Something Monstrous
Created: 2024-09-09 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-16 (18:48:03)Status: completed
2024-09-09: “Write about something monstrous. What does it mean for something to be a monster? Is it a judgment of character, something inherited at birth or creation, or something else?”
As with all monsters there is the unceded potential it will bite, or shred to pieces, or knock to the ground or impale its victim on its singular long horn.
It almost certainly will not. It has agreed an uneasy truce with the world: don’t harm me, won’t harm you. Even if not many people can bring themselves to believe that and still eye it uneasily at the supermarket checkout.
It was discovered at the bottom of a well that had been a century dry. Aquifers around here are odd creatures. They will sometimes spit out rusted equipment or fragments of bone or things from deeper courses. So too for this eel-looking thing darting about in a couple inches of muddy water. By the time it developed limbs and began gulping in the air and vocalising it was too late to do anything other than learn to live with it.
It should feel a certain self-loathing. Monsters are acutely aware of what sets them off. They should curse their difference, their unshakeable isolation and loneliness even as they twist off normie heads. But it was rather proud of its bizarre existence, the way it had metamorphosed out its amphibian years into something even more taxonomically unplacable.
It felt a greater affinity for brutes, for leviathans and krakens and zillas perfectly content in themselves and their capacity for huge violence. If you were going to be unspeakably singular, why not enjoy yourself?
Monsters emerge from the ocean for the sole purpose of destroying our shit. Because we dumped toxic waste out there, or tested nuclear weaponry out there, or simply and thoughtlessly woke them from their sleep. Somehow though, this one found itself instead barely holding down a job and trying to make rent. Too deeply imbricated now to tear things down. If it had emerged from a remote mountain lake and not a stunted dusty well…
Well. When reptilicus and godzilla made themselves known they did not survive long enough to find jobs or rooms anyway. For all their destructive power they remain singular. The entire world can close in on them so easily. Is this why monster movies so often mine horror in the prospect these things might reproduce?
Or form a coalition?
Endmatter
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