A father sits alone in his backyard. Half a moon hangs high above him with twinkling accessories. Before him, hugged by rocks of his own picking, burns a small, but warm fire. The afterglow of fresh cut grass swims in the cooling air alongside the fire’s smoke. His nose begs him to look at the memories proudly dropped at his feet: memories of other cooling nights, other warm fires, and of long-gone places he could slip into. Instead, he stares into the dark of his back field watching living Christmas lights bob and drift and blink to make more lights.
He is troubled.
A father sits next to a fire on the cusp of night, looking and listening. There are…things out there. Things was the word his wife observed him using more and more over the years. There were things in the world he didn’t know what to do about. Not nameless things. Very the opposite. He learned and studied great stacks of names, towers of names, and their meanings. It didn’t help. The names had no end, and the meanings were many fold more. So, without a mythos or legend, they were just things.
It’s all gotten so big, he thinks.
Trespassing universes. Most were small, passing, and harmless. An eye dropper’s worth were dazzling. The remaining few were actively, righteously the opposite of harmless. Is any percentage small when dealing in billions? Too much to process. Too much to know. Too much to stay ahead of. Too much to plan for. Too many futures to cull. Too many roads to guard. Too many shepherds seeking sheep. How can I protect them?
He pulls in a deep breath, but tight chest and shoulders push back.
I can’t make it any smaller. I try and try, but I can’t. I’m not built that way. My brain tries to fit the world into my little human skull, like a giant butterfly in a thimble-sized killing jar. I envy people who don’t know the gravity of it. His nose pulls up more memories. Doing its job, he knows. Old senses hold old maps. Present pressures pushing him to past escapes. That’s part of this, isn’t it? Escaping forwards.
The future lurks behind the present, peeking out from pockets of nothingness and yetness, shyly craving attention.
He remembers painting mental landscapes with brushes of bustling domed cities in the Sea of Tranquility and splashes of flying cars. He’s glad his younger self is safe from the quiet moon. He didn’t want to know what betrayal the breathing boy would feel from the present world. The present is a seed that grows to harvest every moment. He thinks he read that somewhere. His future peeks out from behind the pauses of low words and wall-muffled laughter coming from inside his house. Listening to his family, he can nearly smell it. No, wait, he did smell something. It matched nothing he knew. A new scent to the yard. THEIR yard. His memories slink back from the scent. Fine. You are The Future, he decides. I give you a label. The scent slips away. Alone, again, seconds mature into minutes.
Memories. Escapism. What-ifs. Escapism. A growing parade of non-solutions. Escapism. Escaping the things.
<snap> The scent slips back with an announcement. The run-on thoughts are given a period. <snap> He stands, his back briefly complaining like a worn folding chair. Something not small is moving through the brush on the border of yard and field. All age washes away.
HEY BEAR! (CLAP CLAP CLAP) HEY BEAR! KEEP MOVING AND I DON’T CALL SOMEONE NEEDING A RUG! GO ON! GET FUCKED!
<CRACK> The thing in the dark now has a point and place in his head. He turns toward the sound, side-stepping to put fire between he and it. He calculates the distance to the side door weighing options. It was close, but he was in HIS yard and IT was coming from HIS field. At night he could stroll between its pines with no moon or lamp. This was HIS space. Whatever the animal was, it needed to learn that. He had no desire to run. Yet.
A monster steps out of the darkness.
The man looks at it. He looks right at it. It steps closer. Beneath what might be or could be its foot rises a dim, distant bell-like sound, as if it walked all the echoing Halls of Hallow Earth at once. Another step and the bells. The father…laughs! The monster stops. What are its eyes fall upon the man, save perhaps a glance at the house behind him. The father, smiling wide, holds the inhuman glare pressed upon him. “Look at you. LOOK AT YOU! You’re a horror movie! You’re impossible! Worse! You’re not! I am in the maw of modernity, racking my brain on how I can protect my family from insanity and a MONSTER strides out of the night. Fuck me.”
The man steps past the fire toward the beast.
“Or not. Wrestling with existence, I am gifted a flesh terror. A finite thing. You have a scent. You have weight to snap branches. You have height and width and length. Doomed by dimensions, it will be known by the numbers it carries. We have that in common, I suppose.”
The monster stares down at the man, its two wide eyes cloudy grey like hazy moons. Its breath was the scent, the man realizes. Up close it smelled of Jasmine, pungent rain-soaked stone, and endings.
“Or, are you magical, great horror? Do the walls of the world bow to you? Are you the local Grendel? Are you real? I hope for both our sakes you’re not. Do you know what life insurance is, great terror? Kill me and my family is set. Make it messy and these fields and woods will flood. Spill blood and the world falls upon you. Claws and fangs? Poor stupid thing is begging for the taxidermist. Give us a growl!”
The monster growls a sound new to all the ears and stomachs in the world. The man’s heart trembles. His mind blinks as modernity, primate, and lizard all try walking away at once. The man haltingly, unwillingly steps back.
“That…that was terrifying. Deep body terrifying. Clarity terror, yes. Yes, I must give you that. God, please don’t do that again,” he sputters, almost tripping over the fire’s stone ring. “Okay, okay do you know what sounds waves are, growling grave? Hear those barking dogs? Two security systems just lit up on either side of us. Again, that was Old Testament awful, so please, please never do that again, but I truly hope you are not real. Imagine the world finally knowing of monsters. What a tragically brief cure. It’s sad what they would do to you. Use you to hurt in ways your claws couldn’t dream of. Twisted and snapped by mobs screaming you are theirs alone. You wouldn’t know yourself. Monster to monetized. Miracle to meme. That’s your future.”
Steadying himself, the man assesses the signs and omens for what might come next. The monster, too, watches. The man sees what the thing sees.
“Goddamn it, I can’t turn it off. That’s the world I see. Fine! Tell me the future then, monster. Be useful. Yesterday I gave my children advice. Solid words on morals that really helped them. But…but, that was yesterday. Look at the future, tell me if my words are going to stab them in the back in five years or fifty. Tell me if they are going to trust the wrong person so I can warn them. Tell me if I will always be here for my wife. Tell me if any of the worry planning, or a single second of a hundred sleepless nights worked for something. I’m so fucking tired, I don’t know what I have left in me. Tell me, damn you! Answer me! You’re a monster, live your name and instruct!
A second lost its grip. Another fell behind it. Another. Another. Another. All lost. Not in silence or thought. Truly Lost.
To hell with you then, Monster! If you’re real, you’re nothing! You’re just lungs that need to stop. You’re a heart that needs to be pressed. Muscles that need to be peeled away. Your eyes will end on an auction block, monster. You’re not a system. You’re not pressure. You’re not even an insult. You? You’re the second thing to ever live. You are the simplest, most honest thing that ever was. You’re nothing, oh measurable beast. Here’s your box. Climb in.
The beast looks up at the father, and he down at it.
He sighs as a sudden shudder of tension escapes his shoulders. It passes after a moment. The Father inhales a deep fill of sweet evening air. He pulls back his words, pulling and plucking meaning, arranging then playfully rearranging them to make and see new layers. He runs and climbs in thought. Finally, and eventually, he remembers the other. The father sees his words sank painfully deep in the creature’s face. So small, he thinks. “Come on, sit with me for a bit by the fire.” The father softly pats the edge of the deck next to him. “Don’t worry,” he says to the nightmare. “I won’t let any of that happen to you.’
So, they sit, the Father and the small Thing from the dark.
They sit together at a warm oasis on the cusp of night looking and listening. Winged lightning blinked their life away for it was a good life. The stars kept to themselves. The Halls below gathered dust. Yes, there are things out there, but sometimes there’s one less.
