The usher did his job quickly, leading me to the theatre entrance and holding the door as I made my exit. No sooner had my tail crossed the threshold than the door slammed shut with a boom.

Guess that’s what I get for interrupting a raccoon’s nap.

With my eyes still adjusting to the midday sun, I tried to figure out an easy way to pass the time until my evening Takes class. I didn’t feel much like exploring anything else now, and I wasn’t exactly in the mood for being around others. Something was looming in the back of my head, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with it quite yet.

With a sigh, I looked at my bindle. It shared my sentiment, but then suggested, at least figuratively, that we go back to where I had found it. So we made our way back to the apple tree off on the one side of the creek, and soon enough I was nestled up in its branches. There was a bit of a breeze that rustled the leaves, but I’d say the overall effect was nice. Cel City had character, but the creek had calm.

Mr. Narrator tried talking to me for a few minutes after getting settled, but I gave him a bit of a brush-off, worried I didn’t have nothing good to share.

I didn’t mean to fall asleep, but I didn’t stop it from happening, either. Luckily, I didn’t remember anything of my trip to dreamland, and I woke up in time to see the sun starting to set.

With a loud yawn, I helped myself to another apple and climbed down the tree. “Time for some learning.”

“You still seem tired after all the sleeping you did today,” Mr. Narrator observed. “Are you feeling alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

I took a bite of the apple on the run, not wanting to have to come up with any evidence to support my claim.

The school’s front desk was staffed by a rather angry-looking owl attached to a short branch. When I approached to ask what room I should go to, her eyes narrowed as she pointed resolutely down one hallway. “Basic Takes is that way, Ms. Salamander.”

“Well, it seems my reputation has proceeded me,” I replied, one hand going to my hip.

“Preceded, you mean,” the owl corrected, her feathers ruffling, much to my secret delight.

“Did I? Proceeding, preceding—either way, it got here first.”

If she could squint any more, I’d have given her applause. “Don’t dally, Sally.”

Don't look so fowl, owl.

With a bit of a sigh, I headed down the hallway and found only one door. The sign on it read:

═════════ ✦ ✦ ✦ ═════════

FUNDAMENTALS OF TAKES

|DR.| PEMBERTON PEACOCK

═════════ ✦ ✦ ✦ ═════════

The title of doctor was a sign in itself, tacked onto the original with a small nail. Curiously, I lifted it, but before I could see underneath it—

Swish! Bang!

—the door swung open with a clatter, and the giant bird behind it flared its feathers.

“You’re late!” the professor declared, his tail unfurling as he held up the back of his wing to his forehead. “And to think, we’ve wasted several precious seconds here in the doorway, never to be able to reclaim them! Oh, the travesty of it all!”

Oh, the melodrama.

With a held sigh, I glanced past him into the practice room. There were a few chairs, all save for two lined up against the wall, and a single full-length mirror set on a stand.

“Where’s, uh, everybody else?” I asked.

“Everybody else,” he boomed, “has no need for the fundamentals, because everybody else has already learned to react before they have time to think about it!”

“So it’s just me and—”

“I am Dr. Pemberton Peacock!” he announced, his wing now pressed against his chest. “My critics noted I embody the very essence of ‘faire le paon!’ Others simply refer to me as genius. If you were to do so, I would not discourage it!”

“Uh, pleasure. I’m Sal—”

“Yes, yes, I know who you are,” he interjected, waving me off. “Now. Watch.”

He didn’t wait for me to take a seat. He jumped several feet into the air, wings and beak wide as he shook, the eyes on his tail feathers turning into exclamation points before he fell onto his back, the color draining from him. After three beats, he hopped up, snapping his tail shut as he brushed a bit of dirt off his side.

“That, Ms. Salamander, was a take.”

I nodded. “Obviously. So how do I—”

“You simply do it!” He repeated his performance, faster this time. “Fear! Like so!”

On the rebound, he clasped his wings together and floated into the air, small hearts forming around him. “Delight as this!”

When he landed back on the ground, he clutched his wings behind him as he leaned forward. “You understand now?”

“No, not really—”

“Simply try,” he said, gesturing to the empty air between us. “Try!”

So I tried, thinking about what it was like to be really afraid, like when you’re in nothing but darkness, with no body, only feeling pain—

“No, no, no,” he said with a dismissive flap. “You missed your mark.”

“But I was just preparing myself, you know, by—”

“Thinking about it first. But I told you to try, not think.”

He started to pace back and forth then, his tail dragging across the floor as he seemed almost to chug like a train. Every once in a while, he’d pause to put the back of his wing to his forehead, then shake his head as if rejecting an argument he was having with himself. After a minute of antics, he turned and pointed at me quite accusingly.

“You have spent your whole life reacting to everything, haven’t you, Salamander?”

I wasn’t prepared for the question, let alone the answer that bubbled up from the inside.

“No… I haven’t spent my whole life reacting as a salamander!”

He blinked, snapping out of his pose. “I don’t quite follow.”

“I—”

My eyes stung a little, then came the waterworks I wasn’t prepared to receive.

“Waaaaah!”

“Why, that’s perfection!” he cooed as I cried for the first time. “I can feel your sadness. You didn’t think twice about it. Your tears are refreshingly real!”

Before I could put together any words to tell him the take was a fake, he was already moving toward the mirror. “Take a good look at yourself, Ms. Salamander,” he commanded, turning the mirror toward me. “See as well as feel the state your body is in!”

And then I understood.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t caught glimpses of myself in the mirror back at Bovary’s. Sure, I’d kept them at arm’s length, hoping I’d get used to seeing myself that way as I was now. During my shower earlier, it was all I could do to keep my eyes shut and ignore how my body felt.

But it was time I faced the music.

I wasn’t human anymore, and I wouldn’t be going back.

Instead, I had adopted the form of one of my doodles. A precious one, to be sure, but it was nothing like what I had before. Smaller, squishier, stickier. Sure, it sparkled in the water. It wasn’t ugly, neither. But I had only been in it for three days, and even then, I realized I was trying my hardest not to acknowledge the fact that I had transformed.

Everything’s different, and I was pretendin’ it wasn’t…

Mr. Narrator sniffled. “Oh Sally…”

I can acknowledge it, but I ain’t ready to talk about it. Sorry...

“Now take this,” Mr. Peacock said, pulling out a small deck of cards from under a wing. “For practice.”

Grateful for the distraction, I took the deck. Each card was stamped with a single word.

Anger.

Fear.

Joy.

Surprise.

I shuffled through the cards quickly, noting some were duplicates.

Dr. Peacock tapped the top of the deck. “Look at the word, then see how you react in this mirror. Make faces! Learn the shape of your feelings so you no longer must think about it before having it.”

“That… Actually sounds like a good idea, Dr. Peacock,” I replied, a little surprised he was able to take a step back from his melodrama to be an educator.

“Of course it is. I came up with it, so it only stands to reason,” he professed, rounding out his suddenly barrel chest. “Now, if you shall excuse me, the burden of my genius has become quite heavy, and I must take my leave.”

Before I realized that we had only been holding the lesson for ten minutes, he staggered out the door, dragging his tail as though he were Sisyphus himself, pushing an unseen boulder down the hallway. I heard him pick up the pace, however, as soon as he passed the owl at the front desk, who scolded him for fleeing work so quickly.

“You get back here and finish out the lesson, you preposterous peacock!” the owl shouted.

“I have taught her all that I can, and I am not paid by the hour!” he called back, his pace quickening.

I stood alone then, one hand holding the deck of cards while facing the full-length mirror.

A little practice couldn’t hurt, could it?

After shuffling the deck thoroughly, I closed my eyes and plucked the first card off the top. With a swallow, I opened one eye to see what I had chosen.

Blegh.

“Blegh?” Mr. Narrator read aloud. “How does one… Blegh?”

“Blegh!” I shouted, sticking out my tongue and giving it my best shot.

And so my tongue did shoot forward, sticking to the mirror about two feet in front of me.

“Blegh?!” I questioned in a panic, grabbing the sides of the mirror as I pulled, leveraging my stretching body in hopes of unsticking myself. My grip slipped, however, and the mirror spun end over end, wrapping my tongue and then me around it lengthwise.

When the spinning wound down, my whole body went slack, my tongue retracted on its own, and I slid down onto the floor with a sigh born of both relief and embarrassment.

“How humiliating!”

“Yet I bet it was quite the take, Sally,” Mr. Narrator said with a bit of gusto. “Your timing was spot on!”

“Then let’s call it a night,” I said as I stood up, shaking my head. “I’m not up for trying a second one.”