A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

It’s a stressful way to live, tiptoeing around someone else’s belongings, never truly comfortable in your own home.

Everyone will say it’s an accident and know that it wasn’t.

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.

but it’s hard to live with a depressed person. 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.

she with her frowning dreams, I wide awake.

life makes monsters of everyone, but it’s always possible to come back. Pain and death are real, but so are love, and family, and forgiveness. But the words won’t come. Instead he leans forward and kisses Noah’s forehead and hopes this tiny pink blob of a person will grow up to understand.