A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

I started collecting my older sister Eunice’s suicide notes when I was seven years old.

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

She’d always assumed that religion was something you did in polite company, not in private. Surely nobody actually believed any of the stuff they agreed to on Sundays.

Did anyone think Jesus Christ gave a damn how they used their private parts?

Pierce should be overjoyed that she’d shown some interest in his ...

The constellations put Margaret in mind of Azathoth from Visions of Cthulhu, the vagina monster propelled through the heavens by tentacles.

“Why don’t you love him anymore?” “You’re ten years old, Sydney. You don’t even know what love means.” “This is bullshit.”

Noah, there’s no such thing as a happy ending.

Kyle slipped into the flow of the conversation without apparent effort, and it occurred to me how little time I’d spent in the company of men. Although I shared the same basic biology, they felt like a foreign species. Boastful, loud, and rambunctious, even these fat, aging men remained proud and confident, as though they owned the world. Where did that confidence originate?

Noah is twenty-nine, his esophagus burns whenever he consumes anything with tomato sauce. His back and knees ache all the time for no reason. He carries a roll of Tums and a bottle of Advil everywhere he goes. Every time he turns a corner, he’s exactly where he expects to be. Geography holds no surprises or inconsistencies. He’s tired all the time, exhausted by his job. Sometimes he catches himself looking at the sky, wondering what Ashland would look like from above.

Both of us in my nephew’s bed, she with her frowning dreams, I wide awake.

Dennis continued to frown over the idea of an animal prison.

The house loomed larger than I remembered, seeming both wider and taller, as though it had been growing like any other living thing on a steady diet of whatever houses ate.

She is driven by only a few impulses: feed on their pain; capture workers; serve the City.

“I hate you,” she said. “Drink your tea,” I said,