The Monster at the Door

   How many days, months and years had she waited to be released from this cell?

Her room, her corner, there on the bed, silently wishing desperately not to, but constantly listening to the nasty monster’s insanely threatened screams, as it sat in it’s throne of moulden vitriol. Vigilant not to let up, out there on permanent sentry, never far away, constantly barraging her with ever more poisonous acid filled grenades, and irritatingly besieging her turret door. That door, where a seal of light which held inside a daughter of Heaven, safely protected.

The monster cried at night.

But he wasn’t really worth the mention.

Any value there’d possibly been in him, if ever, had long since been exhausted, as a tiny waft of electrolytes exiting his brain from neural pathway nerve lengths. Exhaust fumes in the last escaping wisps of breath from his sixteen lungs, along with the final screech howled syllable of his most recent repulsively maniacal tirade directed toward the door of her cell. That always unyielding, wooden, expressionless, timber of door! Infuriating the monster to even greater depths of accusing debasement with its rigidly defiant unresponsiveness.

   Apart from him, just what lay there outside her door? What was it that he wanted to keep from her? She wondered, as for day upon day that became month upon month, the drone of hate menaced like an angry wasp beside the sugar pole that she was. The window of her cell showed the side of a mountain, frozen at its peak inside a clear, over hanging bulbous and solid block of ice. Beyond that were only layers of various skies falling across each other like similarly coloured rainbow bands simultaneously appearing and folding over one another, until distance blurred them into the horizon line of the deepest of all the defrosted iceberg oceans.

That night she cried for what she had once been and what she had become.

She had lost something through no fault of her own. Of it, she despaired so deeply and so greatly and with a salt water wrung compassion for every living thing, that despite her hatred of him, she even pitied the monster.

Perhaps, he too had once been free?

It was sure to her that he never would be again.

Such was the beginning of his punishment. As it shall be and, always has been, for monsters such as he. Later, she doubted her own sanity for many years for even considering her tormentor with anything even slightly resembling fond regard, at all.

    Upon awakening, and whilst the monster still slept, she could hear him muttering hurtful insults, as with loud starts, he shouted in his sleep. When one has cried that hard, awakening the next day is like being born. Truly though, this was a new morning. On this day there was some vital aspect which had changed. She looked and saw within her cell and beyond, the world behind her barred window with eyes rinsed fresh by the dew of tears. She spontaneously twirled in a silent flurry like a whirly-gig turning in the breeze.

The repulsively disgusting, creepy, old monster's spell had been broken.

She discovered that she had learned the power to silence the monster’s nail scratches at the hateful steely hull of his own, into madness sinking, consciousness.

 It was as though after having successfully evaded the turned inward, blindly, observational powers of the monster, incensed psychically mute as he was, somewhere, in the plaster walls of her room there had been placed, by unseen hands, a vent, which somehow had become a linked ventilator shaft to some place in which, distantly, she had once roamed. Some scent that she had once contentedly lived with and which now she found so odd and so very strange.

It became apparent that she could stand in her cell sampling the rare fragrance of freedom, (piped in).

   As the monster's shrieks and grunted yells faded into a place in her mind where they were without meaning, substance or conscious volume, she wondered, why? What was the monster’s secret? What kept him so complacently gripping hard onto the nearest solid object in the land of screams? There were no answers and she soon, in the bright light of her newfound abilities, no longer even remembered whenever it may have possibly been, that she had even cared. Not that it did, indeed matter.

   But, as a warning, and perhaps to save some poor person from becoming themselves a monster, or even worse, a monster’s victim,* here it is disclosed that the secret which drove his menace, was his unrecognised incomprehension, of a well-known fact, so widely accepted by virtually every other existent conscious being throughout history, and, in reality, one of the actual bases of the integral processes by which all organic material has been stimulated to grow, (due to the irritation that is manure’s effect), and this was that he was subconsciously aware that all of his verbal defilement attempts at horror infliction were completely futile. For all of the wicked intent behind this horrible monster’s anger, his ultimate purpose had been to unknowingly create in her, an indestructible superhero.

    At last, she took a paper wrapped present from her sister, something she’d been given secretly in a dream that the monster would not be capable of seeing, had it even occurred right before his own eyes, (which it did!)

It was a sword. Her sister had told her in a dream's whisper to keep it secret and it would certainly become a powerful tool in her hand. Handled correctly and with skill by those gifted in the art, it had the ability to cause wondrous pictures to appear.

In the monster's hatred fevered delirium, sometimes he would even bring her things he'd found as gifts, believing that he was gaining favour with her in pressing upon her his kindnesses! Amongst some of these were pens and paper. She saw that the silly monster did not realise these were weapons with which he stood defeated. The monster did not understand that these rendered his weapon useless! She tested the sword, ever so slowly to try her hand, and, with a gentleness, poise and clarity of vision befitting only those who have been doomed to suffer for a time in a cell, she was surprisingly astounded when she looked up and found that the pictures her sword had created were beyond anything that she’d previously imagined.

   It was effortless for her to watch the sword as it worked each surpassingly marvelous image after the other right there in her cell. Even when the monster switched out the lights, the sword made a few quick twists and the room was immediately and spectacularly awash with lights, like a string of coloured bulbs illuminating and lining the length of a promenade beside a seaside carnival at night where she was the only visitor.

Occasionally, into its sparkles a car wreck’s catastrophic calamitous explosion of desperate dribble was spat with an interjection by the monster, breaking through with a quick and slimy exclamation mark. These, she learned to delete instantaneously, upon their foul-odored and odious appearance, crackling loudly and violently, as they so often did, from the horrid monster. The fragrance vented in from the land of freedom slowly becoming something to which she was accustomed, and as she became familiar with it she remembered what it was that she had lost. The colours seeped from around her door frame. They were inviting her to tempt fate.

   Decisively and triumphantly, she reached for the door handle at the very same time that the monster sought to enter, and in that instant she took control of the door, and the monster was repelled. The fearsome sound of his voice became nothing. The colours pouring from her open doorway surrounding her, overpowered his drab, dour and semi-transparent wet, dust sac form. Without question, he chose to try to stop her, but all of his tooth-barring and fist-clenching efforts were from afar, as if he was in a car park and she were inside behind plate glass. She simply walked straight through him into her future and he disappeared into a flurry of disconnected nothingnesses, there to dwell, forever more.  

   As she left, she thoughtlessly but kindly, placed before him a mirror, and on the day the monster, distraught with his loss, finally dared a chance to look into it, he saw absolutely nothing. After crying aloud the only intelligible phrase he’d uttered since his seemingly never ceasing shout-box of obscenities had been given voice, he then fell forever silent.

He had chosen to say,

“At least, no other monster shall have you!”

Which was twisted on every level.

   In the world she found beyond her barred window and her long forgotten turret cell, she searched and shortly found her sister, who bore her own sword and whom she discovered had received as a prize, armour for she, having escaped the castle years before, had by now sent many an evil monster to their ruin. It came to be that they were living in the most fascinating and splendorous city, Melbourne, Australia, ‘the world’s most livable city’, which was overflowing with only the most interesting of peoples, scents, colours, shapes, forms, flashes, sounds, songs, structures, stories, action and intrigue and where it was that soon she became the star in an ABC2 kid’s TV show about this bunch of really cool high school kids from every country on earth. (It’s a comedy, with some minor tragic elements). She really enjoys being a part of it. After all, what else could be inflicted on one who had suffered so much for so long for no actual reason and who now held the sword which had defeated a monster?

   Not that it really matters, or is even worth mentioning, but monstie spent the rest of his days, with his long fringe covering his slack-hanging, downcast face, with his head down, slowly growing a double hump on account of his lousy posture.

Stepping, sadly shuffling his smelly, worn out clogs, as though routed to that same miserly patch of ground where he spent his single, solitary, long, cold, permanently, in twilight day. Loitering, beside a minute and slow-flowing creek, between two slightly elevated embankment slabs of wet moss, in a shaded place which was forever darkened by shadows, and where he waited beside a bramble bush, believing it a blackberry, and constantly examining it for fruit, but never managing to find any.

   She eyes the horizon, examining the edges of perception for any sign of new monsters, (as any monster’s pet girl who became a woman should), and is duty bound to, (whether she likes it or not).

She is secretly watched from afar by the teary eyes of all the prospective suitor monsters who think that they love her, and against whom, they know, she keeps guard, whilst painting the sky, on a mission to protect those whom she loves.

She smiles.

    I wonder, if you may ask of how it is that I know of her, and of her story, so well?

It is a detestable condition to admit. For that monster, is I. So now, can you see, my son, how it is actually a physical impossibility, not to feel happy for her?

*For sadly, not all the victims of monsters escape.

Reviews

[Annette Pisano-Higley]

I read this as an allegorical tale, possibly about an overprotective father trying to keep his only daughter from all the ills of the world- and it does have many ills for a young, innocent girl! It is a well-written tale with clever imagery and metaphor use. A girl coming into womanhood is really the fear of any loving father. But you'll never really lose your princesses dear loving Dads! You'll just gain a Prince or two! Excellent!

[Brett Hernan]

Edit; added an 's' and two commas. Which didn't alter the meaning at all.