Monster

Andrew had an aura of twitchy, baited breath around him on Monday night.  It had been like this every Monday night since Victoria had started working at the Seven-Eleven on the corner of Third street, taking over the night shift for John Halderson two months ago.  For all of the times Andrew had said to himself that he just didn't like people, he had to admit that he enjoyed the few minutes when the shift would turn over and he could engage in the smallest of talks with Victoria before he headed back the two blocks to his apartment.  He had wound himself up for the small questions, the innocuous emotions that might pass between them.  Despite his perfect view of the street and the sky, he might start with "how's the weather?" or something like that.  In the last half hour, he gave each of the five customers who came in the wrong change.  Only two of them noticed, more in a hurry to get back home through the glow of the streetlamps.

Victoria's entry with entourage chimed the door, yanking his head around.  She was wearing a grey sweatshirt he noticed, one he hadn't seen before.  He had the words in his mouth to say something to her, anything, but her friends just talked and talked as they followed her towards the back room, passing the counter.  He didn't want to be rude and interrupt, not because he had any respect for Victoria's friends, but because Victoria might think he was a worse person than he was if he did.  He didn't like tall Jenny and smiling Lucy, in great part because he felt jealousy bubble within him when he saw them hanging around Victoria.  They twittered, glancing his way once or twice while Victoria changed into her uniform and clocked her time-sheet.  Then Victoria was at the counter, and Andrew almost had hope she would say something to him, but she just kept talking to her friends.  

Endless gossip.  Something about a tv show.  He didn't watch tv, and so he ignored it as he tore himself away from Victoria's presence and clocked out.  Her sweatshirt was in a pile on the back room table, shoved up against a small mirror, and he had an urge to touch it.  Nobody would know.  He didn't anyway.  Slipping off the nametag and the overshirt, he scrawled the time in pen and walked out.  An old lady had come in, buying an automotive magazine and a snickers, so Victoria was still busy, and so he could only continue walking.  Her two friends stood off to the side, keeping the conversation alive like an ember for when Victoria could participate again.  He heard the familiar sound of the bell ring one last time that night as he walked out the door.  Weeks earlier, when Victoria's friends first started joining her for her shift, he had stayed a few minutes, poking through the racks of magazines and candy while he waited for a chance to say something to her.  There hadn't been a chance.  Lucy just kept talking and giggling and Jenny would get a remark in seamlessly, glancing conspiratorially at both her friends, as Lucy stopped to breathe.  Victoria talked less, and the fact that Andrew didn't even get a chance to hear much of her voice made the noise even more dreadful.  He liked how she would laugh though, every once in a while a smile bloomed on her face and pure, joyful sound would reach his ears.  He thought it was a perfect laugh, and only disliked her friends more when they made fun of her for it.

Tonight though, he had given up on a conversation.  Maybe tomorrow, he thought, though he knew that her friends would follow her on Tuesday night as well.  He was frowning the whole three blocks he walked to get to his apartment.  He lay down on the rumpled sheets of his bed that was pushed up into one corner.  From his view, he scanned the room searching for something.  The TV that he never used, the refrigerator he stocked with root beer, the pile of ramen wrappers, pizza boxes and pistachio shells that formed a ring around his overflowing trashcan: all of these things couldn't hold his attention.  The ceiling was almost comforting in its blankness, less of a reminder of his life than anything else.  The bubbling of jealousy that had filled him was leaking out leaving an emptiness that made him heavier instead of light.  Closing his eyes and blindly tossing his clothes in the direction of the closet, he slumbered.

Andrew woke to a pressing under his left eyelid.  The light was still on, heating his face.  He recalled a similar feeling when he had put in colored contacts for a Halloween costume years ago; a vampire costume with red eyes that he had almost gone trick-or-treating in.  His eyelid pushed open, but he still couldn't see.  Blinded by the pressure that climbed from inside his eye to his face, then dripping down onto his chest.  He smelled raw eggs as he opened his right eye, looking across the bridge of his nose at the weight.  Blue and black filled his sight, mixing like paint swirling on a canvas.  It was small, billowing bigger like smoke, a face like a chicken with the body of a stub-tailed, six legged lizard.  It paced down his chest, growing to the size of a cat before it was completely free of his eye.  It looked back at him, reflective pools of empty glass that saw nothing and held everything.  The beast scampered down, through the window and off into the night. Andrew lay there, feeling the moist trail drying on his skin where it had passed, wondering when he would wake up.  He drifted back to sleep hours later.

In the morning, he woke to a feeling of puffiness, his left eye heavy in his head.  In the bathroom mirror his eye looked glassy and empty, a faint glint of yellow caught deep inside.  Andrew's bathroom light flickered on and off, a loose bulb, giving him only moments to inspect himself.  It must have been a trick of the light.  He felt normal, just a little puffy eyed as if he had cried in his sleep.  His pillow was lightly moist, smelling faintly of raw eggs.

By four, Andrew began his shift, selling candy and magazines, stocking shelves, counting change.  Instead of the slow building of excitement to closing time, and Victoria, Andrew thought of his dream, the absurdity of it.  Andrew had dreamed that his light had been left on, he thought.  It was off when he woke up, and he certainly would not have been able to sleep with it roasting him.  The creature disgusted him, he decided.  It was repulsive with its slimy skin and its many legs.  He disliked the audacity it displayed, venturing out into the light of his room.  What kept him on the idea of the creature was its emergence from his eye.  He disliked the idea that it had been a growth off of him, that it had been part of him.  He disliked more the idea that the creature might have somehow gone into his eye from somewhere else, invading him before leaving.

The sun set before he even realized it, night dragging itself into the streets.  Andrew barely had half an hour to agonize about what he might begin to say to Victoria when she arrived, her friends following her.  Jenny lagged behind, listening as Lucy prattled on, and a strange thing happened.  As Victoria passed the register and Lucy trailed behind her, Jenny actually stopped and looked at him.  "What's up?" she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.  Lucy and Victoria didn't even notice.  Andrew shifted uncomfortably behind the counter.

"Lovely weather tonight, isn't it? he replied.  The line he had been crafting for Victoria if he could ever get a word in.  But it wasn't her, it was one of the other ones, one of the ones he secretly despised.  He cursed the fact that he had let the words slip out to Jenny, that she would have the benefit of such a bland monument of his interest.

Jenny leaned forward on the counter as she spoke, a twitch of a smile gaining her lips.  "Kinda shitty, I think.  Been cloudy the whole day, not that I've been out today much anyway."  Then she waited.  On him.  Andrew had not prepared anything else to say, he had only had half an hour to worry and think, and all of the words and the phrases that he had thought up others days fled to the darker recesses of his mind.  "C'mon 'drew, what's up?" she reiterated.

"I thought you'd be talking to Lucy" was all he could think to say.

"I can't talk to you?  My friend?" Jenny asked.  She pursed her lips in pretty disappointment.

"You aren't my friend," Andrew thought, then said, the motion of the thought continuing out his mouth.  "I don't like you."  An afterthought.  Jenny turned and ran.  The door chimed; he had heard it so many times, but it seemed to echo this time.  Victoria came out, work-shirt on, and started talking to Lucy.  She didn't seem like she had even noticed the absence.  Lucy, for her part, glanced at the door between phrases, then over at him.  She had a look of worry, of confusion, scrunching up her blonde eyebrows.  She didn't say anything.

Andrew clocked out.  Victoria's grey sweatshirt was sitting on the table again.  Had she worn that when she walked in, Andrew wondered.  He walked out, slowly, taking glances at Victoria, trying to find an explanation.  It was in her eyes, a tiny sliver of emptiness where the color was hollowed out.  She ignored him and continued to talk to Lucy.  He blinked and nothing seemed to be wrong.  Her eyes caught the light and they were impenetrable.  Andrew's walk home took longer than usual.  He turned on the tv, staring at the screen in an effort to free his mind.  The dream was getting to him.  Once he had distracted himself, he might sleep.  The tv was still on when he woke, pressure bursting forth from his eyeball, the dull thump of something jumping off his chest to the floor.  Eggs.  Its back leg disappeared out the window as he oriented himself.  Breathing heavily, he entered the bathroom.  His eyes were perfectly normal.  A nightmare where he didn't completely wake up right away.  No more sleep tonight, Andrew resolved.  He stared at the glassy surface of the tv, playing old Three Stooges skits in between commercials for cleaning supplies.  He needed to take out the trash, his room was starting to smell.  Tomorrow morning, before Andrew went to work, he would take it out.  It slipped back into the room at four in the morning as the commercials went on break.  He remembered the blue-black of its moist skin from last night.  In its beak were bits of string, shiny and luminescent.  They reminded him of laughter.  Pausing on the window sill, the creature swallowed, looking Andrew in the eyes with its glassy orbs.

The creature adroitly leaped to the top of the tv, eyes locked with Andrew's.  Andrew backed away.  It jumped to the light switch, shrouding the room in darkness.  "What are you?" Andrew said.  "Stay back!"  With his back to the corner, Andrew could only watch in fear as the creature walked up to him across his bed.  It climbed him, small claws clinging to his clothing until it arrived at his face.  Andrew pushed at it, fingers slipping off its slick skin, mucus like egg-white running down his fingers.  Then it pressed itself into his left eye, beak first.  The creature oozed its way in.  Andrew got a grasp of its back leg and pulled, his entire head yanked forward.  Inside his skull, he felt a small tearing, as if its claws were anchored inside his flesh.  In pain, he let go, and the last of the leg disappeared behind his eyelid.  It was the same glassy color as before, his eye, and in the mirror more flecks of light shone from within it.

Andrew went to work with an eyepatch on Wednesday.  Victoria came in alone, eyes dulled with specks of emptiness more countless than before.  Andrew seethed.  He had no words, no grasp of what he could do, what he might say.  Andrew had observed the slouch of Victoria's back, the silence that followed her to the back room.  She wouldn't meet his gaze after she had changed.  He went to clock out.

"Vile creature, aren't you?  You strip away her friends, her life.  You make her like me."  He tore the eyepatch off, staring into the wall-mirror.  The scratches that the eyepatch had hidden were faded from the bright red scratches they had been into pink lines that radiated around his eye, which was still glassy, just like the creature's eye.  It all made sense to him, and it sickened him.  He could smell saltiness from the crumpled sweatshirt on the desk.  "I don't want you anymore," Andrew whispered to the empty room.  His stomach was unsettled, and as the image of the creature plagued his thoughts, his revulsion increased.  "I created you, somehow, so how do I destroy you?"  On the table was the timesheet with a cheap bic pen.  Andrew's hand shook as he grasped it.

At the register, Victoria heard the scream, shocked out of the doldrums she was experiencing.  It was a short scream, high pitched.  The store was silent.  Victoria flicked her blonde hair back behind her ear and headed to the back room.  She heard chuckling as she approached.  Andrew leaned over the table.  His left eye had slick blood around it, spattered on his skin just as much as it had upon the floor, the table, her sweatshirt.

"OhmyGod are you okay?  Andrew?"  As he turned his head toward her, she noticed the empty socket behind the blood.  It had stopped pouring out, but his eye was gone.  Had that been under his eyepatch?  How long had he had it?  Andrew was grinning.

"I killed it.  I don't know if I can make it right, but I killed it."  He sounded triumphant, grinning as he said it, gesturing into the puddle of gore on the table.  In the center, the blue-black form, like a lizard the size of an eyeball, twitched.   "Almost."  Stuck into the desk, impaling the lizard, was the pen she had just used to fill out her time card, which was now drenched in blood.

"My nightmare," Victoria murmured.  She stepped into the gory room, moving closer to the creature.  Its glass eyes had clouded over, dark, reflecting the bright red pool.  She reached out to it, to the hole in its chest.  Little golden strings twined up the pen, reaching out the inches between it and her finger.  Victoria brought them close to her face to see the fine threads, and they darted into her eyes, filling the empty vacuum of colorlessness.

Through his one good eye, Andrew watched it all happen.  He did not remember who she was to him, but she was wearing the store uniform, so she must work here.  He smiled.  The bad thing was dying.  Andrew supposed that he had killed it because of how slimy it looked and the faint odor of raw eggs that surrounded it.  With a lightness under his eyelids, he slid back against the wall, and fell asleep.

A little bragging.

I am to some, most even, a legend.  Each story billowing larger in the retelling, and there are many stories.  Most of them are based on something true.  Most of them leave out the good parts.  I grew to fame as they say.  Killing a wyvern isn't actually that hard though.  Most of the men I grew up with would have come out alive.  Back in the blackened forests beasts like that don't deter the people who live with worse breathing down their neck.

No, wyverns are small creatures.  It was only one, not five or ten like some people say it was, not did I escape unharmed, barely breaking a sweat.  There was a long scratch running down my abdomen for a year or two afterwards because I was careless and didn't bring a real weapon.  I had to use a skinning knife, though it was sharpened exquisitely.  They storytellers never play up how fastidious I am with keeping things maintained, though honestly, I can't blame them.  It fits their style to make me out to be going from one thing to another without a care, and there is certainly no time to be sharpening swords or washing blood and ichor out of a shirt.

Anyway, the reason it went into the stories was the girl.  I figured she was just some farm girl who got lost out there in the woods.  Every so often one of them ignores her pa's warnings and comes flower picking or sees a glint of fireflies that seems quite inviting and mysterious.  At least, that was what my parents would say to me.  I hadn't actually seen one before.  I was only twelve at the time, and I hadn't been let to go roam around by myself for longer than around a year by then.  Turns out she was a princess.  Again, I stress that I wasn't really in on the outsider customs at that point, certainly not at the level I am now, or when I talked a duke into playing cards with me with his land at stake.  Don't tell anyone about that one by the way.  He wouldn't like it coming back around to embarrass him, and I like visiting in the summer time.  He has the most delightful gardens.

Anyway, I say this because it would be obvious to you that a girl in silk trappings and glittering with jewelry from ear to toe would not normally be mistaken for a farmer.  Also the reason the wyvern wanted to snatch her up and take her to his nest.  Large flying lizards are like crows in that respect; they really can't resist the shiny stuff.  There was this one time where I tricked on using a gold plated box and. . .ok, not so relevant, I admit.  Just ask for the tale of the twisted tree in the white forest some time if you want to hear it.  There's a lot more to it than you might think, and they get it pretty accurate.

Anyway, I'm walking through the woods, looking around for a deer my dad had sent me out to drag back to camp, and I hear this high pitched scream.  I look up.  Shiny, pink and white, and all flailing in a wyvern's claws.  Wasn't hard to track it to the nest, especially since we forest folk tend to make a point of knowing exactly where wyvern nests are.  It helps when you need some new steel or start losing metal objects.  The trick was getting there before it gets tired of dragging her back into the nest and just stabs her in the gut.  For her sake, it was a good thing I was a fast runner.  Her belly was mostly intact and her arms were only a little slashed up by the time I popped my head up over the edge of the nest sitting in one of the long-armed trees.

Strawberry-Blonde

The first time I saw Amy was the day Dr. Nefarious first got arrested while robbing the Wells Fargo.  She was sitting at the bar, watching the news, and I really only got a look at her short, strawberry-blonde hair from across the room.  I've always been a corner person.  Anyway, I wasn't staring or anything, it was more of how you notice someone particularly pretty and it sticks in your mind.  That night I was more interested to hear that for the first time in our city's history we had what amounted to a super-villain in actual custody.  I think it might have been Galaxy Girl, or maybe Chessmaster who caught him, but that doesn't matter too much.  They got their ceremony.  After a pretty short sentencing, Dr. Nefarious became the first super-powered inmate.

It was two weeks later when I saw her again.  Same bar, same chair, same head cocked upward to watch the TV on the wall.  I'm not sure exactly what made me go up and talk to her.  Might have been the way her hair was just sort of fuzzy, in that way it gets when you fix it up with your fingers as you're leaving the house.  Gave me a feeling like she wanted someone to talk to.  I introduced myself, Martin, and she told me her name was Amy.  We talked, small-talk, and then I had to ask why she was so into the news coverage.  At that point it was still big political speeches, national, that were all about the whole Dr. Nefarious incident.  He called himself that, by the way.  Sure it sounded so cliche, but I have to admit that it was catchy.  Nowdays the villains have horrible sense in naming, especially with the umlaut craze lately.

Amy startled at that, setting down her third shot of bourbon halfway through drinking it.  She asked if it was that obvious.  It was either that or I was more boring than I thought.  Most women who don't want company are less polite about saying so than quick glances up to the screen every time it came off commercials.  Obvious but not odd I said.  I only personally stopped watching it because I had an inkling of where things would end up.  She was blushing a bit at that point, and while I attributed it more to the liquor at the time, from what I came to know I think it might have been more to do with getting caught peeking at the screen.  Girl could hold her liquor, what can I say?  What did she think about it, I asked.  She started in on pretty much my own reasoning at that point.  Said that actual containment wouldn't last long since the jails weren't prepared for it.  Maybe the next time, but not this one.  At the least there would eventually be jail-breaks from other super-villains just to muck things up for the law.  Bad for the economy to keep them in jail anyway.

I was nodding my head along with her until the last part.  You might be like me and not know what she was talking about with that last part.  Nothing said stable economy to me in bank robbery and attempted coup of local government.  Dr. Nefarious was one of the more sane ones, honestly.  There was a nutter around that time who went by the name of Penguin Man.  Wanted to turn the city into a giant penguin habitat.  Crazy.  Anyway, it doesn't really match up from what I could see and I said so.  Amy gives me the eyebrow at that point.  Makes a big theatrical start in on how I was wrong and she would tell me why.  Hand gestures and everything.  So first, she says, you have to think beyond the immediate cause and effect.  Beyond Villain and Hero too she says.  Bottom line is that most of the shenanigans recently had limited actual damages.  A few bullet holes and broken walls.  A broken tree or two and some crushed cars.  Most of that was covered by insurance.  Kinda crazy not to get it with the way the city was anyway.  Next is the jobs created.  Lots of repair jobs, protection jobs, super-proofing jobs (though those were mostly scams), and even criminal jobs to pull money into the local business.  That's without secondary impact stuff, Amy says.  We talked around it more, the whole thing took longer than it did in the retelling of course.  More time, more talk, more alcohol.

It became sort of a weekly thing.  Friday nights down at the bar.  Not the big conversations about the economics of super-crime, though we had a few more of those, but just conversation.  She laughed, screwed up her nose at the prospect of fruity alcohols (she deemed them "tainted beverages"), and made my weekend drinking habit less anti-social.  I, for my part, cracked bad jokes, listened to her thoughts on the world and its workings, and distracted her from some of the troubles she had been having.  It came out a week or two in that she was out of work.  Not broke and penniless though, despite the way her bourbon habit and alcohol tolerance fought late into the night. She had some money saved up from past jobs.  "Lucrative but not exactly stable" is how she described them once.  I didn't pry, at least not too much.  Not in an un-friendly way.  It mostly just made her glum when she bemoaned having to get back into the job-market.  This was when I would turn the subject.  Tacos, Roman sculpture, the news.  Normal distracting things.

Four months after I introduced myself, the topic was the breakout of Dr. Nefarious.  Amy was sure it was some convoluted re-balancing of the criminal infrastructure that involved breaking him and some of his lackeys out, while I was sure it had just taken him time to recuperate before escaping on his own.  Long night, loud conversation.  I woke up Saturday on an unfamiliar bed that smelled a bit like bourbon.  Amy was passed out, arm over my chest, drooling on her pillow.

The room looked organized for comfort and use, though not for looks.  Newspapers and a phonebook crowded the top of the nightstand, my glasses resting atop the stack next to a half-empty, red pen.  There was a pink-curtained window, just a crack in between the edges that drifted a line of light back and forth across my face as the curtains fluttered from the AC.  I recognized some of the clothes that spilled out of the bottom of a half-closed closet, but most of them were more casual than what she put on for her weekly trips to the bar.  Grey, black, yellow, brown t-shirts.  Jeans, black and blue.  What looked like a crumpled up leather jacket.  A fuzzy, furry, brown-with-white-trim coat at the end of the outpouring, draped up the foot of the bed.  Manila carpet, white walls, brown, wood-finished doors, and white trim.  One of them was cracked open just enough to see bathroom tiling.  No clock, no TV.

I might have moved, or she just decided to roll over.  Either way, she woke up slow, stretching her arms and arching her back a bit.  Cute enough to make me blush.  When she brushed my chest she made a noise something along the lines of an inquisitive "mnph", followed by an "oh", and then a "coulda been worse".

We had coffee.  The living room was just off the bedroom, kitchen separated from it by a counter.  Nothing special, just a couch, a recliner, a short coffee table, the kind you have to stoop over a bit, an old lamp, and a wired telephone, which was a bit archaic.  Hadn't seen one of those in a few years by then.  I took the couch, she took the recliner.  It didn't come off as too awkward.  She went for a shower; then it was awkward.  I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be gone or not by the time she was out of it.  Phone rings.  Her land-line that is.  I take it as my cue to leave, poking my head back in the bedroom to make sure I didn't forget something (I almost left my glasses, its a weak prescription), and then it went to voicemail.  I have the front door halfway open.  "Amy, this is Dr. Nefarious, I need you to gather the rest of the minions, same spot as usual. . ."  So I stood there for a moment.  Just that moment.  It was one of those clarity things.  Anyway, maybe it would have been polite to stay and explain myself, but I left.  I still can't figure out the etiquette for that situation.

I missed next Friday at the bar.  That, I'm pretty sure was impolite in a way.  It wasn't really standing her up, I told myself, but I don't believe it.  I watched the news, followed the story of the breakout.  Dr. Nefarious was back to what he did, namely heists and large scale death-ray threats.  There were two or three those two weeks.  Up from the one a month or so that it had been before he went in jail.  It leveled off in the next few weeks.  I had picked up the courage, though that feels like somewhat of a wrong word, and gone to the bar that second week.  She had left a note with the bartender.  "Thank you.  Sorry?"  It was on a yellow sticky-note in red-pen.

Thrown

The floor hummed.  It was not a pulse or a throbbing or a vibration, but a hum.  In the stillness I could feel it, see the flicker of the blue inset lines as they zipped out into the darkness in criss-crossing patterns of varying complexity.  The spot I was standing was a nexus of them, seeming to funnel each strand inwards toward my feet.  The lines didn't move besides the flickering, standing perfectly still in the heated darkness.  It wasn't oppressive since the air flowed and eddied around me, but it only carried warmth with it, scentless besides a faint smell of sweat.  My skin was flushed, likely a faint reddish-pink in normal light but showing more of a purple tone in the blue glow.  With nothing else to do, I started walking.

Each barefoot step echoed; off what I couldn't say.  There were no walls, no ceiling, just darkness.  My hands wouldn't reach anything above me when I stretched or jumped, and the light from the floor, bright as it was, didn't reach any hanging object. The floor was flat, in a manner of speaking.  Perhaps it would be best to describe it as a large number of flat, octagonal platforms or pillars that were each slightly different in elevation, sized just larger than my feet.  As I moved, stepping onto the lines that covered the surface of the floor, they began to strobe, breaking past the physical hum. The flash of light, whiter and less blue followed the rhythm of my feet as they echoed along my pathless way.

I wandered through the emptiness until I saw a pinprick of light extending up from the darkness.  Approaching, it grew higher and wider in my sight.  The center was a pillar, octagonal and thick, that sprouted up from the relatively flat ground up into the sky.  Springing off from the trunk at the center were the lines, branching out into the darkness on their own, more intricate than on the ground.  The squiggles and whirls were like flowers and leaves and gnarled branches all in one woven mess.  They pulsed with my steps as well as I strode closer.

I set my hand upon it, the cold blue-grey of the pillar giving way under my skin, crumbling like a dry sandcastle to the touch.  Inside were cords of blue and green and red and yellow, of purple and pink and turquoise.  They twined around each other, a rainbow of wire that throbbed with light as I stretched my hand closer.  The moment I touched them, their color exploded out into the lines of color in flashes, lighting up the landscape all around in prismatic bursts.  There was still no ceiling, no walls, just the ground and the tree.  I became certain this was not a dream.