A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

Dad told me once that every horror story has a happy ending, but he was wrong. Look at how his life ended. Noah, there’s no such thing as a happy ending. The songs, books, and movies with “happy endings” all stop at the moment of triumph. They don’t tell the whole story. Only the old tragedies tell the truth. Beowulf triumphs over Grendel and his mother, only to fall fighting a dragon. Gilgamesh loses his best friend. Achilles, too. Everyone dies in Hamlet. This is the whole truth.

We can’t make new happiness past a certain point, but we can linger in past joy forever, perfectly captured with the rememberer’s eye.