something monstrous

written 20240922.

“write about something monstrous. what does it mean for something to be a monster? is it a judgement of character, something inherited at birth or creation, or something else?”

as with all monsters, there is the potential, the unceded possibility it’ll bite. or shred to pieces with its talons. or knock down with its tail. or impale on the long horn growing out of its forehead.

which it almost certainly will not. it has agreed an uneasy truce with the world. don’t harm me and i won’t harm you. even if it seems a lot of people have a hard time believing that, and eye it uneasily at the supermarket checkout and in public restrooms.

it was discovered at the bottom of a well that had been dry for almost a century. the aquifers around here are odd creatures, sometimes spitting out rusted equipment or fragments of bone, or other things from deeper places. they figured this thing must have bubbled up the same way, this eel-looking thing darting about in a couple inches of muddy water. by the time it had developed limbs, and begun gulping in the air and vocalising, it was too late to do anything other than try to live with it.

literate monsters are supposed to feel a certain self-loathing. they are acutely aware of what sets them off, they curse their difference, their isolation, their loneliness, even as they twist off normie heads. it, however, was proud of its existence, the way it had metamorphosed out of those amphibian years into this robust, taxonomically unplacable form. it felt a greater affinity for brutes, for the leviathans and krakens and zillas content in themselves and their capacities for huge violence. if you were going to be a weird, singular thing, why not enjoy it?

monsters that emerge from the ocean, or wait with infinite patience in its remotest corners, do so for the sole purpose of destroying our shit. because we dumped toxic waste out there, or tested nuclear weaponry, or simply, thoughtlessly awoke them from their sleep. the problem for this thing was that it’d been found in a well and grown up here on land. even if the world reacted to it with stunned silences, or barely disguised hostility, it was too deeply imbricated with it. it’s hard to tear things down when like everyone else you depend on everyone else for your continued existence.

reptilicus and zilla don’t have to hold down jobs and pay rent. but then if they make themselves known, they don’t generally survive long enough to find jobs or housing anyway. for all their destructive power, they are singular, and the entire world can close in on them so easily. maybe this is why the books and movies it’s seen so often mine their horror in the prospect that the monsters, somehow, might reproduce.

or, worse, that they might form a coalition.

it’s becoming apparent this thing isn’t the only thing of uncertain origins and taxonomy walking the city. it’s passing others in the street, sitting behind them on the bus. monster origins are rarely identical. it imagines a million different starting points for them, who seem so different anyway. long tongues, shimmering skin, too many appendages. it can easily imagine how they might have started out more like ferns, or fish, or fungi. and wherever and however they started out, here they are now, on land, with all the possibility and threat that entails.

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