught himself on the fence on the way down, fingers lacing into the lattice that separated him from whatever was on the other side as he pulled himself back to his feet. It looked like a dog, but was obviously not.

Something like a border collie with two heads positioned elegantly on two elongated necks was hunkered down in the brush and deadfall, watching Leroy’s every move with cautious, careful eyes. A thick, powerful tail like that of a snake hoisted its body up on its paws in place of where its back legs should’ve been. Two silver tags glinted from a pair of extremely washed-out purple collars, one for each neck.

“What the-”

The words fell from Leroy’s mouth without his permission, and they startled both him and the creature on the other side of the fence halfway out of their skin. Both heads flinched back in evident surprise while the body scooted itself back by a few inches. The black and white bands of color on the creature’s tail moved almost hypnotically when it slithered.

“We should go,” the head on the left whispered to the one on the right.

Terrible decision.

Leroy fell over onto his back for real this time with something between a scream and a yelp, and whatever it was made a similar sound and scrambled off into the brush at a pace Leroy was certain it shouldn’t have been able to go. Somewhere on the campus, the bell rang, and he scrambled to his feet in a near-panic, grabbing his bag and racing to class.

What a way to start a Tuesday.

---

The classes weren’t entirely awful, but Leroy felt like physics must’ve been the school’s attempt to break his spirit and turn him into some kind of mindless zombie. That, and he felt like he might’ve been going crazy.

His seat was sandwiched in between a boy with an old-fashioned TV for a head and something like a white lion with wings that shone with subtle colors of the rainbow and a sharp, slightly curved horn jutting from its forehead. And nobody even batted an eye about it.

It defied all logic, and logic was to Leroy as God was to a priest. His desk in physics class was like a public Saw trap engineered specifically to make him want to lay down on the floor and begin to cry.

Did the universe want him to completely lose his mind?

It didn’t really matter. It was way more important that he paid attention to the lesson at hand rather than gawking at the people on either side of him. Considering his encounter with… whatever kind of creature was in the undergrowth on the other side of the fence that morning, Leroy had more than a hunch that he was going to have to adjust to this strange new factor. Quickly, too. The last thing he needed was to make moving in harder on his father and sister. Nobody needed that kind of stress, and part of Leroy’s job had been keeping that kind of stress away from his family ever since he could recall.

To his left, the lion slowly put their head down on their desk, allowing their eyelids to flutter briefly shut as they sighed and carefully stretched their wings. One massive paw hooked up a pencil between its toes after a few heartbeats, then scrawled carefully across the lined paper in front of them with expert, elegant movement. Within seconds, notes written in neat print handwriting began to take form in graphite marks. 

Leroy was utterly enamored and frankly fascinated by the sight of paws writing. Clearly there must’ve been some kind of element of practice early on in his peer’s life, just like how Leroy had been taught how to write in kindergarten. When their golden eyes made contact with his, he finally found it in him to mouth “That’s cool,” to them, then smiled at them. He got an even bigger smile back.

With expert movements, the shimmering creature quickly scrawled out “Iris: She/her,” on the paper and gently tapped it to make sure Leroy saw. In return, he found himself quickly jotting down his own name and pronouns to show as well. Before he knew it, she was scribbling down explanations of the lesson in her notes to show to him, communicating with just smiles and some well-placed looks.

On his other side, the TV-headed boy seemed to stare almost suspiciously at Leroy’s interaction with Iris. Slowly, a clawed gray hand slid a torn piece of note paper onto Leroy’s part of the table, messily marked with the words “What are you doing?”

Though Leroy had absolutely zero experience in note-passing, by the end of the school day he had somehow managed to become friendly acquaintances with Iris and Theodore. From what he could gather, Theodore was pretty disinterested in most science, but Iris was obsessed with anything and everything involving science of any kind. She very expertly guided the two boys through the admittedly rather confusing lesson without speaking a single word aloud, and somehow all of it made sense.

Though exhausted and still a little shocked, Leroy entered the family car with a smile on his face. With his sister happily talking their father’s ear off about her teachers, Leroy found that he had the time to sit and stare out the window. He felt something like joy about the day’s events, but it was tangled and complicated by the surrealness of the whole town so far. It shouldn’t have been plausible, but somehow it was real. Somehow, Iris and Theodore and that thing in the bushes hadn’t been hallucinations.

It hurt his head to think about it too hard, so he didn’t.

Once he was home, he dragged himself up to his room and locked himself in there, much to the disappointment of Cecelia, who he suspected was concerned because of his complete silence. Sliding down against the wall, he folded himself into a little ball and fished his phone and earbuds out of his pocket, brushing aside a few of his ruddy curls so he could put them in and turn the music up. Then, he slowly flopped over onto the carpet and stared up at the ceiling, deeply thinking.

Okay, Leroy, his brain explained to him with practiced firmness. That was real. Everything today was real, which means it is explainable.

Good start. This was the kind of thing his old school counselor told him to do. Sit down, take deep breaths, and work through the situation bit by bit.

He opted to save Theodore for last, deciding that a humanoid with a TV head was probably going to be harder to explain to himself than the other two were. Iris and the creature in the foliage were both very clearly intelligent animals capable of communicating in and comprehending English, so he could start there. Perhaps they learned to mimic the sounds like parrots, or perhaps it was closer to teaching apes sign language.

Iris was obviously feline in form, though the rest of her traits were harder to explain. Assuming she was some kind of big cat, wings and a horn didn’t exactly make sense. Then again, quite a few species of mammals grew antlers or horns. Leroy suspected by the positioning of Iris’ that it might be something between the keratin of a rhinoceros and a bone structure beneath that supported the shape, sheathed inside the keratin like that of a sheep. The wings were clearly too small to lift her off the ground, so they had to be vestigial.

If something like a platypus can lay eggs, then maybe a lion can have wings, he told himself, trying not to get too stuck just yet. Now for the animal in the bushes.

It looked like a border collie, but with a longer neck than a dog should have. Still, that was a good base to work from. The two heads were harder to explain, but conjoined twins existed in many species. Mammals built like that usually died, but they seemed conjoined at the shoulder, which was probably survivable with enough care. The scaly tail might’ve been like a beaver tail, made of tougher flesh. Clearly it was supposed to be attached to the creature, so to hold the being’s torso up in the place of back legs, it probably had to be strong and flexible, something like a boa constrictor.

Theodore, on the other hand, was a whole other can of worms. How did a human body come to have such a clearly inorganic, mechanical head? Just thinking about it made Leroy so anxious that he had to give up before he could even really start. He felt like he was going to quite literally explode if he even tried. As much as he hated mysteries and not knowing the answers, he had no choice but to let go of it and hope to unravel it another day.

Something told him this wouldn’t be the last time, either.

---

Despite promising himself that he’d stop thinking about the day’s confusing discoveries after dinner, it was currently 11:00 PM when Leroy was hopelessly searching through the internet for cases of two-headed mammals. Though in another tab he’d been able to find everything from two-headed snakes to two-headed turtles, he was having almost no luck finding any information about two-headed mammals, much less ones that survived past birth. The poem about the two-headed calf had popped up more times than he particularly cared to count, but it was far from being helpful to him. Mammals with polycephaly really, really didn’t like to survive to adulthood.

He’d jumped into the rabbit hole more readily than Alice ever could, and was somehow more lost than she ever became.

It was a fascinating subject, of course – even if he preferred to learn about things like music, for example – with so many different ways it could manifest. Some specimens had two perfectly formed heads, but others were conjoined at the brain or base of the head, and some were so closely conjoined that there was one normal face with an extra face tacked on next to it. Some shared an eye.

Snakes? Check. Sharks? Check. Cows? Check. Pigs, cats, turtles, lizards, and deer? Check. Humans? Disturbingly enough, check. There were also a multitude of hoaxes that Leroy found while doing his research, but he felt fairly confident in his ability to avoid buying into those after finding some more reputable sources.

Kind of neat how he’d accidentally seen an example of polycephaly in person, provided he hadn’t dreamed it up or been hallucinating. His tongue was laden with questions that would probably be impolite to ask. Ideally, he would have written them down if he hadn’t been so downright exhausted.