My parents were like . . . shit.
They had rigid brains. Their point of comparison was my brother Dorkass (not his given name), a developmental psychologist who wowed them with retroactive criticism of their parenting. When he stopped by for holidays, they couldn’t really imagine their baby girl stalking grimy slimy lemon-limeys.
They couldn’t imagine me, sweatsoaked in the jungle, rocking the natives’ warpaint. The spearmint scent of a hunt unraveling among the brush like a ball of yarn, threaded through my nostrils like a septum piercing. Me, baby girl, peeling back a venetian frond and seeing—for the first and only time—a cryobaboon.
Can you imagine? My parents couldn’t. They would’ve lost their baby boomer minds to see its albino coat. Its icicle whiskers. The soil of the rainforest, thin and loose, tundrifying beneath his cryobutt. Frostbitten fruit all around. And me, seven-foot stapler locked, materializing from the foliage. Flipping my weapon to its blunt side and meeting his gaze. Bashing unabashedly at his shrunken, vulnerable testes, as he breathes his last chilly puffs.
They had a much easier time imagining Dorkass, feet on the dining room table, elucidating why he and I would’ve been better off with two daddys. Just to shift the conversation, I would try to say something like, “You know, Mom, there’s no such thing as a small monster. I once wound up astride a desert. . . ” But they would only roll their eyes and ask when I was going to run out of staples.
To date I’ve corpsed seventeen colossi, cretaceonids, and chthonianisms. You can always tell they’re mine by the lethal, crooked ladders running up their sides.
•••
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| "Kitty" by Nicholas Shea |
My first job was for my landlord, and it was bad. Though not “rats in the basement” bad. We had this mangy-ass stray cat lurking around the property because someone kept slipping it lunchmeat. He paid me thirty dollars to wait in the parking lot and bag it up. This was before I stole my office’s mega-stapler.
I spent the afternoon in the shade of the building, reading a newspaper and counting bricks. When I saw the cat on the fire escape, I went up after it with a can of tuna, which had no pull-tab. I had to beat it open on the handrail. The landlord impounded the cat, and now I think it’s dead. But it wasn’t me that killed it.
My first real job was for a small suburb at the edge of rurality. I told my parents that I was going to spend the weekend with a friend, but this friend lived at the foot of a volcano, and if they didn’t hear back from me ever again then that was why.
The mayor put up an ad for vengeance. A turtlebear had chewed up some cars and children, and then the county sheriff. The townspeople elected their leader the mayoriff, and he wanted to outsource the job.
Enter me! Suddenly, baby girl was following tracks and planning ambushes that would never happen. I went all over that stupid grassland, looking for something to kill and bring back. Turns out I was looking for a twenty-foot carapaced bear.
It found me in a pasture one day, eating a pb&j bagel. Snuck right out from behind the horizon. I did have my stapler at this point, and hugged it to me like the leg of a giant parent. I fired the full freaking clip, too. But the bear—it just coughed up a bumper, phlegmy and gristled. Then it was dead standing up. I contacted the mayoriff, and he tugged it over with a tractor fleet, just to be sure; and I made a bunch of money.
There are more of us now—monster hunters—and fewer monsters. So nobody makes as much as they ought to. I’m still in debt up to my bellybutton, at least. But it’s a great gig. I’m only really working three days a week. The rest is travel and stakeouts, which are pretty loungey.
My recentest job should have been easier than hell. It took place in the stratosphere. (Because I’ve gotten pretty damn talented.) This alien meteosperm struck a weather balloon, resulting in a new life form: a fluttery tract of nerve-endowed latex, longer than miles, like a rubbery stain in the sky. Media called it a condom-kite. It flopped around the clouds playfully for a few days, totally oblivious to how gross it was, and probably surprised to be alive.
A couple of geeks hired me. They showed me some pictures from a satellite, where the blueberry earth had a brown spot of rot. Then they put me in my own balloon and sent me up to put it down.
It took a whole lot of wounding, but I made it eat dirt. The thing was probably surprised to be dead, too. When it landed, it smothered a quaint village. I forfeited the pay and am currently lying low.
•••
Without exception, monsters are towering douchebags. And no two are the same, taxonomically speaking. Except they’re all the same.
I keep a battle log. Up here, in my head.
Versus one monster—some sentient heap of PC parts and dated videogame consoles, loosely cephalopodic—I actually got mindcontrolled. It made me sink a footlong staple into my gut before I could snap out of it. Now because of the scars it’s like I have four nipples, each one stationed at a corner of my torso.
Then one time I murdered a pachydermus rex. Or at least that’s what I thought it was, until I noted carefully the shapes of the ears. But it was just a regular elephant! Or not just a regular one, but a famous one. And I strangled it with its own fat trunk.
What were the odds? Me, and the world’s largest captive elephant, in the same space, with me hunting a p-rex. Chance or fate or karma—something wanted it to die. Those unimaginable odds!
I only ever met one that could talk: this jellyfish son-of-a-bitch. I had scuba gear on, and a riotous headache from the depth, but I could just hear him in my thoughts. His dome would pulse with light at each syllable.
He tried to reason with me; I tried to get him to stop stinging motherfuckers.
He tried an appeal to commonality, and also sympathy; I told him if he didn’t stop stinging motherfuckers, he was about to get stung hisself.
He tried to agree to my demands, retreat into the aphotic zone, and swear off human contact for the rest of his sunless days; I told him I knew he was lying and stapled his four-part brain together.
The jellybitch. It was like talking to Dorkass again.
My motto: I can’t kill every monster . . .
•••
. . . but I can kill any monster.
Once, when I had some experience, I wound up astride a desert. I’d tracked a quarry to the fringes. An atmosucker had been lingering around a windfarm, swimming between the stalled turbines and gobbling up gusts. He slurped his way southwest. The earth turned red and dusty, then yellow and sandy.
I got to the desert’s edges, motorcycle out of gas. I put a foot on either side and looked down into the dunes, where that atmosucker stingrayed back and forth in taunting circles. And I just didn’t want to go.
Maybe it was the primal beauty of the sight. Maybe I felt like I had met my match. Or maybe I was getting tired of hunting monsters.
That was two years ago, though.
Maybe I just hate the shitty-ass desert.
•••
So I would be remiss not to mention the big guys, the monsters you don’t screw around with. So let me just come out and say it: There are things behind the earth.
You know the drill. Beings out of time and color. Vast beyond comprehension. Vigintillions of years old. Elderly monsters with sickheaded followers, undying legacies, and guttural names.
Stupid asshats, I like to call them. Anyway, it’s all a mess. Occultass shit that I don’t tamper with. What a bunch of interdimensional jerkoffs. Yank yank.
•••
I had an agent once, for a while. She was a lot like my mother.
I wish there was a surprise ending. I wish I could tell you that she was a doppelganger. That she vamped my psychic energy and constructed a clever disguise as an agent using the prototypical mommy-memories in my head. That I figured it all out moments before losing my sanity, broke the spell, and waged war with her grotesque true form.
But nothing like that. She was a regular agent, or a crummy one, and she was too much like my mother.
On my birthday, she bought me a rare plant and paid a flowerboy to track me down on whatever disused highway. And this kid wanted a tip from me, the goddamn baby birthday girl.
Oh yeah—and by the light of the moon, the plant turned into a tooth-laden, venom-spitting, radioactive carnivorose. Did she bother to screen the stupid thing? I didn’t even get paid for that fight.
I let my agent go for dropping bullshit battles into my lap on my birthday, and she somehow finagled a severance package from thin air. Happy happy to me.
Dorkass refers to the whole ordeal as another incarnation of my serial inverse Oedipal syndromancy. And I refer to him as a son-of-a-micromanagerial-bitch.
•••
“You know, Mom, some people name their marks. Scientists will note the features and chop them into species, but a bunch of the wanted ads treat them like celebrities.”
She’s not really interested.
“Real dumb names, too. Silver the Dark. Neo-Wolfzkrieg. Gigobooma Gregory. Quillz-Dat-Killz.”
She’d rather be baking. She hunts grocery deals, and weevils in the flour.
•••
There’s not an end to this. I’m still hunting monsters. Still doing my mercenary thing. Still fresh. Still bumpin’.
Somewhere, my parents are wishing for their baby girl to come home and explain why they should have spanked her.
They are not wishing for me, seven-foot stapler strapped to my back, army-crawling upstream for forty minutes in septic sludge. Hair matted to my face. Dung drifting round. Popping from the piss like a bubble. Firing a volley of staples at a giant cockroach. Each shot punching a two-pronged hole in its chocolaty chitin. Its telepathic squeal of misery, like music to my third ear.
by Jimmy Grist
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