Man Made Monsters: List 2

I was a small child, and small children are apt to cry when they have feelings too big to hold inside.

Privates Spears and King had returned several horses to a barn far from the fighting when a barrage of gunfire cut them off from their troop in the trenches.

Eventually, the creature began to scrabble at the mud beneath the door, digging feverishly.

Finally, as the sun began to rise and the machine gunfire on the front abated, the attack by the creature stopped.

Passing the hospital tent, they saw Sergeant White, looking haggard and having his right hand bandaged.

He was loaded into an ambulance with other wounded men for a more substantial hospital.

Joseph was packing up their catch so far, a burlap bag full of big carp and catfish.

Their grandmother, Nelly, had been allotted 160 acres when the Cherokee Nation was forced to accept the breaking up of their reservation.

Black beads, tarnished silver chain, charm-sized Mary and baby Jesus, beads, beads, beads, hail Mary full of grace, beads, beads, beads, Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum died for your sins.

She clutched the rosary tightly in her left hand while she filled in the ovals on the mandatory CAP form.

She imagined God on a faraway cloud looking down at the earth, down at her, the phone summoning him to his desk, a prayer of the penitent necessitating that God direct Michael to run the show, God picking up the phone, a warm voice saying, “Hello, Mary.”

It was nondescript, furnished like every other doctor’s office she had ever been in at the Indian Hospital she had gone to as a child.

Once more the voice, cold and metallic she realized now, spoke: “Hello, Maria. Welcome to Confession, Absolution, and Penance.”

When you looked wistfully at the world where you always felt like an outsider?

“I went to a party after graduation. I was salutatorian so I got to introduce the valedictorian.”

As if sensing her impending existential crisis, Lucas touched her waist and pulled her gently into a position where she now leaned against him.

Maria laughed without mirth.

She had held his hoof while they watched the moon rise over the lake from a secluded bluff.

What Gina hadn’t said was (1) the monster was much too young to be called a Goat Man; and (2) she had surreptitiously watched Goat Boy turn away as soon as she was safely in the car, his shoulders stooping low, as if he didn’t want to be his full height of seven feet, as if he were the loneliest boy she had ever seen.

His black horns curled a little forward, then back, like a pompadour on Johnny Cash.

As she stood close, she sensed something that felt like fear emanating from him as he leaned down toward her from his greater height.

Inevitably, it was a star-crossed romance beset with challenges.

And he immediately attempted to eat whatever notes she proffered.

Third, his romantic gestures ran to gifts of prickly-pear-cactus fruit and bleated love songs.

From somewhere he had obtained a tie and wrapped it haphazardly around his throat.

She sat next to him and took his cloven hoof into her hands.

Like being thrown through time, I was inexorably back a year earlier when that song came out, when my sister was still alive, when I learned there were all kinds of real monsters in the world.

She ignored most of them with their Pocahontas fantasies and their yen to go to a powwow or a stomp dance, but somehow Mark got to her.

She ignored most of them with their Pocahontas fantasies and their yen to go to a powwow or a stomp dance, but somehow Mark got to her.

“What does Carol always want?” I observed nonchalantly.

Overhead, the moon was a waning crescent that kept disappearing behind the October clouds.

I put pressure on the rip in her neck, but there was no blood flow to stanch.

I stepped in and washed my hands and my face. Seven times I dove under. The clouds parted and the sliver of moon reflected off the white stones and fish beneath the water’s surface. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Still, I had a feeling that these ablutions weren’t going to change what had happened, weren’t going to set things right.

After I changed, I could smell the sting of the chemicals the embalmers had traded for blood. It was an acrid, bitter scent that seeped up through the ground for years after the soil covered the coffin.

It had been installed since my brief stint underground.

The shelves that held old mason jars of food no one would dare eat had been rearranged to obscure the back corner.

She followed behind me with a shovel as we walked toward the old corral that still smelled of dry horse manure.

“I hate those stupid preppy kids,” Janie said.

She reached up and touched my pomaded hair.

I didn’t relish the thought of watching him burn while I bathed.