Benevolent Order of the Creature, Lodge No. 241

No one can say when the Lodge was founded, only that the Creature was already in the corner when the columns went up, when the paper sun was first hung and made to burn, when the grass was cut from green stock and persuaded to grow. Four amber eyes, arranged in no order known to symmetry, and a patience older than the room. It does not perform. It presides. The musicians are merely the part of the night that moves. Membership is not applied for. You are admitted the moment you stop noticing the difference between the clouds overhead and the ceiling they hang from, the moment a held note outlasts the breath that started it and you forget which one of you is dreaming the other. The Order keeps minutes from a meeting that never adjourned. Its single bylaw is sympathetic vibration: strike one thing truly and the rest of the room answers, whether or not you meant to touch it. Under that law the Creature gathers its players the way the sun gathers its spikes, the way the jungle gathers itself out of flat paper into something that watches back. What happens beneath those eyes is free, as the best inexplicable things tend to be, and folded into the curated weekly hours of a neighborhood that has learned to leave a corner open. Come for the music. Stay because the Creature has not blinked, and you are beginning to suspect it is keeping the meeting open for you.