A Monster Calls

by Patrick Ness

“You’re a good boy,” she said again. “I wish you didn’t have to be quite so good.”

Stories are wild creatures, the monster said. When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak?

Sometimes people need to lie to themselves most of all.

Belief is half of all healing. Belief in the cure, belief in the future that awaits.

As incredible as it seemed, time kept moving forward for the rest of the world. The rest of the world that wasn’t waiting.

“You be as angry as you need to be,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not your grandma, not your dad, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and hard.”

“And if, one day,” she said, really crying now, “you look back and you feel bad for being so angry, if you feel bad for being so angry at me that you couldn’t even speak to me, then you have to know, Conor, you have to know that it was okay. It was okay. That I knew. I know, okay? I know everything you need to tell me without you having to say it out loud. All right?”

“I wish I had a hundred years,” she said, very quietly. “A hundred years I could give to you.”

I did not come to heal her, the monster said. I came to heal you.

You were merely wishing for the end of pain, the monster said. Your own pain. An end to how it isolated you. It is the most human wish of all.