Baby Girl Monster Hunter

So after I finished college I started hunting monsters. Well—that’s not the entire story. First I got a temp job. But when I figured it wouldn’t put a ding in my debts, I stole the office’s mega-stapler and started hunting monsters. That’s the entire story.

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.

•••

"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 Absolute as Subject (a love story)

9:05 p.m.
I found her in the back of the crowded bar, sitting with a man I’d
never met. The music was a gasoline lake—stagnant and dull like
muskrat piss. Customers stood three rows deep at the bar, passing
beers over their heads to cover orders made from behind them.

7:04 p.m.
The moon shone over the walnut trees and the stars popped like
bubble wrap. I sat outside listening to the hawks chasing rabbits. I
drank coffee and smoked a Tatuaji. The smoke drifted off in swirls,
swishing into nothing, seeking the vulnerable defect of lunar incandescence.
I hoped we were the same, she and I, separated just like
stars—or perhaps because of the stars—inside, ready to dance the
dance of indignation and embrace the incalculable options it offered.

9:09 p.m.
“Who’s this?” I asked, motioning to the man at the table. There
are people in the world who aren’t afraid to get in a cage with a wild
animal. They go in and they don’t take whips or chairs or any protection,
they just go in. I tried to act like one of them.
“Whatever happened to hello?” said Claudia.
“Hello,” I said, “who’s this?”
The man sitting at our table stared away at the crowd of people,
oblivious and uninterested. He had the words “High Times” tattooed
on his left forearm and each “I” was indicated by a drawing of a joint,
but they looked more like tampons.
“It’s a busy place, people have to sit somewhere.”
“I thought we were going to talk.”
“So talk,” she said. “I’m right here.”
“How are you?”
“The night is young. It’s too early to tell,” she said.

Adverbs

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In the attic

When I got home from work and found only my mother, she told me that my father had turned into a sparrow and had joined the others making a mess in the attic’s drafts and rafters. She had caught him in a plastic basket and was keeping him trapped there, fluttering and frantic, with a large leather-bound atlas to cover the top. The poor thing bore no resemblance to my father, but I fixed my mother a cup of chamomile tea and put her to bed early, my hand resting on her dear, troubled head until she fell asleep. Then I took the basket up to the attic and switched the bird out for the right one. My mother’s eyesight had never been good.

by Kara McKeever

 

Slide 5, by Leanna Sparks

No One Reads Kerouac Anymore*

I pull into the parking lot at work with the gnawing feeling/knowledge
I should be doing something better with my life. College grad
returns home, becomes convenience store clerk. The stuff dreams are
made of, straight out of a brochure promising debt and nothing. I
step out of my car and gawk for the nearest distraction before suicide
solves all of my problems.

The McDonald’s connected to Signal Convenience Store owns
a spotlight that beams into the Buffalo, MO, night sky. This baffles
me. Why does a fast food restaurant in a town of 2,500 people need
a spotlight? We don’t live in a post-apocalyptic world. No roving
bands of starving survivors seek rescue from death by cannibal. Perhaps
rural folk become entranced with the big ‘ole light in the sky. Ad
execs probably picture the Clampetts strolling inside a McDonald’s,
Jed taking off his cap, placing it over his heart and saying, “We saw
a strange ray of light up there in that big black empty thingy, and
by god if it didn’t point us right where we needed to be. Bless these 
golden arches.” Or maybe somebody got a great deal on a spotlight
and couldn’t pass it up.
 
“Jesus Christ, you’re finally here,” Rachel says as I walk into the
annoyingly bright convenience store. I recently added her to my roster
of imaginary sexual conquests. Half-Filipino and half-Mexican,
trim figure, thick black hair, and dark skin.
 
“JC is pissed, Rachel. Why the hell am I working tonight?”
 
“I had to fire Patti today.”
 
“For what?”
 
“Bouncing personal checks at work. She’d have Mike come in
and—”
 
“Yeah, I don’t care how she did it,” I say. “I mean, I knew she was
retarded, but damn, how long do you really expect to get away with
cashing bad checks at work?”
 
“Took us almost two months to figure it out,” Rachel says.
 
“I already knew this place was retarded,” I say.
 
“Most people fake being nice to their boss,” she says.
 
I look around. No one’s paying attention. People stand in line at
McDonald’s, but that’s across the building, past the chain link barrier
separating the two businesses from eleven p.m. to five in the morning.
 
“Those people don’t sell weed to their boss,” I say.
 
“Shit,” she says. “You’re gonna go to that well one too many times
and end up getting your ass fired.”
 
“Whatever will I do without all this?” I ask.
 
“Spare me,” she says. “One of these days poverty will erase that
too good for this job attitude you got.”
 
“I am too good for this job.”
 
“No, no,” Rachel says, “tell me how you really feel.” She grabs her
purse from underneath the counter and walks out.
 
Alone. Standing at register one. The chewing tobacco to my right,
the cigarette racks behind me. Pint and half-pint bottles below the
smokes. To my left, trucker speed and different variations of fake
Viagra that promise erections but only succeed in making you giggle
at funny names like Jackhammer and Bonez.

Moon Baby

There were astronauts who went to the moon very slowly, and on
the way one of the astronauts had a baby that she didn’t know
about. They all agreed to leave it on the moon because of jeopardize
the mission. Also, they had no cute little baby spacesuits.
The baby was young, though, and learned to breathe moon. It
slept in a crater and powdered its bottom with moondust. Every
moon day, the baby looked up at Earth multiple times and made
baby wishes. A moon day is almost thirty Earth days! Then the baby
crawled around in reduced gravity until it was naptime. And it had
lots of baby food, because baby food is mined from the moon. Also,
the cheese.
 
Back on Earth, scientists used a giant telescope to see the moon.
Imagine their surprise when they saw a bald baby crawling around
the lunar desert with the American flag as its diaper! The scientists
had a meeting and then became evil, and they put a cat in a rocket
and sent it to the moon so it would sleep on the baby’s face.
But when it got there, the baby and the cat became friends. No
one could talk to the baby except for other babies, because it had
made up its own official moon language: “Baby.” The cat learned to
speak Baby and the baby told it all of the moon secrets. And the cat
introduced the baby to the album “Mothership Connection,” which
the baby loved, by late ’70s funk supergroup Parliament. The scientists
saw all this from far away and scowled.
 
One day the cat and the baby had a fight about who wanted the
funk more. The cat went away to the dark side of the moon in a huff,
and it got turned into a catsicle because cold the universe. The baby
found the cat, though, who was frozen in an ice cube, and cried because
its friend was dead.
 
The baby flew to Earth crying and its babytears made a comet
tail, and the baby was now a meteor. On the way down, it pooped
through its diaper and the evil scientists saw the poop through their
giant telescope and they thought it was a humongous asteroid but
it was poop and the poop landed on the end of their telescope and
the scientists all screamed and fainted, but then the janitor who was
smarter climbed up on a ladder and said it was just poop, dummies.
But the baby also forgot everything because babies have a bad
memory and anyway the atmosphere burned up its memories. The
baby struck an unassuming lesbian couple and sank into one of their
tummies like it was gelatin. She delivered the moon baby nine minutes
later and they did a good job of raising it, because it became the
first mayor of the moon because space travel, and the two mommies
went to the baby’s skeptical grandparents and said, see?
This is why babies everywhere love cheese and the song “Star
Child.”

By Jimmy Grist