Beast Star

Beast Star walked into MoBA with an electric guitar over one shoulder and no idea where to plug it in. It didn’t matter much. The loudest thing in the street was a Beast in a Hyena balaclava at the foot of a long flight of stone steps, shouting at a sandwich.

“It is not called Lunch,” the Hyena was yelling. “Lunch is not a title. It’s a surrender.”

Beast Star went straight over and joined in. Within a minute there were twenty of them, and the sandwich had been called Midday With Pickles, The Crust Remembers and, by Beast Star, Hold Very Still, which got a cheer. In MoBA everything gets a title, even food, and arguing about one is how they say hello. Then somebody pointed at the guitar.

“What’s that one called?”

Beast Star didn’t know. So they played it to find out: loud, scratchy and unplugged, a noise like a happy fence. The crowd stamped on the bottom step, right on top of a chalk tally somebody had been keeping, and argued about titles for the noise.

These were the Portrait Steps. Anyone could sit there to be painted, and the queue up the side was full of pale walkers, Beasts whose colour had started to go thin. The whole place smelled of wet paint. A crate of lent brushes stood at the bottom with names chalked all over its lid.

Halfway up, a painter in an Original balaclava was telling a joke about a duck and a frame shop. It was a very bad joke. The Beast sitting for them didn’t laugh. Their jaw was set like a shut gate.

“Nothing,” the painter muttered. “A whole hour, and nothing.” Then they looked down the Steps, right at Beast Star. “You. With the noise. Can you play quiet?”

The crowd was halfway through a chant. Somebody had just called Beast Star’s name to start the next verse. It was the best morning Beast Star had ever had, and it was also the only one.

Beast Star went up the Steps.

The painter was Paz. Paz paints every sitter smiling, and a portrait here is more than a picture. It’s called a Likeness, and while it hangs in the arcade beside the Steps, it holds the Beast in it. It keeps them from fading. Paz wanted this face held by dusk, and the brush couldn’t start until the smile came.

Beast Star sat on the step below the sitter and played very small: one string, then two, a tune that kept almost tripping and catching itself. The sitter watched Beast Star’s fingers. Down below, the crowd drifted off to find something louder.

At noon a Cat at the top of the Steps counted the empty hooks in the arcade out loud. “Nine,” they called, the way you’d call the weather.

The sitter’s jaw let go a little. Then the tune tripped for real, a wrong note so sour that Beast Star winced, and the sitter laughed.

Paz’s brush was already moving.

Beast Star played all afternoon. The tune didn’t last. It went away the moment each note was finished, and Beast Star knew it would, and kept going anyway. On the canvas the smile was getting thicker and surer with every stroke, and that would stay.

At dusk Paz held out a brush from the crate. “Your hands are steadier than mine now,” they said. “Letter the name on the back.”

Beast Star took the brush and asked the sitter how to spell it.