Monstrilio

by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

Our son died before the dogwood pushed out its first flower, a bloom so simple with four white petals and a burst of yellow-green in the center—a beginner’s flower. I believed that flower was my son reincarnated. One believes the stupidest things in grief. 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.

He didn’t leave his bed for days at a time. He smelled, not in the pleasant way I remembered him smelling, but in a moldy way. He didn’t attempt a doodle. Joseph grew boring. He wouldn’t scream or plead anymore. He didn’t call me a monster or ask me to hold him.

I smashed one of the vases which I was told, by him, had been in Firgesan for decades. I wanted him to snap, to finally and absolutely lose it. To break. He was withering. 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. I needed to see pieces. So I broke the vase. He looked at me with bland pity, as if I were the one withering.

I wanted Lena to neither stay nor leave. I didn’t want the days to go on: the questions, the inevitable events that would follow, the people I would have to see, the aunts and uncles and cousins, my friends. Except for Lena, I hated my friends. The looming days made me want to return to Firgesan, let myself wither with Joseph, dry up, become dust.

I cast myself as the protagonist; Joseph a villain or a lover, often both; and Santiago as the myriad other secondary characters, mostly monsters. Santiago didn’t care that his roles didn’t have names. He cherished changing into the different costumes he created for himself.

“He was our kid! A beautiful boy.” “Yes, he was beautiful.” Joseph sobbed hard into the phone, and I twirled the phone’s cord. “You have no heart,” he said. A fern near the French doors to the garden was dying. Brown and thin, its leaves drooped. It was odd to see a plant die in my mother’s house. As a kid, I believed our house was enchanted, that nothing could die here.

We baptized Santiago because it was another occasion to celebrate his life, but other than that we had not stepped into church. Nevertheless, Santiago loved to talk about God, saying God liked to do this and that, as if God were a buddy of his—he desperately lacked friends. Once, while eating, Joseph was telling us some story and Santiago interrupted him to tell him not to worry. Joseph asked why. Santiago said God found it rude when people spoke with their mouths full, but he shouldn’t worry because God wasn’t looking over us. “God is supposed to look over all of us,” Joseph explained. But Santiago said no, God chooses who he cares for, and he hadn’t chosen us. But, Santiago added, we shouldn’t be sad, God had too many rules anyway, and did we really want to follow so many rules?

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.

I shrugged. “Have you spoken to him?” Joseph was Lena’s friend before he became my husband. Lena nodded. “Our calls consist of him crying.” “Do you think he’ll come back?” “Do you want him back?” “I don’t know.” Lena put her hand on my thigh, and I put my hand on top of hers. In another life, she would have been my wife. In this life, I should have pushed her hand away, saved her from me. I let her touch linger.

The lung’s skin had become grayer, smoother, and showed tufts of dark, downy hair growing in patches. It resembled a poorly drawn cartoon, like one of Santiago’s monster drawings. Santiago had not inherited Joseph’s talent.

Its eyes appeared black, wide-set, and beady, right above its mouth. It had no nose, or none I could find. To add to this awkward effect, its arm-tail grew not quite opposite its face but at an angle, with a paw at its end and three long black claws like talons. Regardless of the cumbersome placing, the lung handled it nimbly. With its arm-tail, the lung dragged itself around. It fed with it. It scratched. It dangled, hooking its arm-tail on the topmost part of the sofa, or my dresser, or—its favorite—the closet’s rod where my clothes hung. Once it had a comfortable grip, it would let itself sway. This is how it slept.

I asked her about the woman she was seeing. Lena, unlike with every other subject she expounded on, answered tersely. “Do you not like her?” I asked, and when she told me she did, her plump cheeks flushed, I relished the knowledge that she was lying.

Almendra yelped and scurried to a corner of the patio. The lung held on, its arm-tail’s claw fastened to one side of her hindquarters while its ball-body bit the other. “I’ll get it.” I yanked the broom from Jackie’s hands. “Get it off now!” Jackie said and grabbed the dog’s collar, trying to calm her. Almendra’s legs shook, but she stopped yelping and snarling.

The lung opened its mouth. I held it away from me in case it was trying to bite me. It burped. A droplet of blood slithered down the corner of its mouth. A reflex told me to apologize for the lung, to call it a monster out loud, to be disgusted. But such declarations would have been insincere. I felt sorry for Almendra, but the lung acted without malice. It was hungry. It didn’t know not to attack her. The lung unfurled its arm-tail, stretched it, and wrapped it against its body, hugging itself. Jackie struggled with the words she wanted to say, a series of false starts and stammers. “Don’t tell my mother,” I said. “She wouldn’t understand.” “Is that the lung?” I nodded.

I squatted so I was eye to eye with Jackie. “Please, Jackie. I can’t let it go. We’ll teach it to behave.” “What if it doesn’t want to behave?” “It will.” “That thing is not your son.” “I know.” I wasn’t crazy. Jackie was right though; I had no idea if the lung could be taught or tamed in any way. I didn’t even know how it had managed to escape my room.

Interesting that she doesn’t seem to harbor a hope that the lung is Santiago

“She’ll be okay. It’s like donating blood,” I said, though I had never donated blood. “Rest, eat, and you’re fine.” “Almendra didn’t donate anything.” “It’s kind of the same principle, isn’t it?” “How are you explaining this to your mother?” “We can say Almendra woke up bitten. That we don’t know what happened.”

“I know where that thing came from, Magos, and what it must mean to you, but that is not really what you want. It’s horrible.” “I can’t just kill it.” “Let it starve.” “No!” “I don’t think it would feel much. It would just pass away. Maybe you could poison it. Quicker.”

This snow globe was the last thing I threw out of my window, not because my mother punished me, which she did, but because this snow globe smashed so gloriously—an explosion of crystal, water, snow, and glitter, the village utterly destroyed—I thought I wouldn’t be able to replicate such destruction again.

Sees the lung as an act of destruction ?

I set my book down. “I think I do. I miss him.” “And Lena?” “What about Lena?” “She’s in love with you, you know.” “Mami!” Lena’s love was a secret treasure I held dear, supposed to be only my own. “Oh, Magos, it’s quite evident.” “Do you think she would have me? It’s been so long. And I’m still married. And I may still love Joseph.” “Do you love her?” “I do, but I’m not attracted to her.” “Why not?” “Are you?” “I could see myself being attracted to her, if I were younger. One is free to explore.” “Jackie?” I asked. My mother did not betray anything, not even a shrug. I laughed and interlaced my hand with hers. Her hand was more wrinkled than I remembered but still as regal, or perhaps even more. Her nails had been filed into neat, rounded points and had been painted perfectly in red. Her rings protruded shiny and elegant, as much part of her hands as her bones. My mother kissed my hand. Back when Lena lived with us, during university, I thought about being with her. I was attracted to her intelligence, her ease. We kissed once. A delicious kiss full of saliva and desire. But I realized my desire was different from hers. She lusted carnally, her flesh hot, her hands horny on my body. I didn’t lust, or at least my lust wasn’t as physical, more of an admiration, a sense of pride in having someone like her want me. And besides, I was already enamored of Joseph by then.

The next day my mother and Jackie finished the handyman’s work with the cement he’d left. My mother in sweatpants—I couldn’t remember seeing her in sweatpants, ever—Jackie with a green bandana tied around her head. They spent the whole afternoon and the next day doing it. When finished, they toasted their accomplishment with lemonade, happy with their newly refurbished floor, proud of their house.

Different sorts of unions/couples

UNTIL JOSEPH CAME, I stayed in my room, leaving only to eat dinner with my mother and Jackie. My mother asked if I was writing. This seemed like the best excuse for my reclusiveness, so I said yes. I fed my lung and played with it. It liked me to toss it in the air, grabbing on to whatever it could before it fell all the way to the ground. It was incredibly limber, like a cat. It could hide inside the smallest nooks and make itself as thin as a pancake. It could slide under doors and escape.

I spent most of the time pacing, wondering what Joseph would think of the lung, if he would want to come back with us and retake our life back in la Roma. Three of us again.

I remembered what loving him felt like. I remembered how perfectly his long, skinny body felt against mine, how delicate he felt, how precious. I could find him again.

Joseph sat up and threw my leg away from him. I scooted up to him and rested my head on his lap. “It got scary for a while,” he said. “After you left and Uncle came to look after me, I suddenly couldn’t feel anything anymore. When my mother died, Uncle absorbed all the grief and accumulated it inside his body so none of it reached me. That’s why he’s so gnarled and bent at odd angles. 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.”

“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.”

“Don’t you see? We can go back to our house in la Roma. Have the lung live on our patio. You’ll go back to your studio. If you really wanted, we could go back to Firgesan. Firgesan would be good for the lung, actually, all that open space. We could—” “Magos, stop!” “I’m writing a one-woman show,” I lied. “I’ll perform it. We can make this work.”

“Maybe it ran away? Back to nature?” “It didn’t.” “Magos, it’s just an animal.” “Help me look for it or leave, Joseph.” Joseph resumed sifting through the clothes. I opened the suitcase where I sometimes kept the lung but, apart from its poops, I found nothing.

I managed to push one finger inside and, hooking it onto the side of its mouth, I pulled. Its fangs dug into my fingers. My mother cried out in pain. The lung was not letting go, and I was hurting my mother. I let go.

LATE AT NIGHT, the streets of las Lomas are dead, dark, flanked by huge trees and huge houses. I walked, hiding when the odd car drove by. Carrying the lung, a monster, my monster, I felt like a fugitive, even if it was dead.

Why didn’t she feed it more regularly ?

I gave her a bar of soap, which she lathered in her hands before pressing it on my body. Not even that first time did I need to give her instructions. Carmina washed me starting from my neck all the way down to my toes. Her touch was firm and purposeful. She took shampoo and washed my hair, her fingers strong like a masseuse. She stayed silent throughout, no moans, no touching herself. Somehow, she realized that what I wanted wasn’t explicitly sexual. She came out of the shower first and told me to stay inside. She toweled herself off, wrapped the towel around her, then spread a dry towel and wrapped me in it. She rubbed my hair dry, my body too, like a mother would dry her child. She took my hand and found my bedroom. My nakedness felt more pronounced outside the bathroom as her hand led mine. She asked for pajamas, and I pointed to a drawer where I kept loose pajama bottoms and T-shirts. She handed me pants and a T-shirt and watched me dress. “All set?” she asked. I said, “Yes,” satisfied in a way I’d never felt before and also rattled that this woman knew what I needed better than I did myself.

I looked for Carmina, whose real name I didn’t know, all over Mexico City. I couldn’t convince myself that she’d really left. I thought she might be in danger, and I wanted to help her like she’d helped me. I found other Carminas but not her. I hired other women, but I drove to Tlalpan at least one Monday a month to see if Carmina was back. I was tempted to pray for her, but God is a scumbag; he wouldn’t answer any prayers of mine. I wished instead, like one wishes on a birthday candle or a star. I wished Carmina was home and someone bathed her like she had bathed me, waiting for her with an open towel in which she nestled and went to sleep, safe and happy.

I had accepted the fact that none of the other women would accomplish what Carmina did, her tenderness true and inimitable, but Maritoni did an acceptable job, even if after three years she retained a hint of fakeness.

For sure, I typed, though I wasn’t sure. What if Magos stayed longer? What was the plan? Could I go another week without an appointment? I would have to figure shit out day by day. Magos had upended my life. I finished loading the dishwasher and ran it.

Why not explain the situation to Margo’s ?

I wished I could’ve examined the creature, determined what it was and where it had come from. What if it was Santiago’s lung? 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?

I was gifted at what I did. Colleagues trained themselves to achieve this kind of focus. It came easily to me, this compartmentalizing. So easy I sometimes worried that I was a type of psychopath as yet undiscovered, and then I remembered that if I were a true psychopath, I wouldn’t fear being one.

The human trait of Wondering what normal is.

My father said I had to be patient with my mother; she was sick. “Why can’t she take medicine?” I asked, but my father said that her ailment was in her soul and only God could cure it. I prayed for her to get better. I was good. I kept the house spotless. I cooked my own meals and left my mother’s on a tray outside her door. She seldom ate my food, afraid I would poison her. “Why can’t you leave us alone?” she’d ask me, and I’d try harder. I wore old-fashioned dresses that made me look like a storybook good girl. Three starchy numbers with white scalloped necks that my father found at the tianguis: pastel blue, pastel pink, and pastel yellow. When I outgrew them, I wore my school uniform exclusively: skirt, knee-high socks, black shoes, and a forest-green cardigan. Some days, if she was out of her room, she’d strip me naked, searching for marks on my body, something she could show her priest and my father to make them see I was in fact a demon. She’d scratch me as if my skin were peelable and my scaly demon flesh hid underneath. I brushed my long hair every night so it would shine. She’d mess it up when she tried to find horns on my head. I spoke softly and never cussed, but she would’ve been happier if I screeched and yelled obscenities. In church, my mother was less afraid of me. She prayed for me with eyes tightly shut. There, she believed I could be saved, her family could be saved. I hated the kneeling, the Hail Marys, the Our Fathers, the bells and rituals, the pries...

It took me years to realize that my mother would never see me as her daughter. It didn’t matter if I looked and acted the part of the sweet girl perfectly; to my mother I was a demon pretending to be good. Wily. Ready to destroy her whenever she let her guard down. At thirteen, when I finally understood that no matter what I did my mother would never love me, I acted even sweeter. Cloying. “Mamita,” I called her, smiling grotesquely. I turned her crucifixes upside down, scratched the eyes out of her Virgins. She slapped me, pulled my hair. “Leave me be!” she’d scream, and she’d hit me harder.

“Flaqui. My goodness.” Magos picked a twig from my hair. The monster stared at me and growled. Magos held it closer and kissed its head. My mother thought I was a monster and didn’t love me because of it. This thing, an actual fucking monster, was loved.

“It just needs time. The lung will become a boy. You told me so, Jackie. Like your great-grandmother’s cousin.” Magos held the monster out to Jackie. Jackie took a step back.

I was unable to sleep. I’d lost my Monday bathing routine, plus now Magos slept in my bed and I was housing a monster in the room across the hall. At night, I heard it scratch, hiss, and growl.

It could attack me like it had attacked Lucía, but I didn’t run away. I stared back. The room stank despite Magos’s constant cleaning. It opened its mouth wide, revealing the fullness of its fangs. Two rows extending halfway across its body. 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.

It continued leaping from fixture to rod, rod to fixture. It flipped and cartwheeled in the air, putting on a show. I sat on the carpeted floor and watched. After a while, it tired, dangling from the light to let its momentum ebb. I clapped, my jealousy mutating into something like kinship. I watched it sway.

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.

Monstrilio lay on top of the cat tower. He folded up his body to look at us, showed his fangs in what I liked to think was a smile (but possibly wasn’t), and produced a series of growls. “What the—” Joseph whispered in English.

“Papi!” Monstrilio said in a raspy voice, his eyes carrying a light within. He bared his fangs, said “Papi!” again, and draped back down to dangle.

I went up to Santiago’s room. Sat on his bed. Sunlight seeped at the edges of his closed curtains. The room smelled of fabric softener. I sniffed his cartoon-dinosaur bedspread. Maybe Magos would hate me for having erased Santiago’s smell from his room. Time would have erased it anyway. On his desk there were mugs and mason jars filled with rainbows of colored pencils, markers, and pens. I noticed a notebook with “Santiago Jansen de la Mora” on the cover. On the first page, he had written, “Hello, today is Tuesday,” and drawn a sort of fox with a tail three times the size of its body. The next page read, “Hello, today is Wednesday,” and showed a drawing of a pink creature. Its shape most resembled a giraffe’s, but with two large fangs protruding from its mouth. On one of the last filled pages (“Hello, today is Saturday”), he drew a creature that looked just like Monstrilio, same ball-body, same arm-tail sticking out awkwardly from its side, same row of fangs across half of its body. A few pages later, he wrote, “Hello, today is Monday.” Then, instead of a creature, he wrote, “The End.” There were a bunch of blank pages remaining in the notebook. I closed the book and set it down the way he’d left it. I opened his curtains and the window. I sat back on his bed hoping for a breeze to waft in and cool my face and for the sunlight to lift the shadows that clung to me.

He monstrosity or he Santiago. A blending of identities. Even Lina isn’t sure, either. Ominous “the end”

Magos and Joseph decided to move back into their house in la Roma, as I suspected they would. Joseph flew back to New York to pick up the things he and Magos had left behind. While he was gone, Magos asked me to empty Santiago’s room. I told Magos to wait for Joseph, but she told me neither she nor Joseph could do it. I didn’t want to either, but Magos pleaded, and I was unable to say no. I packed Santiago’s clothes, books, and toys into boxes and stowed them in a small storage room on their rooftop. His furniture, I gave away to an orphanage. I kept his monster notebook for myself.

I wanted to delay their move, make Magos see that her place, and Monstrilio’s, was with me. I would give up my apartment and Magos and I would buy a house. I would convince Joseph to stay in New York, tell him Magos didn’t want him. She had abandoned him, twice. She hadn’t even looked for him, had come to me instead. I would tell him Monstrilio was a monster that couldn’t love him.

“He started speaking only recently,” Magos said. “Simple words: mami, papi, meat, hungry, play, light, thank you.” “It says ‘thank you’?” Lucía asked. “Sometimes. Mostly to Joseph.” “He says ‘Lena’ too,” I said.

A sort of blended family

Jackie looked at me with sad eyes. “I told Magos a story in which a heart became a man. That story didn’t end well.”