The Monster

This is a short story I wrote in 2010. It touches on morality, family, domestic abuse, adultery and alcoholism. I'd love some feedback :)

The street is a picture of suburbia, lit by streetlights and lined with winter trees and matching houses of the cold, angular type, mass produced to be mass marketed. New-ish, shiny clean cars habit the driveways and streets, Holdens, Toyotas, Fords, three blue Commodores in a row �" snap. The stars are faint overhead, competing with the city’s artificial suns, but shine still, patient and eternal.                                                                           

 

A light is on in a window. The gate says twelve. A woman’s silhouette is hanging a new family portrait on the wall. She stands back to view the photograph, smiling, and turns to her husband, who sits on the floor, reading to their baby son on his lap.

“’Hurry up,’ said Snail,” he reads. “‘Please hurry up, Franklin.’”

The boy looks up as his mother sits down besides them. “Hurry up, Franklin!” she echoes, reaching to tickle the child’s tummy. He squeals and wriggles delightedly, knocking the book from his father’s hands, and the family embrace each other, laughing, a flesh-and-blood reflection of the heart-warming image watching over them.

 

 

Mum is crying. I hate when she cries. The tearing, rending, animal sobs echo down the hall to my                                          room and I choke back tears of my own.

She cries too much, almost every night when I’m meant to be asleep, but it’s worse tonight. He makes her cry. Crashes through the door shouting and stumbling, falling and vomiting, a great red-faced monster who lives on bottles and cans and misery.

The monster roars, a hideous, gurgling stream of obscenities. Suddenly, crash! I start, Mum screams and my heart thuds wildly. I want to run, to climb out my window and disappear into the darkness, but the darkness is where the monster has come from. He belongs out there. This is our home.

The bile rises in my throat and my heart beats too fast for me to breathe. Our home. Get out, monster.

I am creeping down the hall. Through the slice of light at the end I can see him, swaying on his feet, still choking out hateful curses. As I watch he hurls the bottle in his hand �" crash �" and Mum screams again. The wave of fury rises again in my stomach and I tighten my grip on my cricket bat. I am almost at the light. It’s ok, Mum, I’m coming.

I am standing right behind the monster and still he hasn’t seen me. Mum has, though. She stares, wide-eyed, from the corner where she’s crouched. She looks so small, smaller than me, shrinking in terror from the great hideous figure bearing down on her.

“W***e,” the monster growls. “Who do you think you are? Look at you, you stupid, useless bi-“

I swing. He falls.

 

 

The papers will say Dad died on July fourth, twenty-oh-nine, but they’ll be wrong. They’ll say I killed him, but they’ll be wrong about that too.

The man who lay crumpled and bleeding on our lounge room floor while Mum and me held each other in her corner and cried wasn’t Dad. Dad died two years ago. I remember it exactly.

Dad came to school early to pick me up. I was in grade two. He came to my class beaming like the sun, put my backpack on his back, and swung me up onto his shoulders on our way to the car.

“Dad got a promotion,” he told me, a smile in every syllable. “So the boss let me take the afternoon off. You know what that means, mate? That means Santa can get you that new bike you wanted!”

On the way home Dad stopped on the main street. “Come on Jason, help us pick out some flowers for Mum, eh? Look, those ones are nice, she loves tulips, doesn’t she? I think those yellow and red ones are perfect, what do you recon?”

 Dad slammed on the brakes mid-turn and stared. “What’s that other car doing in our driveway?”

The sun behind Dad’s face had turned into thunder and rain. He didn’t look at me as he stormed out of the house and slammed the front door behind him. Mum ran after him, tying her dressing gown and calling desperately, “Steve, don’t leave! Please!”
I heard the car start and rev and skid on the gravel and I ran to the window. Dad was driving away. Mum was standing in the garden, and as I watched, she sank to her knees and buried her face in her hands.

There was a crunching, crackling noise and I turned with a start. In the hall doorway there was a stranger. He was wearing Dad’s dressing gown and he was staring at me. He had trodden on Mum’s tulips, on the floor where Dad has dropped them. Panic flooded through me and I shrieked “Get off my Mum’s flowers! Get off!!”  

That was the first night Mum cried. From my room I could hear her in hers, the endless sobs and moans and wails echoing eerie and terrifying in the still, empty house. All night I lay awake, unable to block out the sound that filled me with an agony of horror, and as the pale grey light of dawn crept through my curtains after that sleepless night I realised something was very, very wrong.

Mum said Dad was only going away for a little while. For a week she was pale and teary, and the doctor had to give her pills to take. For a week my Mum was away too, and there was a cold unsmiling zombie in her place who hardly came out of her room. Then one day Mum was back, and she said Dad was coming home. I ran all the way home from school that day.

But Dad never did come home. The monster ate him up and tried to steal his place.

 

Mum and I will be living at Grandma’s for a little while, and I’m going to start seeing a man named Dr Collins every week. Grandma says he’s a special sort of doctor who looks after your mind, instead of your body. She says I should never lie to Dr Collins or hide things from him, because if I do he won’t be able to make me better. I don’t understand what she means, or why I have to be made better, but I know that Dr Collins is important and perhaps making me better means making Mum stop crying, letting me go back to school, and making everything back to normal.

 

 

The street is dark and empty, lined with high fences and hedges behind which large, old-fashioned houses sit like sleeping giants. A possum, a single sign of life in the dead of night, skitters across the road and up the huge elm tree, the largest, that watches over the street from the garden of number twenty-two like a ruling matriarch.

At number twenty-two there is a single light in a second-story window. The only light in the street. The figure of a small boy casts his silhouette in the window-frame. In his hands he holds a faded photograph, a young couple holding a baby, smiles all over their faces. He frowns, as though baffled by the innocent image, and slowly and carefully, his face full of concentration, begins to tear the picture to shreds, dropping it piece by piece out of the open window to be carried away on the breeze.

Only the possum in the elm sees the boy’s hands start to shake, the tearing become frenzied, and the set face of determination crumple in anguish. Only the possum hears his moans of despair as he tosses the last shreds of photograph to the wind, and sees the tears pour down his face in an unstoppable torrent.

The tree is silent and immovable and the possum is still and vigilant in its branches as the light is switched off and the street is sleeping again. And as the grey light of dawn creeps through and wakes the first tentative birdsongs they are there still, the guardians of Johnson Street, as they are every night, for better or for worse.

Reviews

[Xx_Belle_Emo_xX]

great job! i loved this (:

[Raven Starhawk]

This has a great touch to it. I am in the story and feeling it word for word.