Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

by Kim Fu

On some level, it seemed like this would just be part of Liddy’s eventual adulthood, tucking her wings beneath sensible slacks and off to the office, just as our mothers scooped and flattened and plucked themselves raw.

“Depressives are selfish,” her Specialist had said. “You’re selfish, and then you berate yourself for being selfish, which is just another way of focusing your attention on yourself.”

He was less a person than a quilt of these beautifully colored squares.

she napped in her apartment building’s courtyard, sleep with the texture of tattered lace, frayed threads of dream woven into reality’s edge.

the meaning shifted, became a declaration of how desperately she wanted my full attention, how much she loved me.

I journey through the stars, fingers trailing through cosmic dust, the unfeeling desolation of space. I sink through a fizzing, golden ocean, bubbles drifting past, gently dissolving my skin. I lie on clean, crisp sheets in a comfortable set of pajamas, buttons and drawstring, as a reassuring weight bears down on both of my shoulders and forces them apart, spreads and flattens my body out like dough, thinner and thinner, into a dun-colored sheet of pastry, into a single-layer matrix of atoms, and finally into the infinitely small that is indistinguishable from nothingness.

Despite her efforts to keep everything casual and low-key, she still felt silly, nakedly hungry for attention, like a child in a cardboard birthday crown.

It feels like a weakness, a deficiency of character, to be pining for the past this way.

She doesn’t create sensations, she awakens the memory of them, and only in those who are primed for it, who want badly to return to those memories, who want to believe.