Fiction: The Big, Big Monster

By Maria Barnes

 

Mason stood beside his mother and tried not to cry. Despite being only seven, he had rarely cried before, not even when he had fallen off his bike and skinned both knees, or when his grandma had died last year. Today everything was different, though.

His mother was awake, lying on the floor next to her severed limb, her hazel eyes shifting in their dark sockets, like two inverted suns. There was no blood around her or under the bed or in the closet, which Mason had checked twice because he was afraid of it. There was no blood on the healed stump to which the arm had been attached a couple of hours ago. The absence of blood scared Mason, and he asked his mother where it was. She didn’t even look at him.

“Mom,” he said, leaning closer, peering at her white face. “I love you more than anyone, I promise. Please come back to me.”

Mason waited for some time but received no response. He stroked his mother’s matted hair, his fingers catching in tangled clumps, and turned away. He swallowed a lump in his throat before saying, “I’ll be in my room, Mom.”

Wondering whether she heard him, Mason left his mother, too upset to stay with her longer than needed.

There might still be a slice of chocolate cake in the fridge, he thought. Maybe two. But he was too scared to pass her room and go into the kitchen. Mason dived under his fleece blanket instead and thought about something happy the way grandma had taught him before she died, but thinking about the cake made him sad, and he stopped just in time to hear the faint noise of someone waking up in the next room.

Would you like to live with your mommy? She will give you any food you want. You would like that, wouldn’t you? And she knows all those stories I don’t know, like the one about the big, big monster. She will tell you about it if you ask.

She knocked on his door at midnight and entered before he could fully wake up. The smell of chocolate cake grew stronger and sweeter as she sat on his bed and touched the blanket under which he was hiding. He pushed the blanket aside, sat up, and switched on the lamp in the shape of a polar bear his dad got him for Christmas. His mother winced at the light. But as soon as Mason smiled shyly, she smiled back, a sign that she was herself again, at least for now.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” she said, stroking his hair with her remaining hand. She touched his forehead, her skin so warm that Mason thought he would cry again. She probably saw a hint of redness around his eyes because she leaned forward and gazed at him as if he were her newborn baby.

He saw now that the lines around her mouth had become longer, her skin grayer. Mason bit his lower lip so he could keep looking into those pallid eyes, eyes of a blind fish that could still see the fear inside him. They were nothing like the eyes he remembered.

“What’s wrong with your arm?” he asked.

His mother would get mad at him for these questions and call him names, the kinds of names she wouldn’t let him say out loud. She said it was his fault she resorted to those names, even though Mason failed to understand why.

Your mommy likes to shout and scream. She likes it when I scream at her, too, so she can call me names.

But tonight she lowered her head and breathed out through her mouth. The air from her lungs smelled nothing like chocolate cake; it reeked of stomach-churning rottenness of old meat.

“That’s nothing you have to worry about. I just need to rest.”

As she made a move to stand up, Mason lunged forward and wrapped his arms around her neck, careful not to hurt her. She hugged him back, reassuring him and herself, acknowledging this gesture of her son’s love. Then she let go and returned to her room.

Sleep evaded Mason at first. It circled his bed, allowing him to think about the past and his family, fragile and small compared with the world. He imagined the world as a roaring expanse of empty space, empty because of his absence from most of it. It could easily crush his family, and it had done so when his father wanted to move for work and his mother said she had met someone else. But Mason knew that she lied. In reality, she wanted a divorce.

Stories she can tell you, your mommy. You wouldn’t believe them—I didn’t believe them when she told me, but they are all true. She told me some of them when we first met. I don’t know why I didn’t run away from her then. I’m so sick of listening to them. Better you than me. You have to stay with her and listen to her fucking stories until one crawls under your bed and terrifies you at night. Then you will know.

  Mason pressed open palms to his eyes, resurrecting in his mind their family dinners, which he used to dislike. Those long-drawn affairs had meant nothing to him then. His parents would talk between themselves about work, career prospects, something Mason didn’t understood. Dad, his light blue shirt unbuttoned at the top, would glance at Mason’s mother, speaking in a soft voice about numbers. Those numbers were the most important thing for the company, Dad said. And he was responsible for them. Numbers are easy, Mason interjected because he could already count to one hundred. They are easier than words, and they can’t lie, unlike the kids from his school. Dad patted him on a shoulder. You’re going to follow in my footsteps, he said with a proud grin.

Soon after that conversation, Dad stopped having dinner with them. It was just Mason and his mother, silently pushing forkfuls of mushy food into their mouths.

Do you know the man who visits your mommy? You have seen him around the house. Sometimes he is tall, and sometimes his feet barely reach the floor when he sits in a chair.

He sits there and stares at your mommy, not paying attention to anything else. Even my newspaper is of no interest to him. He likes to stare at your mommy, to see how her hands move when she is preparing dinner or loading the dishwasher. No, he won’t go away, not without mommy. She has invited him, and it’s his house now.

No, I won’t stay, not when he is around. You shouldn’t ask me that.

The next morning, when Mason emerged from a pitch black cave of sleep and sat at the kitchen table, he asked the same question he asked every time.

“When will the man come back, mommy?”

She came to a halt in the middle of the room, a bowl of vibrant cereal in her outstretched hand. Her well-brushed hair shone in the morning light, and if not for the absent arm, she would look almost like herself again.

“He is not a man, sweetheart,” she uttered after a long pause.

“Who is he then?”

“Not a man.” She placed the bowl on the table and splashed some milk on the cereal.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked.

She said she had already eaten. She said that whenever he asked her about the man.

You want to know what he is, Mason? Are you sure you want to know?

He is someone who invades other people’s homes and takes parts of their bodies. That’s what I think, but you’d better ask your mommy. She knows all the stories, even those no one should know.

Mason insisted that there was no point in going to school, but after breakfast his mother drove him there anyway. He sat in the back as she navigated the road with one hand. In the beginning, the steering wheel kept slipping out of her hand as if it were covered with oil. Once they had passed the movie theater and the road became clear, the car movements were smooth again. When the car drew up outside the school, she refused to step out even for a minute.

“Be good for me,” she said, kissing his flushed cheeks and holding out a purple lunchbox with a tiny picture of a hedgehog on the side. He grabbed it, avoiding looking at the stump. Maybe in the afternoon, his mother would have a new arm, better than the old one. When the afternoon arrived, however, Mason spotted no familiar silver car parked outside the school.

“Has she mentioned anything to you about being late?” his teacher asked as they stood on the curb, looking in the distance. Other cars came and went, taking his schoolmates away.

“I think it’s the man who comes to her sometimes. He made her late.”

The teacher stared at her shoes, brushed invisible specks of dust off her skirt, and then dialed Mason’s mother. The phone rang for more than a minute before his teacher hung up, her skin turning pink under a layer of powder. Mason thought she was angry, but when she faced him, her expression was full of kindness. She probably knew about the man (or not the man) and everything he had done to Mason’s mother.

“I’ll call your dad then,” the teacher said.

The man lives far away and only visits your mommy because he is hungry. But under his fleshy shell, he is nothing like you and me. He is a big, big monster, and he needs your mommy.

Once she summoned him, he wouldn’t go away. And you know what, Mason? She doesn’t want him to go away.

Mason and his dad arrived at the house when the air started to dim with twilight. The boy climbed out of the car and was taken aback by the scent of flowers and the pungency of death, which the flowers couldn’t mask.

They were quiet, almost reverent, as if they were approaching some great mystery they wanted to preserve rather than solve. Mason picked up his schoolbag from the back seat, realizing how useless it all was.

“I shouldn’t have left her,” his dad said, and the air felt like needles on the boy’s skin. “But she wanted him, only him, and I couldn’t deal with it.”

For a long time, they stood in the driveway, getting ready to see what the man had done to Mason’s mother. The neighbor stepped outside her house and waved at Mason, but the boy didn’t wave back. Eventually, she went inside, abandoning the son and the father to their fate.

There wasn’t much left, a head split in half and a few fingers in a puddle of tacky blood.

Mason asked what tacky meant. Instead of answering the question, his dad let out a sorrowful groan and sat on the floor by the remains. Neither of them said anything for a long while. The head was cold, dead, unseeing. It was no longer her head, Mason thought and said out loud, “Why do you say that he is a big, big monster? He doesn’t look that big to me.”

His Dad shrugged in response, and at once the doorbell rang. It was a sharp sound, sharper than Mason remembered. He struggled to his feet, watching his dad’s motionless shape on the floor, cold, dead, unseeing.

“I’ll get it,” Mason said to no one, feeling like an adult for the first time in his life.

Before he opened the door, before the shadow behind it grew into flesh and bone, and before the last vestiges of his childhood disappeared forever, he realized, with a pang of grief, who rang the doorbell. And he was ready to invite the man in to feast on his incapacitated father.

 

 

 

 

 

Maria Barnes teaches English and writes dark fiction. Her work has appeared in The Pinworm Factory: A Tribute to Eraserhead edited by Scott Dwyer, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and Samjoko Magazine, among other places.