It was the most horrible dream I have ever had.

I couldn’t wait to get it into form, get something physical under my hand where I could control it. Until then I would feel defiled, invaded, somehow guilty for the creature’s filthy touch on my clothes. There was risk in form, but that was a faint fear beside the need to purge myself of its utter vileness.

If it were going to be reproduced I would have cast it. That was a temptation. A clay model would feel cleaner, be finished with sooner, and then there would be only the making of the intaglio mold, pouring the resin, breaking the mold, and releasing the creature. I’d still have to paint it no matter how it was built. But a mold would take less time than the right way, and I might be tempted to refrain from breaking the mold. A cast piece can always be recast. I didn’t want reproductions. In the dream it reproduced itself quite handily. I shuddered, nauseated.

The right way was the slow way. I wanted to think about it, deeply and completely, once. Just while making it. Then I could cleanse myself, knowing the job was done.

I started with a wire armature, black and heavy but soft, life size at ten inches high, soldered to a forty-pound lead base. Something heavy was needed. This critter wasn’t going anywhere once it was built. The armature did most of the show work, too: all scrawny limbs and joints like a mantis or a grasshopper. It sat on its haunches, foreclaws to its mouth, gnawing, a pest, a parasite. I soldered on the sharp hooked spurs at forearm and shin, remembering how terrifying it had been to feel a tug on my uniform pants-leg, look down and see its feral face, half rat, half insect, see it climbing me with those spurs.

In the dream I had not noticed if it was scaly or bald or chitinous; as I painted on layers of resin I compromised, etching on scales with a dental tool on one layer, then painting it with a wash like dirty dishwater, then over that another translucent layer of sewage-colored resin etched with a few coarse hairs in large pores, then a wash like oil on a wet tarred street, building up the thickness of the strong thighs and upper arms, the bulb of the head. Color went on in washes. The effect was to be pearly and obscene, and the viewer would remember it black, as I did, though it was many colors.

In my head as I worked I saw it scamper through cratered villages to pick up a bit of charred skin, a child’s finger. I saw its bullet head, all eye and mouth, swimming strongly in the latrine, and my sphincter squeaked as I drew back unemptied. I saw a bulge in the belly of my friend, dead two days and unburied under the shrieking yellow sky, the bulge and a busy, squirrel-like tugging and pecking under the skin as it maneuvered in the little room it was making inside him, working its way toward his genitals. I feared it in the bellies of the living. Who will die next? What will he do first? I never saw one dead or stretched to its full length.

I positioned the foreclaws close to the head, mouth parts askew in the act of chewing. Chewing what must remain ambiguous. For that I used a piece of green pepper partly coated with resins, knowing that the pepper, rotting, would leave the resin convincingly shredded-looking, with a lingering odor. The creature took shape, rubbery and durable, squatting on a flattened, empty cigarette pack, completely at home.

I had no business submitting it to the veterans’ show on Halsted Street. I knew that. I photocopied decoration certificates from a library book, forged a signature on the entry form. I could more easily have put the beast in one of my regular galleries, where I would rub it in the public nose, if it had any validity at all.

But what if not? I couldn’t bear the idea. What if it was my dream alone? I believed in my monster completely, but I wasn’t quite sure of the war. I didn’t have that nightmare and do this work to make a bogeybeast for white chicks from the suburbs.

They didn’t question me. I walked among the authentic photographs and the helmets painted by genuine veterans with my hands in my pockets and dread in my heart, waiting for a reaction to my work.

There must have been a dozen men in the gallery. Some still wore the rags of their uniforms. My guilt lent me second sight. Blinding fire shimmered off them, granting them vitality that made my eyes water and my throat tighten.

The first man stopped in front of my creature. He swayed.

That was the most satisfying gallery experience of my life.

He looked for a long time. Then he looked toward the card. I said, “Mine,” without thinking, and he looked up at me.

“You saw it too?” I said.

“All over the goddam place,” he said, shuddering, his gaze shocked and inward.

I should have kept quiet. I should have left. “What was it called?”

He faced it again. In his eyes I saw the echo of my own reaction to the thing: shame, defilement, invasion. He swayed again. “Nothing. I never saw one—so close.” His eyes narrowed on it. I wondered if for him the memories returned, sputtering over reality with a horrid paintbrush. He shook himself. “It isn’t real, you know.”

This is the exquisite moment. No hunter takes greater satisfaction in the capture. I exulted, for now I knew, as I had suspected, that our nightmares were the same. Joy rushed out of me toward this man, and toward the thing I had made, the unknown parasite, eater on the dungheaps of war. We shared that. That justified everything, the horror itself, my impertinent illustration, my intrusion into authentic veteran space. That justified him. I wanted him to know that. I wanted to say, I did this for you.

Then he saw me. How young, how female and unscarred. “Hey, you weren’t there.” His face reddened. He swelled with anger.

I hung my head. I felt disastrously exposed and ashamed of myself.

“Who do you think you are? This isn’t your war!” He shouted and shouted at me. “You don’t know what’s real! You can’t just come in here—”

The other men came to listen. I felt their scrutiny, damning me deafeningly. They saw my work, they heard him accuse me. I said nothing. I put up my hands, mortified. I still saw their faces, stripped and angry.

He pushed me. I stumbled against the pedestal. The pedestal rocked, but the piece stood solid. I had screwed it down.

They stood around me now, the fire radiating out of them, an anger that knew how to express itself.

“Who told you about it? Who? Come on!”

Cringing, I whined, “I dreamed it.” Stand up or he’ll smash you, I thought. In a stronger voice: “I dreamed it.”

“Easy now, easy now.” The gallery owner pushed forward. He looked at me and at the card pinned to the pedestal. “Who’s this Andy Franco? Your father? Your brother?”

“My brother?” I echoed, dazed. “Th-the papers—” I stammered, but they only looked at each other. I stopped, sour fear in my mouth.

“He checked out,” the gallery owner said.

Relieved, my harasser demanded, “So your brother made this?”

Oh no you don’t, I thought, I know what you’re doing. I was still desperately ashamed of myself. I shouted, “What does that matter? Can’t anybody believe in the war?” My belly cried, Never mind all that, get out or get hurt.

The gallery owner stepped between us. “You can get out now,” he said to me. His jaw unclenched. Grudgingly he added, “Thanks for delivering it anyway. Andy did good.” He turned back to the listening men. “Settle down. She’s leaving.”

One by one, each man gave me a hot look and turned his back. I had to dodge around my creature, screwed forever to its pedestal, to get to the door. There was a small tearing sound as I opened the door. When I looked back, the card with the false name on it lay on the floor in four pieces. Beyond, a barrier of implacable, shabby green coats.

The beast sat on its pedestal at the end of a dark tunnel. It looked, suddenly, impossible. Fresh air blew in past me. My skin felt less sticky, my mouth less sour. My shadow scuttled across the floor, fleeing the sun at my back, and disappeared into the bodies of its rightful owners. For the first time since my dream I felt clean.