A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

there is no such thing as a happy ending. There are only good stopping places.”

Human beings are small and insignificant in a big, scary universe, and in a horror story—be it a movie, a book, or a haunted house—we have to face that fact. But no matter how scary things get, no matter what the audience has to confront or endure, there’s always a happy ending. When the credits roll, or the reader closes the book, or when our guests walk out tonight, their lives will go on. Because they faced the dark, the sun will shine a little brighter tomorrow, and the real-life monsters won’t seem so bad. For a day, or an hour, or even a moment, life will be better.”

Living with a family wounded by a loss you can’t remember is like sitting behind a tall person at a movie theater. The people around you are laughing, crying, reacting to something, but you have no idea what.

In the old days, your left side was considered your sinister or bad side. Left-handedness used to indicate a moral failing. Teachers would smack you with a ruler if they caught you writing with your left hand. So it seems appropriate to me that the heart, the symbol of love, the organ supposedly driving the major decisions of our lives, beats on the left side of the body.

Most people in your life are digging at you for things they want—sex, attention, a smile, permission to change lanes on the highway. They’re hunting for things to take, not give.

The depression takes up physical space, swells and seeps under closed doors. It wafts between rooms like poison gas, settling over the house in a fog.

Kierkegaard said (I think) that society has always put a taboo on suicide because when a person kills herself, the people around said person start to question the value of their own lives, and that makes them uncomfortable.