Monstrilio

by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

And now, nothing. This is the moment—Death!—and not a tear.

If she wanted, she could make her husband dance like a puppet, crawl him forward until he rolls down the stairs.

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

To wither is not the same as to break; to break is to have pieces to put back together, and to wither is to dry up, to wilt, to lose bone, to die, and death is the most boring.

There’s a way of believing where one believes and does not believe at the same time.

Once, Santiago told me we couldn’t know where electrons existed exactly, that we could only guess, a cloud of probability, and wasn’t that fascinating because we were also made of electrons and maybe if he tried hard enough, he could be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, like electrons did?

On occasion, Lena would join, and either I would cast her as the narrator—the only role at which she excelled—or she would join the stuffed-toy audience. I cast myself as the protagonist; Joseph a villain or a lover, often both; and Santiago as the myriad other secondary characters, mostly monsters.

“We’ll keep it contained.” “We?”

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?

Magos followed the monster’s shit and we followed her.

to my mother I was a demon pretending to be good.

I needed to break her before she broke me.

She despised church but not God.

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

what they needed wasn’t acknowledgment or empathy or closure; it was escape.

I’d kick and punch and scratch until they were so distracted by my wildness that M would escape.

I pretend my time as Monstrilio is hazy. Muffled sounds and blurred colors. I say I remember warmth. But I don’t say I miss my fur. I don’t say I’m hungry because my hunger is what makes everyone scared. They are happy to believe I forgot how they maimed me.

Perflousita. A little aplesude.

Books and biting. What more could they want!