Monstrilio

by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

She lies next to him and licks his ear, like an animal would. He remains dead.

Mainly, she wants to see the lung and hold it.

I liked the tree’s resistance to make sense.

I spoke to the flower and called it my son. And then I laughed because how ridiculous—how cruel, really—it would have been if my son was reincarnated as something so ephemeral, frail, and beautiful. I killed that first bloom with one swoop of my hand. Dead again, my son could become something else: the shell of a tortoise, strong and ancient, or a hideous fanged creature deep in the sea where he’d see wonders even he could’ve never imagined.

Carried by the wind, some of him landed in the pond. In the pond, he became mud.

We didn’t so much exist as much as we haunted, and with no one else to haunt, we haunted each other.

He asked me to cry with him, but his sadness was his and I couldn’t steal it.

In a version of events, I called her beforehand. In another, the one I like to believe, she knew to be at the airport because she knows how to love me the best.

I kissed the back of Lena’s neck, where dark, thin, downy hairs grew, needy to love someone who wouldn’t disintegrate.

Santiago was so mine, I could not fathom her feeling him gone.

“It’s part of his lung,” I said. I expected shock and repulsion, but I only got a nod. “Have you fed it?” She pointed at the lung. “Feed it and it may grow.” “Grow into what?” “I don’t know.”

Joseph found it easy to help strangers, a quality I admired but did not possess or have any particular interest in acquiring.

This was no miracle; there was no luck, no divinity. This was Santiago and me biting, jaws clenched, sucking life.

I had missed the lung eating, but it had eaten!

“Do I poop out my grief and hand it away?”

I once loved to make a big deal.

Was I expected to find solace in these people? I felt alone, perfectly alone. So alone I felt divine. Divine like a lonely god unfathomable to anybody but herself. Perhaps I could believe in Santiago’s God, a God who existed but had chosen not to look over me.

The one person, perhaps, who I wouldn’t ever swallow whole.

Before, I hadn’t been able to simply do nothing, but now I found it soothing to stare.

It smelled of earth and rotting fruit.

“I’d rather struggle here, be a pauper, let the house crumble around me, and die with it.”

This place knows me, and I know myself in it.”

A delicious kiss full of saliva and desire.

I forgot we had lost anything. I felt whole.

“So you’ve missed me, huh?” The orgasm’s pleasure lingered even as the pain of the cramp vanished. “I did miss you, Joseph.” “I stopped missing you a while ago.”

After Santiago, I expected to gnarl too. I wanted my grief, but instead I was left with a horrible nothingness, and I got really scared. But then I realized fear was a thing I could feel, and I clung to it. I was afraid of my loneliness. I was afraid I would never have anyone to love again. I blamed you for it. For leaving. I was angry. Furious. And then I had two emotions. Fear and anger. The anger helped me wake up in the mornings and eat and clean the house and wash myself. The anger even distracted me long enough that I would forget my loneliness, and sometimes, in short bursts, I even felt cheerful.”

“Are you angry at me now?” “Yes.” “That’s okay.” “I love you, Magos, but I don’t know if I can live with you, or if I want to. So it really doesn’t matter whether I love you or not. What do I do with it? What—this love doesn’t make me feel better.”

I pulled his hair, hoping that if I hurt his head, his heart might hu...

Wouldn’t that have been a groundbreaking discovery, someone bringing a creature to life solely with their own grief and a prodigious unwillingness to let go?

My mother thought I was a monster and didn’t love me because of it. This thing, an actual fucking monster, was loved.

I was jealous of the monster, how it didn’t care what it was or did. No shame. It held itself up with a certain pride. But mostly I was jealous of the way Magos cared for it despite it being a monster.

“Monstrilio likes you.” “Monstrilio?” “I can’t keep calling it Lung.”

Monstrilio wasn’t Santiago, but he was becoming his own being, the ties that bound him to Magos’s pain thinning, his original darkness giving way to something new and independent.

“What is happening?” he said among blubbers. “Magos, did we kill ourselves in Firgesan?” “We’re not dead,” Magos answered in Spanish.

I wanted to delay their move, make Magos see that her place, and Monstrilio’s, was with me.

Everything seemed to be falling into place, returning back to a life in which I had no place.

“I don’t get it,” I said, though I was spellbound.

I thought, “You can do it!” but she didn’t need my encouragement, only someone to watch her. Me, her audience.

“I don’t know if I want it to pass, Flaqui. Maybe it’s okay that we taste bitter to each other.”

Magos watched as if the rain were part of the art.

“Monstrilio is not Santiago,” I said. “You want to make him something he’s not.” “I know what Monstrilio is,” she said. “I made him.”

There was a person inside Monstrilio, at least anatomically.

Joseph said he was dying and Magos said he was shedding his old body.

The kitchen seemed dimmer than normal. I realized it was Monstrilio’s sadness that radiated thick around us and blocked out the light. We had fucked up. I’d fucked up.

“I’m not a fucking speck,” I said. “I’m Lena.”

I ran too, hoping that if I imitated his zest, a zest for most anything, I would one day catch it.

One of the things I loved most about him was how he used words like marvelous earnestly, so committed to their meaning that any hint of affect dissipated and the words lingered full and sweet.

We too had gotten engaged once, but this night felt nothing like Magos. I didn’t feel the weightlessness or the certainty that this was it, that from here on out this was what life would be.

New York City in general, but particularly Manhattan, made me feel small, and I enjoyed the particular sense of joy one gets when feeling small, because when small, someone will protect you, or at least, someone should.

A fight brewed in my chest between a sense that it was unnatural to stop him and another that yearned for M to be like us, completely.