Pity The Monsters
We are standing in the storm of our own being.
“I was a beauty once,” the old woman said. “The neighborhood boys were forever standing outside my parents’ home, hoping for a word, a smile, a kiss, as though somehow my unearned beauty gave me an intrinsic worth that far overshadowed Emma’s cleverness with her schoolwork, or Betsy’s gift for music. It always seemed unfair to me. My value was based on an accident of birth; theirs was earned.”
The monster made no reply.
“I would have given anything to be clever or to have had some artistic ability,” the old woman added.
“Those are assets with which a body can grow old.”
She drew her tattery shawl closer, hunching her thin shoulders against the cold. Her gaze went to her companion. The monster was looking at the blank expanse of wall above her head, eyes unfocused, scars almost invisible in the dim light.
“Yes, well,” she said. “I suppose we all have our own cross to bear. At least I have good memories to go with the bad.”
The snow was coming down so thickly that visibility had already become all but impossible. The fat wet flakes whirled and spun in dervishing clouds, clogging the sidewalks and streets, snarling traffic, making the simple act of walking an epic adventure. One could be anywhere, anywhen. The familiar was suddenly strange; the city transformed. The wind and the snow made even the commonest landmarks unrecognizable.
If she hadn’t already been so bloody late, Harriet Pierson would have simply walked her mountain bike through the storm. She only lived a mile or so from the library and the trip wouldn’t have taken
The socalled waterproof boots that she’d bought on sale last week were already soaked, as were the bottoms of her jeans. Her old camel hair coat was standing up to the cold, however, and her earmuffs kept her ears warm. The same couldn’t be said for her hands and face. The wind bit straight through her thin woolen mittens, her cheeks were red with the cold, while her long, brown hair, bound up into a vague bun on the top of her head, was covered with an inch of snow that was already leaking its wet chill into her scalp.
Why did I move to this bloody country? she thought. It’s too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter ...
England looked very good right at that moment, but it hadn’t always been so. England hadn’t had Brian whom she’d met while on holiday here in Newford three years ago, Brian who’d been just as eager for her to come as she had been to emigrate, Brian who walked out on her not two months after she’d arrived and they had gotten an apartment together. She’d refused to go back. Deciding to make the best of her new homeland, she had stuck it out surprisingly well, not so much because she led such an ordered existence, as that she’d refused to run back home and have her mother tell her, ever so patronizingly,
“Well, I told you so, dear.”
She had a good job, if not a great one, a lovely little flat that was all her own, a fairly busy social life—that admittedly contained more friends than it did romantic interests—and liked everything about her new home. Except for the weather.
She turned off Yoors Street onto Kelly, navigating more by instinct than vision, and was just starting to congratulate herself on having completed her journey all in one piece, with time to spare, when a tall shape loomed suddenly up out of the whirling snow in front of her. Trying to avoid a collision, she turned the handlebars too quickly—and the wrong way.
Her front wheel hit the curb and she sailed over the handlebars, one more white airborne object defying gravity, except that unlike the lighter snowflakes with which she momentarily shared the sky, her weight brought her immediately down with a jarring impact against a heap of refuse that someone had set out in anticipation of tomorrow’s garbage pickup.
She rose spluttering snow and staggered back towards her bike, disoriented, the suddenness of her accident not yet having sunk in. She knelt beside the bike and stared with dismay at the bent wheel frame. Then she remembered what had caused her to veer in the first place.
Her gaze went to the street, but then traveled up, and up, to the face of the tall shape that stood by the curb. The man was a giant. At fiveone, Harriet wasn’t tall, and perhaps it had something to do with her low perspective, but he seemed to be at least seven feet high. And yet it wasn’t his size that brought the small gasp to her lips.
That face ...
It was set in a squarish head which was itself perched on thick broad shoulders. The big nose was bent, the left eye was slightly higher than the right, the ears were like huge cauliflowers, the hairline high and square. Thick white scars crisscrossed his features, giving the impression that he’d been sewn together by some untalented seamstress who was too deep in her cups to do a proper job. An icon from an old horror movie flashed in Harriet’s mind and she found herself looking for the bolts in the man’s neck before she even knew what she was doing.
Of course they weren’t there, but the size of the man and the way he was just standing there, staring at her, made Harriet unaccountably nervous as though this really was Victor Frankenstein’s creation standing over her in the storm. She stood quickly, wanting to lessen the discrepancy of their heights. The sudden movement woke a wave of dizziness.
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” she meant to say, but the words slurred, turning to mush in her mouth and what came out was, “Redfolly shurry.”
Vertigo jellied her legs and made the street underfoot so wobbly that she couldn’t keep her balance.
The giant took a quick step towards her, huge hands outstretched, as a black wave swept over her and she pitched forward.
Bloody hell, she had time to think. I’m going all faint ....
Water bubbled merrily in the tin can that sat on the Coleman stove’s burner. The old woman leaned forward and dropped in a tea bag, then moved the can from the heat with a mittened hand.
Only two more bags left, she thought.
She held her hands out to the stove and savored the warmth. “I married for money, not love,” she told her companion. “My Henry was not a handsome man.”
The monster gaze focused and tracked down to her face.
“But I grew to love him. Not for his money, nor for the comfort of his home and the safety it offered to a young woman whose future, for all her beauty, looked to take her no further than the tenements in which she was born and bred.”
The monster made a querulous noise, no more than a grunt, but the old woman could hear the question in it. They’d been together for so long that she could read him easily, without his needing to speak.
“It was for his kindness,” she said.
Harriet woke to the cold. Shivering, she sat up to find herself in an unfamiliar room, enwrapped in a nest of blankets that carried a pungent, musty odor in their folds. The room itself appeared to be part of some abandoned building. The walls were unadorned except for their chipped paint and plaster and a cheerful bit of graffiti suggesting that the reader of it do something that Harriet didn’t think was anatomically possible.
There were no furnishings at all. The only light came from a short, fat candle which sat on the windowsill in a puddle of cooled wax. Outside, the wind howled. In the room, in the building itself, all was still. But as she cocked her head to listen, she could just faintly make out a low murmur of conversation. It appeared to be a monologue, for it was simply one voice, droning on.
She remembered her accident and the sevenfoot tall giant as though they were only something she’d experienced in a dream. The vague sense of dislocation she’d felt upon awakening had grown into a dreamy kind of muddled feeling. She was somewhat concerned over her whereabouts, but not in any sort of a pressing way. Her
