#teratovore

[fenmere]

We are currently writing a multiversal crossover for all of our other writing, and it is titled THE LOST TRANSITION OF ANNE ELLIPSIS.

Here's the cover, for if it turns out good enough to publish:

It's at a bit over 120,000 words right now, and we're not sure when the climax is going to happen (or quite what it'll be). What we're writing might just be the first arc of a longer series.

The story is that J. Geissler, 36 year old barista for the Oarfish Cafe, is a closeted trans woman who inherits a "wooden" sword from her Grandma Dory. She used to play with the sword every time she visited, and her Grandma knew that she'd want it, so bequeathed it to her.

The very night she sleeps within proximity to the sword, she starts having remarkably vivid dreams of being, well, what you see on the cover, on another world, talking to an elder, who is explaining what the sword is and what it does.

And things start to unravel dramatically from there.

The sword is magical, and J is able to use it to transition, but there are Side Effects.

Obviously, she also ends up changing her name to Anne (J. is the initial of her deadname).

This is not a quantum multiverse, though. It's not like a new universe is made every time someone makes a decision. There's something else that has created all the different timelines, and sometimes the differences are so fundamental that there's no Earth (or no one knows that it exists).

Officially, canonically, each of the timelines is one of the series of fiction we've written. Or one we've yet to write.

And the sword exists across all timelines, and so do people's souls.

If you wield the sword in two timelines, you can communicate between your two selves, typically through dreams.

But that's just the setting.

What's happening in this story is that Anne is given a tool that is the cosmic equivalent to an antimatter bomb, and told to practice doing little things with it so that she can learn how to fundamentally alter multiple realities on behalf of one person who is in a lot of distress.

And, she's given no training, because that's not how the gods do things.

From their perspective, the damage she's doing is like scribbling all over a picture book. It's just what kids do. The book will have served its purpose.

But, at some point, Anne develops a different plan.

Anyway, the reason her transition gets "lost" is because what she can do with the sword is alter history. Or, rather, when she alters things, like whether or not she's already transitioned, the side effects include an altered history. And then, when she sees how disastrous that is, she tries to do things "right".

You can find the works that this one references and incorporates here:

I am genuinely wanting to read some works from other writers. This is your opportunity to shamelessly plug your WIP or completed work :)))

Bonus points: you yap to me about your story and characters. I am desperate need of a good literary yap session

[monster-rinds]

Teratovore, by Synthia of the Inmara

If you've gone shopping in Gresham lately, you may have met Synthia (she/her). She "works" a counter at Hayward Groceries and loves to talk to people. She eats the excess emotions they radiate when experiencing such things as jokes, prices, tabloid headlines, declined credit cards, and holiday music. She's a monster.

She's been around a bit longer than humanity, and is quite experienced at surviving the inherent violence of the Earth. She's pretty good at pretending to be human. And other things.

Recently, however, she's met someone.

Felicity.

A monster who eats monsters. A teratovore.

And Felicity had an interesting proposal for her.

It almost worked, too.

You might find it easier to read over on Scribblehub, but all the chapters are here, now. ___

Table of Contents

prologue: About Gresham, Oregon

Not a woman

Not you

Not a trick

Not a chance

Not a hit

Not the world's greatest gangster movie

Not dead yet

Not your only friend

Not quite

Not forgotten

Not according to plan

uədo

Not a con

Not the key

open

Not a new pact

Fast friends

Happiness

Synthesis

Not par

Partnership

A drain

Call me a spade

I'm going digging

Not a good time

Paydirt

No lie, no face

No food for you

Nightmare city

Not fooling anyone

I'm feeling happy

Brief friends

All fired up

Complications

Indigestion

Probably hubris

Not a win

Demise

Not a nightmare

Teratovore

Scraps

Orientation

Feelings

Reasons

Teratodivergence

Doing surgery on a city

Pulling on a tendon

To see where it goes

Hold up

Important negotiations

Pulling the Chord

In the outlet by the lightswitch

Ring around the rosie

Cassiopeia's Boast

The punchline

And that's it! It's done.

[fenmere]

Author Ask Tag?!

Thank you @goodluckclove for tagging us in this one. This is great. This is a wonderful and useful distraction from our current project that might also help us figure out how to write the freakin’ blurb for it!

We’re going to answer these questions for Teratovore, the first draft for which is almost done, but it may still be a bit before we slam it up on Scribblehub and Tumblr. You’ll be able to read it at @monster-rinds when it starts running.

@shadesofmauve, we don’t know if you’ve got anything planned or in the works, but you’re up next if you wanna do this. Tag!

What is the main lesson of your story? Why did you choose it?

OK, we’re currently 85k into the story and starting chapter 39 and maybe have discovered the main lesson finally?

We generally don’t successfully write a book if we don’t have some sort of thing one or more of us are Really Trying To Say, but it’s not always obvious to the rest of us what it is. We usually start writing a story because it’s time for another in-system freeform TTRPG campaign. Which is what novels are for us.

Anyway, we chose to write this story not because we knew what the lesson or message was, but because we thought of this really evocative title, Teratovore. And a bunch of us just started riffing off of it immediately.

Also, we hadn’t yet written any stories about monsters eating each other, written from the point of view of a monster, and we felt that the world just needed that.

But the lesson is something along the lines of, “If you regularly work with another species of creature, they can rub off on you, and that’s pretty cool. You should pay attention to it when it’s happening.” Or, maybe it’s not that. Maybe it’s, “You should eat your girlfriend when you have the chance, otherwise someone else might.” But probably not.

Speaking seriously, though, it is about immortal beings that are stuck in an ongoing play of brutality and consumption for survival who learn some things from the ephemeral and fragile humans that they befriend along the way. What they learn is maybe somewhat less important than that they learn.

And, it all presents kind of an interesting, almost sci-fi model for how something like animism might work. And addresses a myriad of things we see in folklore, religions, spirituality, philosophy, and fantasy that we don’t think are turned on their heads enough.

Also, it’s a thinly veiled excuse for vore. Not necessarily sexy, kinky vore, unless it’s your kink, just vore. 

Everything eats things. It’s a fact of life. And one we must reconcile with. And we, the Inmara, often have trouble with that. So it's a little therapeutic for us in that way.

What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding?

Oh, us. Mostly.

A lot of things went into it.

It takes place in Gresham, Oregon, because we want to fictionally torment that place over there on the other side of Portland from us. Also, from the outside, it seems like the kind of place a small town horror movie might be set in, though it isn’t really a small town anymore. (Like Hillsboro, for a lot of people it’s a suburb of Portland)

The mechanics and history of the monsters, or emanants, and how they exist and work, comes from all of the sci-fi/fantasy pseudoscience we’ve been collecting over the years from reading actual science and then daydreaming about it in conjunction with myths and folklore we’ve read in parallel.

And it’s how, if we were immortal spirits of consumption and manipulation, we’d want things to work. But tempered with some horror story conventions, mostly to help drive the plot and seem familiar to any readers who happen across it.

What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness, or help the reader grow as a person?

Our MC, Synthia, who is also the narrator, is really just trying to survive what’s happening to her while hanging onto her friendships that she’s had with the humans around her, who she’s been feeding on.

Our femme fatale, Felicity, wants a relationship with Synthia for some reason, and ends up disrupting all of that because they’re both disasters.

And through them, we the writers are trying to achieve fun. And then maybe discover something profound along the way, and maybe we have. But whatever.

As we mentioned above, we’ve been having trouble writing a blurb for Teratovore, and part of the reason why is that the story keeps evolving as we go.

It starts out looking kind of like an aroace neurodivergent queer platonic “romance” story between a couple of cute monsters. But then it kind of turns detective noir, with the heroine discovering she’s way in over her head without any clear indication of who she can trust. And then the whole situation becomes way more complicated than it looked.

And, in the meantime, she finds she cares about her food source. She’s been feeding off the emotions of the humans she’s been hanging around (generally without directly hurting them), and she’s so old that their lives are like those of gnats to her. But, she can talk to them, and she likes them. But, unfortunately, everything extremely upends their lives, and she has to decide how to ethically handle that. On her own terms, because monster culture doesn’t care much about individual humans.

But, then, it’s also sort of a very late in life coming of age story. Because even though Synthia is ancient, even by monster standards, she’s been having such a sheltered existence that there’s a lot about the world and her very nature as a monster that she’s missed.

And we dug ourselves into this complicated mess of a story because we it seemed fun at the time.

What can the story achieve beyond simple fun for us and the reader?

A different perspective, maybe.

But it really doesn’t need to. 

How many chapters is your story going to have?

It’s on Chapter 39. We’re rocketing toward the climax right now, but there might be some late game rallying and learning to do yet, so it could be maybe… 25 more chapters until it’s done?

We’re doing this annoying thing that’s a challenge for us, and trying to keep the chapters between 2k and 2.5k words each. On Scribblehub, the common wisdom is that chapters that are longer than that are onerous for most readers, which is bullshit. Except if people are reading on their lunch breaks, we guess. Which is fair.

We’re used to writing 5k to 7k long chapters and have topped out at around 10k for one once. That’s our comfort zone. So, breaking it up into smaller plot developments is really restrictive to us and we’re not going to do it again. But we’re learning stuff about writing from doing this, so it’s worth it.

The other result is that there will be way more chapters than usual for the same length of book we typically write. Which means more updates. Which means more time on the front page of the site. So we might end up getting more readers that way.

It’ll be interesting to see how that goes.

Is it fanfiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it?

It is original fiction (fuck the word “content”), and as mentioned it will be published on ScribbleHub and here on Tumblr, on our side blog @monster-rinds.

But it is written by fans of Wildbow's writing (particularly his series Pale), John Carpenter's The Thing, the kind of queer fiction you can find on Scribblehub if you look hard enough, the original Hellraiser, Fringe, and @ohthatphage.

When did you start writing?

We wrote our first poem in 3rd grade and our first short story in 1997. Like with drawing, we don’t have a single start date and we never really stopped.

We started writing Teratovore late last November. Not sure what date specifically. We’re writing it slower than most other books because we’re also trying to take care of a bunch of other business.

Do you have any words of encouragement for fellow writers of writeblr? What other writers do you follow?

Oof.

Same basic advice we’d give fellow visual artists.

Do it for the fun of it. Do it for the learning of it. Do it because it makes your life feel fulfilled while you’re doing it.

Look for the aspects of writing that grip you, and celebrate them, roll in them like a dog that’s found something stinky, eat them like a fan of picture books, smear them all over your face, wear them for clothing, and then, feral and ravenous for more, go hunting.

Everyone we follow on Tumblr is a writer. Everyone on Tumblr is a writer. If you type something into a blog post, you’re a writer. The length and frequency of your blog posts can tell you what kind of writer you can be. It can be your first clue. But, of course, you can grow by writing more.

But, you know, we also follow @seananmcguire, of course. Mostly for her cat pictures. 😉

[monster-rinds]

Chapter 38: Demise

I was so proud of my horn, because it was my actual mouth. If I had managed to stick it into an opponent, I could have sucked them dry and empty in seconds.

It was so perfect and funny for a unicorn.

But I never got to use it.

As soon as I set hoof on the floor of the barn, it turned into a bowl and then a funnel and I began to fall down into it, with the flying boars above me, circling.

I don’t think I could accurately describe how utterly terrifying this was while also using the names of what we looked like or what was happening. But I’ll try.

I noticed the warped space of the barn and slowly began to register what was happening, and then I saw the dark hairy bulks moving around me, making disturbing noises. Snorts, squeals, and the leathery creak and flap of flexing wings accompanied the sudden sensation of gravity seriously warping spacetime and causing my hooves to slide out from under me.

My haunches hit the muddy ground first, and slid through it toward the center of the space. And since my reflex had been to rear up, I went nose over ass backward, legs flailing above me, and the back of my head smacked a rock that just happened to be there.

But these were just the physical sensations meant to disorient and distract me. They did no real harm other than lay me prone and draw me to the center of the slaughter box.

And the world around me expanded, making me very, very small, surrounded by a ballet of teratovores.

And then I reacted.

I didn’t really think. I didn’t have time to think. I knew I was already losing, caught in someone else’s domain. I just reached for the most successful form I’d ever taken, the black cloud of tiny compound eyeballs, but with that added addition of a proboscis for each one.

And I did my best to fill the ever growing space with myself, so there was no place to get away from me, and no way to box me in.

I grew so fast, injecting the domain with every quantum of myself from the Strands.

But it didn’t work.

I felt myself buffeted and churned by the wing beats of the boars as they circled me, braying and croaking, and I was pushed into myself by the whirlwind. And, of course, the ever warping scale and weight of the place outpaced me.

Something about it was extra disorienting, and it took me a few moments after realizing I couldn’t find purchase to figure it out.

I felt like I was in a kaleidoscope, tumbling, with images of myself overlapping, being chopped up by some fundamental force of the universe itself that I’d never encountered before. And it was only a matter of time before portions of myself were divided up and snorted into oblivion by these monsters.

There was no longer any light, only me and the intersecting prisms of reality.

Trying to make sense of it, I recalled what I’d seen as I’d fallen into the trap. Twelve winged boars circling in lockstep, flapping alternatively in a wave that rotated counter to their movement. Clockwise against counterclockwise. 

The shards of space I was now inhabiting were doing something very similar. The same kind of movement and dance.

I wasn’t caught in one domain! I was caught in twelve domains simultaneously!

This was very bad.

Obviously, I’d never experienced anything like this before, because if I had I wouldn’t have existed to experience it then. I would have been killed. I generally tried to stay out of shit like this, and had had a seven hundred and forty some million year track record of being very good at it.

To say I was humiliated by the experience would have understated the situation beyond description.

But I didn’t have time for pride. I had to escape, and for a few pulses of consciousness I worked at it mindlessly, scrabbling feebly and desperately at the bounds of all reality around me.

After a bit, though, I realized the monsters weren’t attacking me. They weren’t bothering to try to eat me. And I wondered if they hadn’t figured out how, yet. I knew that if they tried in the ways I’d been attacked before, I could turn it around on them. And maybe I had a reputation that scared them.

Which then gave me enough calmness to remember that I’d just eaten a carpedominator, and now knew how to adopt that adaptation.

Ah.

One little adaptation, without even a physical change. It was coming so easy to me now. Especially one that I had the memory of using before, even if it wasn’t my own memory. Such a shortcut.

A little self origami of waves in my own energy and I was able to lash out in twelve directions and corrupt all twelve domains to make them mine.

And that was my undoing.

I should have guessed what was going on. The way that Chord had fed me such a vulnerable carpedominator earlier, stroking my confidence while giving me a crucial skill. And the way these boars were so identical and so adept at coordinating not only their movements but the complex interplay of their domains, disguising them and letting me into them without my notice in the first place.

It was all spelled out before me, and I just hadn’t read it.

Because it wasn’t my wheelhouse.

I may have been able to eat other monsters, but in my heart and my sheer mass of experience and honed reflexes I was not a teratovore.

My size and my complexity didn’t save me.

Cackling with glee at turning the tide on my captors, I seized their domains and gripped them, bringing their dance to a halt.

But just as I took a moment to decide what to do next, they wheeled in synchronicity, lowered their heads, and charged, sinking their tusks, their own proboscides right into my very mind.

And I knew such pain.

And, unlike Felicity, they didn’t hold back.

It was over in less than a second.

Because, what happens when a carpedominator tries to take a domain? They make that domain a part of their own psyche and start to draw the owning emanant into their own being. It’s how they feed.

And, normally, I would have been able to use their domains against them, to keep them from making the distance to charge me.

Except, their own domains were now me. All they had needed to do was pierce the fabric of those domains.

And the real crux of it was that they were carpedominators, too. And when a carpedominator attacks the domain of another carpedominator, which I had no idea about, apparently it just becomes a force of wills.

I was huge, but I was outnumbered twelve to one. And I hadn’t known what was coming. I barely even saw it happen, and I had less than a second of awareness to make sense of it when it did. And that time was spent in the deepest agony I had ever known.

The boars grew very fat, very fast.

---

“The livestock ate her,” came the next message, remarkably quick on the heels of the last one. “She’s gone.”

He’d hardly had time to visualize the different ways his trap could play out after that. Synthia had been so wily that he’d expected her to best his livestock, but not unscathed. Sewer Teeth should have had time to use the drain carefully placed and concealed beneath where she had been held, in order to deliver the coup de grace itself.

But obviously he’d overestimated her.

What a wonderful relief.

The city was his again.

It was a little bit of a shame, though. Without Sewer Teeth eating the last bite of her, all her memories were gone forever. The livestock hadn’t been configured to do that. He couldn’t risk them getting that smart.

Such a treasure, destroyed.

Oh, well.

---

Greg may have been speeding.

He may have, in fact, been speeding through a school zone.

Normally he never even came close to doing that. He’d learned how to drive from his dad, who had been the most careful driver anyone had ever known. And he’d inherited his dad’s rock solid nerves, and used them on the road every moment he was behind the wheel.

But, lately, life had gone beyond even his family’s legendary endurance. Synthia’s nightmare storm of last night had shaken him so deeply that now the wheel of his truck itself shook him whenever he gripped it.

And in his panicked desperation to get to Cassy, he’d forgotten to compensate for that.

And now he was waiting for a police officer to finish running his plates before coming up to tell him the bad news that had the worst timing ever. It would be a big ticket. The first in his life. When he had no income.

And he didn’t think he could contest this one.

The school zone light was visibly flashing on the sign across the street.

He’d made a legitimate mistake.

He texted Ayden to let him know he was being detained.

---

Ayden pushed his phone toward Charlie again, with sleep ridden and pained eyes, asking, “Could you drive me there? I think we need to hurry.”

---

Milk was pleased with itself.

It had learned a neat trick from a tiny organism a long, long time ago, and now it was going to use that trick.

It was its favorite trick, even though it so rarely had had the opportunity to use it.

After it had snagged the very last morsel of Synthia from underneath Chord’s livestock, it had used the property’s overdone network of sewer-like piping to find a safe place to message the master of this trap with an update, using the memories it had acquired from eating Sewer Teeth to spoof its identity.

Chord had praised it. The ruse had worked.

And fooling Chord wasn’t even its trick.

Then it left entirely for more familiar territory where it could address what it had done and make new plans.

Having originally manifested as a physics eater had given Milk so many delightful options for being sneaky. It loved being sneaky.

---

When it was all over, Chord returned to his property to survey the aftermath and to set up his domain again.

He traveled there as a very small worm riding a mount that looked something like a hawk. He could change his size at will, but he couldn’t truly change his own shape. Despite the fact that he could sculpt and reconfigure other emanants, he still hadn’t figured out that trick for himself.

What he did to others was invasive and altered an emanant at a deep and fundamental level. It often changed their memories. And he couldn’t adapt that to himself without changing the way he thought and behaved, and he couldn’t allow that.

All that he could safely do was change his apparent size.

Which was fine. He was so very content as he was.

But what he found when he approached his ranch threatened that contentment and gave him disquiet.

Sewer Teeth was missing, and so were his livestock.

Bremerton, the dog, was still there, napping on the porch. And so were Bremerton's keepers, Chordate jr. and Kate Montgomery, the current humans who legally owned the property for him.

And when he confronted them in their living room about what had happened, they reported that Sewer Teeth had not spoken to them since he, Chord, had set the trap and left the farm. And when they had seen the unicorn attack the barn and allow the livestock to escape, they had been powerless to stop it.

They did tell him that the livestock looked bigger than before and had flown off in a flock toward Mount Hood.

This was all he ever expected of them, so he thanked them and went about reestablishing his domain in the attic.

The livestock could be tracked down or replaced.

The absence of Sewer Teeth was more worrisome, but flying into a panic or rage about it would only put him at a disadvantage.

He needed to think, and he needed more intelligence.

He could do the former just fine, and he had servants and agents all over the county for the latter.

So, once he was settled, he sent out commands and instructed his remaining forces to fill the vacuum in Gresham before the common thralls and peasantry could return.

Despite his major losses, one benefit of all of this was that he'd have a stronger grip on the county seat, and he could now build a stronger foundation for his long term goals.

The hardest part would be replacing Fate Vine. Overlords with its talents weren’t exactly rare, but very few were ever as cooperative as it had been.

At least he no longer had any local enemies to worry about, besides maybe a rogue Sewer Teeth.

Hm.

Had Sewer Teeth lied to him? Had it successfully consumed Synthia and gained the adaptations she’d collected?

Did Sewer Teeth now think it could rival him?

That would prove amusing.

Still, it would be a good idea to start laying the groundwork to trap it now.

He sent out messages to his Portland contacts to start the politicking necessary for an idea he had.

---

previous

next

[fenmere]

*looks over at current writing project, which is titled TERATOVORE*

The author's barely disguised desire for a cheeseburger

[monster-rinds]

Chapter 2: Not you

“This you?” they asked, gesturing at the wooded lot, as if we’d been walking together as companions.

“No, I’m right in front of you,” I said, sticking to my new dry affect of the afternoon. It seemed like a good way to deflect or stonewall them.

“You should invite me in to see your place,” they said, ignoring my reply, as if they were referring to an apartment building or something. Then they said, “I brought wine.”

“Merlot does pair well with tampons, I’m told,” I lied.

“Oh, those were just a conversation piece.”

“Effective. We’re having one.”

“True. Though we could both be more comfortable while doing so.”

“I’d be more comfortable if I knew your name. Since you know mine,” I said.

“I rather think I don’t, actually,” they replied.

Ah. There we go. Now my hunch was answered. They at least knew I was faking my identity at work. Which probably meant that they were a private investigator, a government official, or something else.

They were still smiling, and totally relaxed, all looking like a soccer mom with a queer flare in their fuchsia plaid shacket, dark burgundy hair, navy Capri leggings, and immaculate makeup. But none of that meant anything.

I sighed, and admitted, “Names are kind of meaningless actually. They hold no power. So I don’t have one.” I have many.

They silently laughed once, smirking and nodding their head forward a little, lips pursed. “Same,” they said, then flashed that winning grin. “But, let’s call me Felicity.”

I tilted my head to the side and nodded, then gestured at the woods, “After you, Felicity.”

They bounced a little as they stepped forward and turned to enter the wooded lot. And I followed somewhat listlessly.

But I asked, as we left the view of the street, following a pathway between nettles and brambles, “What gave me away?”

And over their shoulder, without looking, Felicity replied, “Oh, nothing in particular. I just have a really good sense for these things. Don’t really want to give away my secrets either, though.”

“Ah, yes. Neither do I,” I said. “But I do want to be more careful.”

“Oh, understood! Um,” they looked around as if entering the foyer of a fancy building. “Your facade could use a little work. You don’t stick to a single affectation very well. Watching you from customer to customer, you reflected each one back so fluidly. And it was more than just your voice or stance, you know. And then when I threw you off balance, you reverted to what I think is your natural state.”

“Well, shit.”

They entered my clearing and turned to face me, swinging their bag jauntily and letting it fall back to the side of their leg. Still grinning. “No, but it was subtle! If I hadn’t been looking for something like you, I wouldn’t have noticed! You really shouldn’t worry.”

The fact that they’d managed to walk to my clearing told me almost everything I needed to know, though. A typical human wouldn’t have been able to do that. They would have continued right on through, following the path to the park behind my lot. To detect and reach my clearing required skills and senses that your average private detective or government official just does not have. But also, to choose to enter my clearing also implied things.

I tensed up.

A human was something I could deal with. Bamboozle. Manipulate.

A not-human most likely meant I was prey.

“Oh, relax,” Felicity said.

I did not relax.

“I really do just want to share my wine, and maybe my crackers and cheese, and talk,” they said. “Then I’ll go, and maybe I’ll see you around the store again sometime. Maybe I can show you my place.”

I think I frowned, and asked, “Do the wine and crackers do anything for you?”

They shrugged, “Not really. But they’re fun anyway. A kind of social ritual.”

“I don’t have any furniture,” I pointed out.

“I’ll conjure some.”

“In my home?”

“If you’ll let me.”

“I’m not sure I should,” I said.

“Well, OK, I did sniff you out and stalk you, so I do owe you something you can trust,” Felicity admitted. “But we are in your home, your domain, where you have power over me.”

“There are those that can turn your domain against you, if they enter it,” I stated.

“True. But if I was one of those, I think you’d already be food,” they countered. “But, please, take some time to investigate me. I’ll leave if you tell me to. I will be disappointed, but it’s only right and fair.”

I snorted and stomped around them in a circle, examining them much more closely than before. I used the same senses I needed to reach my clearing, which were all I had beyond the typical sets simulated by any nervous system. I’m pretty good at detecting my own kind just fine, but Felicity wasn’t that. Their physical camouflage was more complete than mine, allowing them to rely less on misdirection. But there should have been some sort of clue to their nature.

And there was. Just not where I was looking.

I’m pretty sure that when they said that I had slipped and shown them my true self, they’d actually sensed the very fabric of my being. I wasn’t about to get the same courtesy here. But you don’t get to be as old as I am without learning how to spot danger or suss out potential allies, even with inferior senses.

We’re monsters.

Some people call us a variety of other things, like spirits, yokai, demons, rakshasa, ogres, fae, ogbanje, etc. Some of these terms are very specific, others broad. Some are accurate sometimes. All of them have cultural contexts that are not quite universal and may describe something else, actually. 

It’s also really hard to figure out which terms were inspired by some of us, and which of us were created by the terms themselves. We happen. And we happen for a number of reasons. And some of those reasons are primordial and some are linguistic, and a whole universe of other mechanisms.

In the here and now, I like to use the word “monsters”. I’m really just a fan of the whole concept, the range of what monsters are in popular culture and mythology combined, including things like Sesame Street and various cartoons. It feels like an accurate assessment of what you can expect from us.

But call us what you want.

Those of us who speak tend to use a mix of Greek and Latin words to categorize ourselves. We inherited the idea from human science, but I don’t think we’re very scientific about it. The point isn’t to understand our ecosystem of monsters better, nor to create factions and draw lines of allegiances. We just needed words to quickly describe a given situation between any of our kind.

For instance, I’m an affectivore. I’ve seen that term used in human pop culture, too, in several different places. But it’s not super common outside of a handful of fandoms. It means that I feed on emotion.

But it’s not like I suck the emotion out of a person or other being. There are some monsters that do that. I’m more like the plankton of monsters. I feed off of radiant emotion.

Any being that experiences emotion creates an excess of it that just radiates from their presence. It affects the world and other beings around them, and generally shapes reality a little, just like sunlight does. So, I just have to position myself within that radiance and I soak up what hits me. Pretty harmless, really.

Some affectivores go out of their way to create strong emotions in order to feed off of them. They’ll disguise themselves as things like printers, traffic lights, and other appliances that malfunction just enough to be very irritating, but not enough to be replaced. Others operate as serial killers, marriage officiants, judges, household pets, natural disasters, and any other number of deeply impactful things. And depending on where they’ve set themselves up, they can get quite a bit of nourishment that way.

I don’t do that. I usually disguise myself as human, because that gives me a chance at the more complex interactions that I personally crave. And then I go where there are a lot of people. I don’t really need to do anything to provoke emotion, either. When there are enough people, there is always emotion, a gale wind of it. People carry it around with themselves everywhere, and then when they interact with each other it amplifies.

A grocery store checkout stand is a pretty subdued place for emotion compared to some of the venues I’ve frequented. But it provides a constant supply, and it has a predictable routine that creates a stability I find nice. I know I’m going to get a decent meal every day, and I also know I’m not in one of those places where affectivores like me are expected to be. It’s just a little off the beaten path, so there’s less likely to be any sort of a feeding frenzy there. Which I’ll get to in a bit.

Oh, and another consideration is that the kinds of emotions I consume do affect me. One reason I don’t hang out at bars, for instance, is that emotions that radiate from drunk people get me drunk. And I’d honestly rather not be drunk. It lowers my chances of survival.

Now, I can eat all sorts of emotions. To me, they are like different flavors of energy drink. But some affectivores are more specialized.

We sometimes use different words for them.

An epialivore, for instance, feeds off nightmares.

More specifically, epialivores typically enter a being’s dreams, turn them into nightmares, and feed off the emotions that happen because of them. Though, humans are pretty damn good at giving themselves nightmares, so most epialivores can just set up shop in there and soak up the trauma without a lot of work. Epialivores are extremely numerous. If you’re human, you’re probably carrying around a handful of them.

They’re also hard to get at because they’ve adapted to their preferred environment and are basically imaginary. Someone like me can’t just reach in and grab an epialivore to get its attention or something. I have to do something like convince its host that there is an epialivore in their head and can they please tell that monster to come forward, take control of their body and talk to me? And a lot of humans are resistant to that sort of thing.

Not all though.

But, anyway, there are a whole lot of different affectivores and other types of monsters. There are monsters that feed off of physics, or various physical phenomena. Enthalpiphages are a fascinating subject that I’m not going to get into here, for instance. There are just so many.

Now, we don’t have the reverence for ancient linguistics that human scientists have, and have mixed our Greek and Latin in some cases.

In one in particular, it’s at least partly because that mix invokes an appropriate sense of wrongness. And, of all the variations, it sounds the darkest and most threatening.

Teratovores.

Monsters that eat other monsters.

There are numerous monsters that have adapted themselves to eating other monsters such as myself. Which is why I do a lot of hiding, actually.

In fact, the largest reason that monsters hide from everyone is because of other monsters. We’re not really scared of humans. Those of us who are still around are fairly impervious to most things humans can try to do to us. And we know we can adapt. Even if humanity broadly accepted that there were monsters and developed a science to study us and learn how to eradicate us, we know we can survive it. We’ve done it before.

But, if I were to make a disturbance among my local population of humans, it would draw attention from other monsters. And my own personal ability to adapt to the enormous variety of teratovores and their interest in consuming me would be put severely and imminently to the test. It’s way easier to study my adversaries and adapt to them if I have time to do it, and certainly if there are fewer of them present to focus on. A feeding frenzy is the worst time to do so.

And most teratovores hide because it helps them catch their prey.

But, sometimes they are also prey.

Anyway, I obviously suspected that Felicity was a teratovore, so I was looking for signs that they were adapted to catching and consuming other monsters.

And I could immediately see that they were not a carpedominator, the type of teratovore that claims your own domain before eating you, by the way spacetime was normal around them. Circling them confirmed that, with no telltale ripples in the background as it parallaxed around them while I walked.

A carpedominator can control just how much that happens, but as far as I know they can’t hide it completely. Which is why, as Felicity had said, if they were one they would have pounced by now.

Carpedominator? Are we even using Latin correctly here?

Don’t care.

More important things to do.

Unfortunately, my clearing doesn’t get much direct sunlight. So I used my claim over it to change that, so that briefly Felicity cast a shadow.

It was a normal shadow.

Their skin was typical of a human’s.

They had the requisite number of fingers, and I assumed toes. There was nothing I could reasonably do about clues that were hidden.

Their hair wasn’t doing anything unusual besides having the appearance and fragrance of being dyed.

Their clothing had the detail of stitches and woven fabric.

The irises of their eyes had a complex texture and a typical gradient from center to rim. Their retinas didn’t reflect light.

Their moles were made of melanin.

They rotated in space relative to me at the same rate as their surroundings as I walked around them.

After three circuits, I couldn’t find a single tell.

For all physical intents and purposes they weren’t a monster. They were human to me.

I relaxed a little and looked them right above the eyes. Not a good idea to make actual eye contact, typically, no matter how confident I was.

“You’re an epialivore in possession of your host,” I said.

Their smirk changed shape to become another smirk, and they replied, “Not quite.”

I frowned.

“I definitely eat other emanants,” Felicity said. “Just not you.”

Ooh. emanant is a cool word for what we are.

I narrowed my eyes, though.

Words aren’t very reassuring.

It would take time and care to build trust, even if I currently seemed to have the upper hand.

“What are your pronouns?” I asked.

---

previous

next

[monster-rinds]

This Saturday, my webserial TERATOVORE starts on Scribblehub. But, it's being released ahead of schedule on my system's Patreon (of course), and you can start reading there right now (if you subscribe):

[monster-rinds]

Chapter 15: open

Felicity heard the sound of a door opening as she took a great big breath, gasping as if she’d come up for air from being underwater.

And then she opened her eyes to find herself looking right into the pupils of Synthia.

She didn’t see much else, because very quickly she wasn’t using either set of eyes herself. Or any other actual nerves.

The process was familiar and reflexive once it got started. She didn’t have to consciously do anything to finish her meal, and soon she’d return to Amber’s deep subconscious. That was, if she wasn’t consumed right along with Synthia by the teratovore entering the room behind her. But maybe she could eat that one from the inside too, if she was fast and wily enough.

So, for the sake of her own existence, she pushed herself to devour her new friend even faster, burrowing as deep into her being as she could.

It was like burying herself in the deep loam of the meanings behind the words of an ancient epic. It was dark, and warm, and timeless, and each bite (such as it could be called) brought with it not just energy but knowledge. Not memories that weren’t hers, as she never could do that, but the knowledge that she might as well be eating time itself.

Something was different, though.

Something was wrong.

A process that normally took a matter of seconds was going on for much longer.

And even though she herself was getting stronger and bigger, possibly more so than she’d ever had been before, Synthia didn’t seem to reduce or thin out.

What was Synthia? What was happening?

Suddenly panicked and filled with an unrelenting and confusing terror, Felicity tried to turn around and escape, to eat her way back out again. But to no avail.

She tried reaching out to Amber’s psyche and invoking the memetic link she had to her, to jump to her mind the way she usually did, but she was locked in the process of eating an unending prey.

She was completely incapable of detaching herself from Synthia, in any way.

With nothing else left to do, she continued struggling.

---

What that felt like from my end was considerably less pleasant. It was also very distracting.

And then, as I faintly heard Amber scream through my fog of pain and monstrous dissociation, a teratovore began to chew on me from behind.

I have a pretty good sense, actually, of how pain feels from human to human, and creature to creature. It’s all pretty similar, with minor variations for neurological differences. The basic purpose and concept of it is the same. And, I’ve also felt the pain of other monsters, back when I fed off of them. And I know how that’s different from how lifeforms tend to feel it. It’s pretty strikingly different, though it serves the same function and can be just as unfortunately incapacitating. Certain teratovores have adapted themselves to invoke a certain level of pain to paralyze their victims with it.

Fuzzy-feet wasn’t that kind of teratovore. It felt like they just sort of became all mouth and started chewing, with the goal being to just eat as much as fast as possible.

And, maybe because of the nature of my origins, I felt pain in a way that was sort of a mix of both the monster fashion and the way complex lifeforms experience it. Which isn’t a great adaptation. It kind of makes it more distracting and intense than it needs to be.

So, the teeth in my back didn’t really faze me, because just prior to that what I felt was something like worm quickly and wrigglingly munching its way through both of my eyes and into a brain I did’t actually have. However it is that my inner structure is actually composed and organized, when I’m pretending to be human the sensations match pretty closely to what humans might experience. At least, how I experience it secondhand through consuming their feelings.

The stinging, searing, prickly, squirming icepick driving its way into my very mind robbed me of my sight and quickly my hearing, and almost all of my focus and faculties.

I not only don’t know what my body did after that, but I lost track of its shape.

My locus of consciousness followed the feeding worm, deeper and deeper, becoming surrounded by sharp and growing agony.

So, when the teratovore’s teeth sank into my back, nearly surrounding me, I felt them like a discomfort on the very outer layer of me, almost more like footsteps on my domain. So removed, I couldn’t feel the urgency of the situation. But, of course, I was already fighting for my existence.

And Amber, if her reflexes were merciful, was hopefully running from the room.

---

Just before opening the last door between himself and his prey, Felix paused to think it was a little strange that she hadn’t put away her cell phone yet. Just holding it out like that while she stood just around the corner from the door with her own prey. What were they doing?

Did she even have a clue that she gave herself away with it, that clumsy over-complicated extension of herself that radiated etherscent? He could smell its location right through the walls!

But then, there were entire spirits that gave off that smell, and who hadn’t learned to mask it. Or didn’t have the good natural luck to be built that way. And he fed off them all the time.

And how could the cell phone not expel its telltale? It had to, in order to interface with the local cell towers.

Grinning with his real teeth in anticipation of his meal, he opened the door to enter the room.

And as he stepped in he thought, maybe too late, that it could be a trap.

But when he looked over, he saw the two of them behind the room’s bar there, standing, facing each other, with the spirit’s back to him, holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes.

Aw, a poor human was going to get a full glimpse of his gaping maw and the ethergore it was about to unleash from her ersatz friend.

It would teach her to be more careful about who she dated.

If she was even still intact, as a person. There was no telling what that spirit had managed to do by the time Felix had stepped into the room.

From tip of pseudoforehead to crotch of his protective coloration, he opened his truemouth as wide as he could as he crouched and wiggled his behind for a leap. He could make it clear over the bar and onto the back of that spirit, no problem.

Right then, the human victim came to from her entrancement and caught sight of him. And screamed.

He took that as his cue.

---

Felicity found it strange that she could distantly feel the pain of sixteen teeth sinking into the physical body of Synthia that surrounded her. And, it was so far away.

But she now knew that she’d been too late, and they were both being consumed.

---

I think I had so many memories at the time that I couldn’t feel them disappearing as Felicity ate away at my insides. I felt a certain mortal despair at what was happening that I remember from times I’d been around people who’d been made suddenly aware of their own progressing dementia. Or that one time I was present when someone was diagnosed with a neurotropic nematode.

And that was under and nearly overwhelmed by the pain that still gripped and defined me and my new fleeting existence.

None of these things were helping me, and I needed to act fast.

So, the first thing I did was gather all of my remaining focus and channel it toward adapting, to cut myself off from the pain I was experiencing. Or rather, to alter it to become a different, dispassionate sensation.

And that took precious time and energy, but I found of the two I had copious amounts of the latter. More than I had realized.

I was still being bathed by radiant energy from that con, despite the fact it was winding down and we were separated from it by a few walls and several yards of open space. It had been strong enough that I felt it on the way up to the front door, after all. But that was not enough to explain what I found at my disposal. And neither was Amber’s terrified reaction to the event.

But I didn’t have time to ponder about my reserves, or even spend time feeling about within myself to understand where they were coming from.

I just used them.

And when I tied off the pain of being eaten, I was flooded with the euphoria of its absence. Which, unlike for living beings, didn’t serve me any better than the pain. It was just distracting, so I temporarily tied myself off from that feeling as well.

And then, in the clarity of that moment, I turned to Felicity.

I felt her struggling, trying to break free of me, of her autonomic grip on my being. And I couldn’t exactly help her with that. Not from within her.

But I saw that I could protect myself by changing which parts of myself I put in front of her.

So, I moved her, and surrounded her with my newly found vast and unfathomable energy reserves. And I felt calm relief knowing that she was no longer damaging the parts of me that I knew defined who and what I was. And it looked like I could deal with her sometime later.

At the rate she was growing, I could deal with Fuzzy-feet before she became a problem again.

So, I turned my attention on them, now knowing I was somehow so much bigger than my physical projection.

---

It really took only three convulsions and bites to get most of the spirit into his truemouth, but a foot remained sticking out near the bottom. Ludicrously, it twitched about where his crotch should be, and that mildly frustrated him.

It should have broken off and started dissipating now, but he couldn’t bite through it.

And the human victim had fallen to the floor and backed against the wall, convulsing and screaming uncontrollably.

He needed to figure out how to digest his food, and he couldn’t think with that going on.

He felt like he needed some privacy.

So he closed the top of his mouth and reformed the face of his protective visage so he could speak with his psuedomouth.

“Hey!” he shouted, closing his eyes shut with the effort. “Hey! You’re safe! Stop! Quiet! She can’t hurt you anymore! And I won’t! You can run! Run you little thing, run!” Without the limit of lungs, he was fully capable of overpowering her voice with the volume of his, and he did.

It shut her up, at least. And in the shock of hearing his words, she hyperventilated with blinking eyes that wanted to be as wide as they possibly could be. And she clenched her clawed hands in front of her throat.

She was clearly so traumatized by all of this that it wasn’t likely she’d remember any of it, he thought.

But now he could focus on the lumpy ethermass that filled his truemouth.

He worked his jaws and encircled the ethercorpse with his many multibarbed tongues, and squeezed. He released his own energy reserves into his gullet as a raw entropic force used to digest his food, allowing it to drip out around the leg of his prey where it stuck out of his maw. And when his ethersaliva hit the floor, it hissed and sputtered wastefully. But most of it remained where it should do its work.

And though he began to feel a surge of energy enter his system, telling him he was successfully eating his prize, the ethermass did not begin to shrink.

Instead, it started to grow and bulge.

How could it possibly do that?

Was this spirit still alive and somehow feeding on something he didn’t know about? Was it able to eat multiple things? Emotions, physics, his own entropic juices?

He had never in his existence experienced anything like this. Never even heard of such a thing.

In sudden concern for his own wellbeing, he started to open his mouth to expel his would-be food.

The human let out a little, “eep.”

---

previous

next

[monster-rinds]

Chapter 4: Not a chance

For most of my next shift, Greg worked the till in front of me, and Ayden behind me. And Cassy mostly did stocking.

Normally, this would mean that when there was a lull in customers, I could turn one way to talk about Star Wars and the other way to talk about dinosaurs. And that would be quite a choice, because while I find that dinosaur conversations are more mentally stimulating for me, Star Wars conversations have a greater chance of triggering intense emotion.

If Cassy had been there, we might have talked folklore and urban legends, which was always a hoot for me.

But there was more Christmas music, of course, so both men were inclined to whine about that. Well, Ayden whined about people whining about Christmas music, but same effect, really.

The human invention of holidays has always fed me pretty well. It didn’t really matter the culture or era, people have always allowed themselves to really feel things during their special days. And, also, wherever there are crowds there are conflicts. Especially, little wordless frustrations between people that just fester and radiate nutrition for me. But, sometimes, also, there’s quite a bit of joy.

But whatever the overall mood and how it might affect my outward demeanor, a well fed Synthia is an alert, graceful, fast, and dexterous Synthia, and that usually makes me happy underneath everything.

And a part of me was definitely preoccupied with Felicity’s proposition, and what I was going to do about it. But not so much so that I couldn’t relax and focus on what I was doing.

Now, the thing about dinosaur conversations is that I’ve seen dinosaurs. I’ve even been them, in a manner of speaking. I mean, besides the ones that are alive today. The big ones.

So, even in the midst of traditional Christmas whining, I could spark a conversation about dinosaurs by turning to Ayden and saying the most inane little truth I knew, that I couldn’t possibly know if I was human, and it would set him off about how paleontology works. And even though he knew it was my habit to do this to him, and assumed I was just teasing him with ridiculous statements, he always rose to the occasion.

It was delightful.

If you’d never seen someone grin and frown at the same time, that was one way to witness it.

“OK, guys,” I said. “Enough about Little Drummer Boy.”

“Oh, no,” Greg grumbled.

I pushed on, knowing that they both yearned for the distraction, “You know that heron that’s married to her zookeeper for life?”

“Oh, don’t even go there, Synthia,” Ayden muttered.

“Sounds like this one’s on you, kid,” Greg called over both his shoulder and mine.

“The other day, I learned that T-Rexes were like that, too,” I boldly stated.

I heard a thump behind me and turned to see Ayden leaning over his bagging counter, head in arms, convulsing with what I happened to know was silent hysterical laughter.

Feeling that radiate from him was gratifying.

“That sounds reasonably plausible,” Greg said.

“Mmph!” Ayden protested.

But a customer pushed their cart into Ayden’s checkout aisle and said, “Oh. I read that article! It’s totally true!”

Ayden straightened and faced the person, “Oh, please don't encourage her! Hi! Did you find everything you wanted?”

“Yep. Thank you.”

Then, as he started ringing things up, Ayden explained, “It’s a cool idea, and we can't disprove it. I'm sure the article you read had all sorts of quotes from an enthusiastic scientist. But as far as I know, and I stay on top of this, all we can guess is that at least one species of Tyrannosaurus tended their nests. That's based on fossil evidence. Everything else is conjecture based on similarities to extant life today, like birds.”

“No, I get that,” the customer said. “But this article said there was new evidence!”

“I didn't read the article,” I said.

“Oh,” said the customer.

“Synthia…” Ayden groaned.

“I have a T-Rex for a husband now,” I said smugly, then turned to take care of my own customer.

The confusion and amusement that bloomed behind me was delectable.

“I think she likes to hear me talk paleontology,” I heard Ayden saying. “But then she teases me like that when it's time to cut out the chatter. One of the perks of working here, really.”

Then I lost myself in work and dining, and pretty much enjoyed the rest of my shift.

Lunch, break, and after work banter was basically more of the same and pretty routine, though I contributed a little more.

At one point, a bit later, Ayden asked me, “No really, you were just teasing, right? Or was there a new theory? Was there really an article?”

I was so distracted by my evening plans that it took me a moment to remember what he was talking about. But when I did, I turned and smiled at him.

“Oh, of course I was teasing, Ayden,” I said. “I like making you talk about dinosaurs and I needed an intellectual break from the music.”

“I thought so,” he nodded. Then he looked up at me, squinting his eyes. “It’s just, maybe not today, but sometimes you say things with such authority, like you were there somehow, it’s half convincing. And you really know your stuff. You have to in order to tease me like you do. What was your major in college again?”

“Oh, I haven't done school yet,” I replied, truthfully. “It seems like a good idea someday. But I do pretty well listening to people like you.”

Even if you're faking an identity, it's good to use truths when you can. It makes it easier to speak with conviction. Also, I've found it fun to see what I can get away with. Whatever you tell somebody, they will make up a story in their head to make it fit their idea of you.

“Ah, I get that,” he said. “And, it's not like a degree pays for itself anyway. Loans can destroy your life.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, I'm glad you work here,” he told me. “Greg's OK, and I love Cassy, but you're the only person who actually listens to me rant about scientists and dead animals.”

“Mm,” I replied. “I'm glad I get to work with you, too. It's fun. I guess you could say, I grew up with dinosaurs in my life. Everyone around me was into them for a while, and I kind of miss it.”

“Oh?”

“Not much of a story to tell, really,” I said. “Just got caught up in one of the waves.”

“Oh, like back in the ‘90s leading up to Jurassic Park.”

“Kind of like that, yeah. Dinosaur mania's been a periodic thing for a while.”

“Right!”

And that's all the time we had for that exchange.

But having to mask my true identity and motives while explaining myself to Ayden got me thinking about Felicity’s gig, and why I was going to actually try helping her.

She hadn't even offered me a reason or incentive to team up with her. It was pretty obvious what my share of the take would be. Her host would have emotions I could harvest while she was making her attack, but the real reward was that in order to be her bait I'd have to put myself in riskier situations. Which meant going to places with more intense crowds experiencing excitement. I could feast just before the action, in a way that I usually denied myself.

She'd be my bodyguard, in a sense.

And besides the extra food, it would also be more fun for me.

For instance, I love movies. I watch quite a few of them on my own. Alone, I get to feel my own emotions in a way I don't normally notice when surrounded by life. And movies also give me a glimpse into the human psyche while not feeding, and I can just think about it. But I avoid theaters with large audiences because they can become feeding frenzies all too easily, and it’s harder to avoid getting preyed upon in that situation.

Which was the crux of the plan that night. I'd go see a movie and then hang out in a restroom afterward, to tempt a predator to come after me.

And Felicity would tail me, and hopefully pounce on anybody trying to predate me before they make their move.

It made me really nervous, but we'd agreed to what should be a more subdued showing. One where the crowd would be smaller, and easier to comb for likely targets and threats. Less confusion than a big theater with a bunch of blockbusters in it.

And I'd been mulling and fretting over how manipulative we were going to be.

The plan was to lure another monster out into the open so that Felicity could eat them. That monster would die and never exist again. Just like what would happen to me if Felicity wasn’t there.

But, while my usual methods of feeding don't result in death or even injury, I do manipulate the heck out of people.

I'd just then had to explain away what I'd been doing. Because my usual habit of slinging quips and teasing people was sort of predatory in itself. I had been provoking emotion from everyone around me. I always did. And sometimes that prompts people to ask why I am the way I am. 

What I do is maybe more akin to an ant tickling the butt of an aphid to get a droplet of glucose. And I feel protective and appreciative of my people. But I'm not one of them, and I don’t talk to them for the same reasons they talk to me.

I feed on them.

And those of my kind who have fewer scruples than I do often get called energy vampires while using a lot of the same techniques.

It's just that I prefer to provoke amusement and camaraderie instead of frustration and irritation.

So, was I bothered by this new modus operandi I was considering?

Kind of.

I was risking my existence, which is something I usually take great pains not to do. And I was participating in the murder of another monster, which I have done before, actually. A lot. But not usually in coordination with anyone else. I’ve just knowingly led a pursuer to their death at the hands of another who wasn't really expecting it, as an act of self defense. And it’s not really something I like doing, actually. But, I do admit, I have a tendency to view teratovores as deserving of an early demise.

It’s hard for me not to think that way, after eons of being their prey. I might be able to converse and negotiate with any of them, and even cut a deal like I was doing with Felicity, but I could never afford to trust them. Not on a personal level, at least.

Mind you, I can see their importance in the balance of everything. I’ve observed ecosystem after ecosystem develop and evolve, from germination to extinction, and apex predators are every bit as important as the tiniest bacteria.

But anyway, the thing I’ve become used to about existence is that it is an exercise in revisiting and reviewing old dilemmas and situations, observing them, re-evaluating them, and acting anew upon them, over and over. That’s all there is, after you’ve outgrown your juvenile years when everything is discovery.

I’d done something kind of like this before, many, many times. Just not amongst humans yet, and not with the complexity of language that living amongst them could afford me. I’d spent the several million years of human evolution coasting on comfortable habits of safety and security, so I could soak up as much culture as possible. And humanity kept bringing me new things to occupy myself with, so I’d had no trouble with boredom. Though, not being a predator myself, I just didn't really experience boredom.

And maybe I thought I was ready for some risk, to apply my new rhetorical tools of thought and examination to see if I could learn something new about the ancient dance of eat and be eaten.

One might look at the length of my existence and my history of sticking to the reliable and stable for extraordinarily long periods of time and question how I could jump right into working with Felicity the very day after she’d presented her proposal. And one would not be out of line to question me about it.

But what one might not know is just how long I’d been preparing for something like this.

After work, I went back to my home to rest in safety for a couple hours and to change into a new disguise. And to make other preparations.

And then I went to the movies.

---

previous

next

[monster-rinds]

Chapter 41: Scraps

In the end, after a lot more talking and some frivolous dismissals from Susan, Ayden and Greg agreed to help Cassy look for Synthia. Maybe they were just humoring her, or they were genuinely trying to help her ease her mind, but they pointed out that they all needed something to do that maybe felt important while also rallying for a job hunt.

They could pretend they were keeping an eye out for help wanted signs while driving around town.

But the very first thing they did, that very afternoon, was do a ride-by of Chord’s ranch. Felicity had known where it was, in order to heed Chord’s beck and call, and it would have been where Synthia had gone, if she was going after Chord. Fate Vine had also known where Chord’s ranch was, and Synthia had absorbed its memories.

Cassy wanted to see if she could at least sense the aftermath of that encounter, or the presence of either Chord or Synthia. And maybe, if Synthia was still scouting the place and poking around for weaknesses, she could warn her away from it.

She reassured the boys that Chord wouldn’t detect her. Synthia had told her that something weird about her emanant physiology made her hard to recognize as what she was even a couple yards away. But if Synthia had been able to detect Fate Vine from several blocks away, then surely she’d be able to see signs of Synthia or Chord from the road.

But it turned out that either she didn’t know what she was looking for, or she hadn’t inherited Felicity’s senses with her memories, or no one was home.

As they rolled down that stretch of road, they couldn’t actually see any of the ranch’s buildings through the trees. The drive was curved in such a way as to obscure the view. And Cassy remembered what Synthia had taught Felicity about the Strands, but couldn’t figure out how to look at them.

She did, however, see several emanants lurking around the perimeter of the property. Mostly small and harmless looking enthalpiphages.

And she agreed with Greg, before he even said anything about it, that rolling up Chord’s drive to get a closer look was not a good idea.

Still, the early defeat crushed her spirits, and as the week progressed she continued to lose hope that she’d find Synthia.

Taking a grand tour of the city, which was no small place, really impressed upon her just how much humanity was clustered around this long stretch highway and MAX line. So many houses and apartment complexes. So, so many parking lots with stores and restaurants scrunched in around them. Way too many cars.

But, she also got to watch as the density of emanants increased by the day, because it took them several days to complete their search.

They would drive around for a few hours every day, meeting at either Cassy’s or Ayden’s house first, and then end at either Work Source or the Library to help each other job hunt and apply for unemployment.

Frankly, Cassy wanted to give up on the employment thing altogether. It didn’t make sense to do so. She still had a body to take care of. But it felt extremely unfair that she could now remember living through vast swaths of human evolution, and could see herself existing through millions more years of it, but, for now, she had to eat food.

It did feel more than a little weird to her that she found herself thinking about that directly, instead of daydreaming about thinking about it.

But whenever that dilemma crossed her mind, she couldn’t figure out if what had happened was that she’d somehow become immortal but with mortal needs, or if she’d suddenly allowed herself to truly experience a taste of mortality.

The more she thought about emanant affairs and what she knew of them, the more she felt like she was Felicity finally free of Chord’s machinations for the first time since she’d ventured near Gresham.

If failing to find Synthia was disheartening, job hunting was utterly demoralizing.

The timing with the economy and the political climate was the absolute worst, especially for Ayden, who was trans and not white. Not that any of them felt they had any promising prospects.

They’d each had the prior experience of taking months to find work before, and it was still just over a week into the work of it this time for them. But by working together, treating it like an old school study group, it was easier to scour the listings and connections they each had. And it soon looked like they each might have to start looking for work out of town. If it could even be found there.

Between the corporate price gouging of groceries, which was blamed on inflation, and the threats of the incoming presidential administration, it seemed like nobody legitimate was legitimately hiring.

Most of the listings they found that any of them were qualified for looked like scams written by Large Language Models (or “AI” as the industry insisted on calling it).

And anything vaguely scrutable had application processes that were onerous at the least, and downright ableist to impossible in most cases.

Of course, when they traded notes they concluded, as per common wisdom, that they had usually gotten jobs in the past by word of mouth. So their work quickly turned to contacting friends and acquaintances to let them know they were looking. But they still had to go through the motions of applying cold to various listings, because they needed to meet the requirements for unemployment benefits.

Worksource offered other activities that counted toward that, though, but they weren’t quite ready to go to classes and shit like that. That felt demeaning and humiliating for some reason.

Also, that first week was called a “waiting week” and didn’t count, except that they still had to go through the hoops of applying. And that was absurd and convoluted. They each had to verify their identities through a two step process involving the postal service that the incoming President had sabotaged during his previous term.

At one point, Greg mumbled something about being fired for trying to start a union, and how that was supposed to be illegal. But Ayden had groaned in response, saying that adding lawyers on top of job hunting was just too much.

And Cassy just couldn’t even bring herself to comment.

They’d been in the middle of Worksource during that conversation, each at a separate computer doing their own searches, wearing face masks to ward off COVID and the flu. And Cassy had been just so tired and bewildered by this mundane human activity that had always agonized her when she’d had to do it.

But then there’d also been a couple of enthalpiphages playing in the network, zipping between the different computers like they were involved in a game of tag. And she was trying to figure out what they were doing, instead of actually searching for work she knew wasn’t there.

The place was also riddled with affectivores, monsters kind of like Synthia, but small and as simple as the enthalpiphages that had her attention. People came here to be frustrated, hopeful, bored, and discouraged, and that drew entities that fed on those emotions.

She did not, however, see any predators about. Or, at least, she didn’t recognize any.

Her sense was that that was fairly normal, actually.

Teratovores would want to let their prey thrive and grow and feel safe in most places, so that they would have plenty of energy when they were finally ambushed. Prowling the smaller feeding grounds like this one was safe for smaller teratovores, because anything too big that came through with any regularity would just scare off the prey. But hunting here too often would have the same effect.

These were Felicity’s memories, of course.

And they were memories in a setting that got her thinking about Chord again.

As she watched the dancing enthalpiphages, she found herself wondering what Chord would have done to them if he’d had the chance to alter them.

Would it have been worth it to him to work on such small and inconspicuous emanants that could so easily be eaten by something larger?

And, if so, would the changes to them have something to do with the game they were playing?

She could maybe find out by eating one of them.

But she wasn’t sure she was ready to do that so frivolously.

She didn’t really feel hungry for feeding that way. It just sometimes felt like a perfectly OK thing to do, despite any other ethical or emotional misgivings she might have. But, she felt like she wanted to save that kind of act for something bigger and something more deserving of annihilation.

Something like Chord, if she could get the jump on him. Or Croc-face.

Sewer Teeth?

Sewer Teeth was what Chord had called it.

Chord.

When she’d first come to – when Felicity had first come to town, Chord had successfully baited and swallowed her in a way that didn’t make any sense for who she remembered herself to be. She could have sworn she hadn’t ever been the kind of emanant that could be swallowed in that way. But there was that memory. And she’d come out the other end of him different.

But different in a way that she couldn’t remember, because her memories of her entire past matched what she was now. More or less. It had taken a while for them to make sense, really. A period of recovery, during which Chord had whispered to her and fed her and talked to her about his plans and needs for her.

These were deeply unpleasant things to think about, but there they were.

“What’s wrong, Cassy?” Ayden asked her.

Greg looked up to see her face and hear her answer.

She frowned and scowled and said, “Mmm. Felicity stuff. Icky flashbacks.” She scrunched up her face as if trying to squeeze the memories of the sensations out of her head. It really just held them firmly in place. Then she looked around, wondering what people would think if they overheard what she wanted to say. She bit her lip. “Stuff I wish I could talk to Synthia about.”

“Ah,” Ayden nodded thoughtfully. Then he gestured at his computer screen and asked, “Is it at least better than this shit?”

“No,” she told him. “I feel violated in a way I can’t really describe.”

“I’m so sorry,” Greg rumbled. “Hey. You guys want to take a break and talk about me for a bit? Like, go somewhere else and, um, help me figure something out?”

Ayden raised an eyebrow, almost smirking, and asked, “Is it that gay shit?”

“Not here,” Greg growled quietly.

“Right. Shit,” Ayden straightened up. “I’m game. How about you, Cassy?”

“Yeah, let’s do that.”

---

Later, in Greg’s dining room, after a somewhat lengthy truck ride while trying to coax Greg to start the conversation, but also reassuring him it was OK to take his time, they sat around his table with coffees in hands and a box of Tagalongs between them.

“I’ve been making noises about this before,” Greg finally said. “You both know what I want to talk about. But, this job hunt thing and everything else that’s going on is making me think I need to do something.”

“I get that,” Ayden nodded. “I’m sure Cassy has had a similar experience, too.”

“I’m not trans,” Cassy said. “Not really, anyway. Just gay. But, uh…” She realized what she’d been about to say about gender and sexuality didn’t feel relevant anymore. Her own past felt alien and insignificant. “Woah.” She put a hand to her head. “Maybe I should just listen. Is that OK?”

Greg creased his brow but nodded and said, “Sure. I mean, I think I’d rather do most of the talking, if I can get myself to come out with it.”

“Mood,” Ayden said.

“Yeah,” Cassy agreed.

“Like, I’m not getting any younger or healthier,” Greg said. “And this country is turning to shit for the kinds of things I want to experience, I’m realizing. You know? And, uh. I feel like I’m saying this all out of order.” Ayden appeared to be about to say something, but Greg held up his hand to stall him. Then he swallowed and took a breath to say, “I don’t know what I’m doing, or exactly what I need to do, but I just know I gotta do it. And, if monsters are a real thing, and you’re really getting to experience what that’s like first hand, Cassy, I just. I’m. I’m not a woman. OK? I’m not trans like that. I know that. But I need something really different. And maybe that’s different hormones, but that’s scary. You know? If they turn out to be right for me, and then they get… they get… taken away?”

Cassy saw that he was definitely shaking now, and his next breath was shuddery. Oh, yeah, she’d felt that. Not about gender, or even about sexual orientation, but about, well, her thing. Her monster thing. Which she’d never been able to really explain to anybody before, no matter how often she’d tried.

Ayden was nodding. And he said, “You’ve obviously been thinking about this a lot and doing your research. So, I’m just going to say a couple of things you need to hear hear, from a friend, Greg.”

“Yeah, go for it,” Greg sighed.

“I see you,” Ayden told him, leaning forward and putting his hand on the table between them. “I hear what you’re saying, and I believe you. You have a human right to be who and what you are, whatever that is, and I will help you fight for it. We both will. You’re important, and we’re family. Got that?”

Greg rubbed a tear from his eye with his thumb and looked down at a cookie that was on the table near his coffee, “Yeah. Thank you.”

“And, you lead us,” Ayden said. “We’ll help you, and be there for you. We’ll answer questions. But don’t let anyone tell you how to do what you need for yourself.” He looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then continued, “Something other trans people told me when I first came out that I think is really important, whether you just change your name or you do more than that, is that you’ve gotta do things at your pace, for yourself, for your survival. And coming out to yourself and people you trust is all about your survival. You’re already doing right by yourself. But there’s no timeline. There’s no right way to do it. You can take all the time you need. But once you know you need something, or are just ready to try it, reach the hell for it. Don’t hesitate, it’s yours to have.”

“Even if they won’t let me have it?” Greg asked, obviously aware and embarrassed about how he sounded like a child asking the question, but pushing it out anyway.

“Yes. Even then,” Ayden replied.

---

previous

next

[monster-rinds]

Chapter 1: Not a woman

I used to be pretty good at pretending to be human.

But my confidence in that skill irreparably crumbled with the wink of a sharply winged eye.

My hand was passing a box of tampons over the laser scanner when it happened. And while it wasn’t just the weird context that did it, that was the situation that sent my mind spiraling through a set of inappropriate responses. Why wink right then?

I was also enduring Christmas music half a month past Halloween, and had memories of two of my coworkers talking during our last break about how nobody really knows how to recognize flirting. The conversation had coursed through a pop psychology evaluation of different neurotypes, including ASD, ADHD, BPD, C-PTSD, ASPD, and a few others, very briefly, with one of my coworkers saying that since they were autistic they had always felt alien amongst other humans and that for them it was worse. Except, according to the other coworker, studies had shown that it didn’t matter your neurotype. Everyone was equally bad at it.

The coincidence of having Cassy and Ayden’s words bouncing around in my head, competing with “Santa Tell Me” by Ariana Grande, while holding a box of tampons and receiving a wink from a customer I had never met before, kind of twisted my sense of self a hundred and thirty-seven degrees off from the axis of my place in the world.

I felt my face flash the sort of rictus grin I’ve seen on Cassy’s face fairly regularly.

And the customer stuck their tongue out at me, pushed up against the white of their teeth, nose wrinkled.

And then.

And then, to my utter horror, I held up the box of tampons before putting them in the bag, and asked, “Got any special plans for these tonight?”

This was back during the time I took a job at Hayward Groceries, in Gresham, Oregon. 

This was probably one of the more laid back types of retail jobs you could have at the time. If grocery is considered retail. Selling food and household items to people tends to be easier than electronics or cars or music or whatever. You just check out their items, bag them, take their money, and chat a little bit. Giving them their receipt puts a nice cap on the interaction, and then you move on to the next one.

And when I say that I took the job, I mean I walked into the business one day, logged into one of the registers, and started working the till. 

How I did this doesn’t need to be known. I might need to do it again someday.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, and the way that I did it meant that I wouldn’t have to worry about any sort of paperwork or taxes. Of course, I didn’t get paid, but that didn’t matter to me. I was there to help and talk to people, and the job gave me the opportunity to do that.

And as my eyebrows raised themselves in question, my left hand hovering the box of tampons over the pride-striped reusable grocery bag, my right hand reached for the next item to ring up. A bottle of red wine.

“Oh, you know,” the customer began to say, “I’m thinking of a nice marinade overnight.”

“Ew!” blurted the customer in line behind them.

And while this was funny, and not unusual for working a counter, and we all laughed at it, all I could think was that no one had ever winked at me before.

If you take a tired clerk and put them into an unusual social exchange, something slightly off script, their reactions are likely to be even further off, as were mine. And that is one of the genuine joys of working with the public in a relatively quick paced environment.

And nobody noticed that I wasn’t an actual employee. Everyone else got paid the same as before. The workload was shared by one more cashier. The business was able to handle more customers without having to pay for the extra work. And there weren’t any complaints.

It was a minor deception, really. And one that was accepted by everyone.

And so, during this era of my life, I was having a pretty good time, and I really enjoyed getting to know my coworkers and some of the regulars.

And the events of this exchange, beyond the wink, weren’t really bothering me.

Had no one, in my entire existence, really ever winked at me before?

A wink was a conspiratorial gesture, as I understood it. It could have been flirting, but it could also have been something else.

It’s pretty intimate. It implies there’s some sort of shared knowledge. Or so I’m told. I’ve seen it occur in movies as a gag, a lot, where the communication breaks down completely and the person being winked at really doesn’t notice or doesn’t know what it’s about. It’s pretty clear that it’s understood that for a wink to be meaningful, both parties have to be expecting it.

And I hadn’t been expecting it. Why should I? I’d never been winked at before.

Which is kind of bizarre in and of itself, but I figured there was a reason for that. I didn’t really know anybody. Or nobody knew me. Nobody ever really could.

And then I’d made that rictus grin before I could take control of my face. Like Steve Martin cringing at his character’s own foolishness while facing the camera that caught his antics on film.

And I’d gotten a silly conspiratorial smirk in response? From this person I didn’t know?

I couldn’t see anything about us that we had in common, except maybe our sense of fashion and general gender expressions. And for me, those things are very superficial.

Had they seen past my guise somehow? Did we have something deeper in common?

I didn’t sense anything. Not that I’m particularly good at that.

While everyone was giggling over the disgusting little conversation about tampons, I finished ringing them up and bagging their groceries, putting the wine in its own paper sack before slipping it into the bag. Then, as I handed them their receipt, I leaned forward, brow furrowed, and asked a question quietly.

“What was the wink for?” came out of my mouth in a near whisper.

Taking the receipt and hefting their bag from in front of me, they shrugged and tilted their head to the side and said, easily, “Your reaction. I just wanted to see if a hunch was right, and it totally was. Have a great evening, Synthia!”

I have a name tag. It says “Synthia, she/her” on it. So it was pretty reasonable to assume that's my name.

Once, one of my coworkers asked me about the spelling and I told him, “My dad wanted to name me Moog, but my mom objected.” Everyone had laughed.

I don’t have a dad. Never did.

Without learning their name, I waved at the customer and said, “Oh, goodie! You, too!” And then turned to the next one.

And most of the rest of my shift went just fine. Externally. But internally, I was a wreck.

What had been that person’s hunch?

Was I making more of it than I should because the wink had been so new to me?

Or was I actually in danger of being discovered and outed?

If you’ve ever had to hide something big about yourself for a long time, you can probably understand my concern. Small things seem bigger than they are, especially when they happen for the first time. And there is a lot at stake, after all.

I’d been discovered and outed before, but not with a wink and a smile.

And now I was reviewing my own reactions and my tenacity to ask directly about the wink, and I was feeling like I’d given a lot away. It felt like my facade had slipped, and I’d reacted more according to my nature than to my wisdom and experience.

I didn’t think I’d behaved particularly inhuman. But I hadn’t matched the behavior of my recent past very well.

I’d been doing so well, too.

This worry irked me so much that when I was hanging up my apron and name tag in the back with Cassy, after work, I asked her, “How often have other women winked at you?”

I decided, for the purposes of this question, that assuming the flirty customer had been a woman was the shortest method of filtering potential answers to something useful to me. They certainly had not appeared to be a cisgender man.

Cassy frowned, and replied, “My friends and I do it a lot? But strangers? I don’t know. Sometimes? Why?”

“It has happened to me only once. Today,” I told her. “During checkout.”

“Did you get her number?”

“No?”

“OK, but she knows where you work. So there’s still a chance of a second date,” she said.

“Second…?” I started to ask.

“I’m joking. But she might have been a lesbian!” Cassy explained. “Tell me more. How did you react? Did you wink back?”

“I grimaced, like this,” I demonstrated.

“Oh, yeah, OK. I get it,” she replied. “How’d she respond?”

“By sticking her tongue out against her upper teeth and wrinkling her nose in this way that is usually cute,” and I demonstrated that.

“That is phenomenally cute on you, Synthia,” Cassy snickered. “Has anyone told you you’re really good at imitating other people?”

“But you didn’t see her do it,” I pointed out.

She shook her head, “I don’t need to. You’ve got my grimace down perfect, and I’ve seen you imitate Ayden when you don’t realize you’re doing it. You’re a natural!”

“Ah.”

“Seriously, Synthia, you’re a riot when you relax,” Cassy said. “At least, you are from my autistic perspective. Tell you what, I bet she just clocked you as on the spectrum.”

“Weird,” I said. “I did ask her why she winked.”

“Well? What’d she say?”

“That I confirmed a hunch she had by my reaction,” I replied.

“Well, then, that’s definitely it,” Cassy said.

“Autistic women wink at each other?” I asked, genuinely incredulous. The behavior didn’t match the stereotypes I’d heard about.

“Oh, of course. Especially if we’re lesbians!” Cassy dismissed my question with a wave. “Sometimes we don’t know when it’s not appropriate to wink. Come on, you should know this.”

I bit my lip and made an “mmm” noise.

She looked at me out of the side of her eye and admonished me, “Sweetie. Darling. Synthia. OK, we’re not all the same, but you can’t tell me you’re not autistic. I mean, there’s a reason we’re friends.”

“Maybe I am,” I suggested. I’m not. I wouldn’t mind if I were, but I’m not. I can’t be measured meaningfully in that way. But I could see the role I was playing in this conversation and I let it happen.

“Oh, OK,” she said, nodding and pushing her hand toward me. “I’ll eat my apron if you’re not. But that doesn’t matter. You’re autistic enough, and she probably thought you were. Especially if you flashed her my grimace.”

That did make me feel a bit better. A plausibly deniable reason for the exchange. So, I said, “OK. Thank you.” But, to get a bit more out of her, I added, “I don’t feel autistic, though. How would I know?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s a whole bunch of things, big and small. Watching so many people able to do things you can’t do, but not knowing why. Being able to do things that nobody else can, and not feeling like you’re even human because of it. That sort of thing.”

“And that grimace makes me look not human like you?” I asked, knowing full well what autism was and that my feigned concern was meaningless. Cassy was definitely human. I just wanted a little more conversation. Though, I really was also worrying away at my sense of self and whether my facade was still good.

Cassy laughed. “You’re fine. It was harmless. And, hey, maybe you’ll see her again and make faces at each other some more,” she said, walking toward the door. “It’ll make the day go faster!”

“Yes,” I agreed.

Cassy turned to me and squinted, “Synthia. Wanna go to Shady’s with me and Ayden? It’s dark and quiet and they’ve got great drinks.”

“I really need to eat dinner,” I told her. “Sorry.”

“Well, they have food,” she replied.

“I can’t eat their food,” I explained. Well, I could, but it wouldn’t suffice for me as a meal. But I would never tell anyone that.

“Of course! Come after you eat?”

“Maybe…”

“Well, OK. See you there if you come. We’d love it if you joined us some time,” she said carefully.

“Thank you,” I said.

And then I walked home.

Cassy’s explanation really did make me feel better about the whole day, but now I couldn’t get another thing out of my head.

Even while I had been talking to Cassy, I had felt off. And watching myself respond to her I could see myself saying and doing things I wouldn’t have done before. Or, not doing things I would have done before. It had been as if I’d already accepted her model that I was autistic, even before she’d suggested it, and had subconsciously followed a script based on my preconceptions of what that meant. Or my observations of autistic characters on T.V.

I’d had a flat affect and said things in a matter of fact fashion instead of my usual quippy repartee. Which is fine, as far as humans behave. There are plenty of humans who do that. Just not me, usually.

Something was off about me. And even if it wasn’t enough to be strange or alarming to anyone I knew or met, it was enough to make me wonder what was going on. Normally, I have a lot more control than that.

And there was still the slight chance that the customer had not clocked me as autistic or queer or anything normal like that.

I found myself staring at the sidewalk as I proceeded to my wooded lot between Elliot and Linden streets. Much less aware of my surroundings than I usually pushed myself to be, I actually almost walked through a couple of red lights. And this startled me.

Both times, I did look around up and down both sets of streets and up at the sky, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything else.

And then I kept going.

And by the time I got home, to my wooded lot, which I don’t know if it’s legally owned by anybody in particular, I was looking at the sidewalk again, deep in thought. Thinking the same thing I had been thinking when I’d left Hayward Grocery.

And I just habitually turned toward my woods, and then I looked up and turned, and did my usual thing of letting my gaze follow the path of a car as it drove by. To let me scan my surroundings without looking too obvious about it. Though I'm sure I failed this time.

And there, standing on the sidewalk before me, where my eyes landed after following the car, arms at their sides, pride-striped grocery bag in hand, head cocked slightly to the side, was the customer. Grinning.

---

next

[fenmere]

For the first time in our life, we've had to vote "I want them to kill and eat each other (literal)" because we're writing a book called TERATOVORE where that happens in Chapter 15. But, the thing is, this event doesn't make them worse? We don't think it makes them worse.

It's just what they need to do in order to actually find love.

Seeing "toxic yuri fan" in their blog header and skimming their last few dozen posts to see whether that's toxic yuri as in "I have ambivalent feelings about the central relationship in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, a PG-rated cartoon for children" or toxic yuri as in "I want them to kill and eat each other".

[monster-rinds]

Chapter 25: Not a good time

It wasn’t that she had a death wish of any sort, she told herself. It wasn’t like her life had been so hard that she still struggled with suicidal ideation. She was pretty stable on that count these days.

And it wasn’t that Gresham was particularly more safe to walk alone in than any place else, either. Let alone a place where one would deliberately go searching for a monster’s lair.

But she did regularly go for walks on her own, during the daylight. Even into parks and trails, without even a dog. And a lot of local women did that. More than most other women admitted. And she was used to it. Nothing had happened to her, nor anyone she knew. Not while going for a walk.

Yes, there were news reports and internet chain letter stories about women assaulted by strange men while walking to the grocery store. All over. But violent crime had actually been going down country wide, and locally, for decades. And there had always been women walking alone, as they should be able to, unmolested.

It was a matter of statistical likelihood as much as any safety protocols, whatever they were. Just like driving in a car without a wreck was. Like Synthia had pointed out.

Though, of course, with the incoming Presidential administration, it might actually start becoming dangerous. But Cassy refused to give into that particular fear mongering, even though it was relentless.

Normally, she didn’t even think about it.

The only reason she was thinking about it now was because she was, actually, searching for a monster’s lair. So there was a certain amount of self justification she had to go through to get there. And along the way, it dredged up the usual societal bullshit that kept women afraid and complacent and, well, restricted.

No, actually, telling herself she didn’t have a death wish was all about seeking out a monster. Obviously.

Why the fuck would she be doing that, upon being presented with intensely convincing proof that monsters, or spirits, or emanants, or whatever they were, were real? Why?

Because Synthia was her friend. And her friend was experiencing something weird, and had now disappeared, and that was deeply worrying.

And because she needed more proof too, actually. A video of Synthia doing something strange and impossible could easily be faked. She needed something more. Something that no one could deny.

And because…

Well…

Whenever she thought about any of this, she got feelings. Sensations in her heart and gut, and head, that drove her. Warm, energetic, fizzy, swirly feelings.

She wasn’t entirely sure what to make of those feelings, honestly. But they were mostly the same feelings she got those rare times she’d met someone new who she’d really clicked with. Someone who invariably turned out to also be autistic, and who ended up being a best friend. Like the feelings she got that first year she met Synthia.

It had been like she’d met Synthia all over again, and they were still clicking, or clicking even better, despite how short and scary it was. How little actual interaction they’d had in that time didn’t seem to factor into her feelings.

She needed more.

Or a resolution of some sort.

And with Synthia suddenly going quiet for two weeks, and the rest of her life in upheaval, she found herself now right in front of Synthia’s lot.

Looking at the narrow, winding little trail, somehow nearly overgrown even in Winter, beckoning her with her own yearning, Cassy realized she was feeling acutely and intensely lonely.

It felt like she could smell the whole world where she was standing. Which, of course, was a very silly thing to think, because she couldn’t smell the ocean from here, among other things. She didn’t even know what a desert smelled like. But it still gave her that impression. Where she stood was on the brink of a green space, and when she faced it she could smell the rotting duff, the ferns and nettles, and the bark of the trees. But she could also still smell the concrete beneath her feet, and the fumes of exhaust and rubber from cars, a hint of tobacco from a cigarette but at her feet, discarded gum, the marks of civilization. She associated bird shit with the city, but that’s only because pave surfaces collected it so well.

The noon January sun of Oregon cast stark shadows from the leaves of the foliage, the ground cover, and illuminated the lot through the bare branches of the deciduous trees that were there. But the bushes and brambles between the trees were tall and thick enough that she couldn’t see terribly far into the lot. A tall evergreen here and there shaded the deeper realms of the space, too.

She could see how a cottage could be hidden in a clearing deep in there, maybe. But Synthia had said the cottage had been a construct she’d removed somehow. Like an illusion, or fairy glamor.

What would she do if she did find Synthia in there? What would that be like?

Would Synthia appear as she always did, wearing some combination of the eight or so articles of clothing she seemed to own? Her dirty blonde hair pulled back in that perpetually messy bun? A purse that had a phone in it?

Did she need any of those things when she was home?

Or was Synthia just a homeless person who’d been fired for losing her PO box or something like that? And maybe all the weird stuff she’d said and that Cassy had witnessed, had touched with her own fingers, had been a shared delusion.

It felt like hints of madness, or childhood fantasy, to step onto that cruddy little path in hopes of finding out.

But she desperately needed some fantasy, for magic to be real, for some kind of proof that the mundane world of bills and workplace politics was the actual illusion, and maybe that the reality she’d made friends with a being that could remember when lichen had evolved meant something. 

So she did it.

Her jeans and Uggs protected her legs and feet from the nettles and brambles that encroached on the unkempt path. And she covered her hands with the sleeves of her puffy coat to push aside the higher branches and tendrils of bushes and vines. And she told herself that if she found a homeless encampment, she’d just back out respectfully. It shouldn’t be much of a problem.

But there was no tent.

No clearing, no natural little alcove between trees, clear of brambles, no branch in the path.

Not even a piece of discarded underwear.

The path kept going deeper, and she would have spent her time thinking about how much trouble she always had with making friends, or even knowing when someone was a friend, if she wasn’t preoccupied with the growing suspicion that Synthia had lied.

She was pretty sure that on the other side of these woods was a secluded neighborhood of old houses. Unless it was a magical trail that would draw her deeper and deeper into an eldritch fairy land of myth and collective consciousness, like in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. Which, of course, wasn’t what was happening. That sort of thing was as real as telekinesis.

But Cassy kept a tiny kernel of hope that that was exactly what was happening.

Right up until the path went around its last curve, and the ramshackle cul-de-sac of old stick-built houses she truly expected to be there became visible.

Her heart sank, and she felt a weird relief surrounding a pit of disappointment in her gut.

And she turned back.

---

The one thing I couldn’t teach Felicity was how to change what she ate. Which was OK, because our goal was to change how she ate, so she didn’t need to either jump through another monster’s eyes or sneak up on them in the monster realm. She needed a new way to absorb another emanant, so that she could ambush Croc-face and get that missing piece of herself back.

So we’d worked on that and came up with something.

Without a corporeal body besides a given human host, it was impossible for her to injure, let alone consume, another monster’s emanation.

But what we discovered was that she could learn to manifest her own mouth in my emanation, attached to a gullet that could sap and metabolize the energies of another monster.

It was disconcerting to me, and startling when she first did it. To look down and see a toothy orifice with a barbed tendril in it open of its own accord from my middle, I perceived it as a part of myself that I couldn’t control. But there she was, and she could do her thing.

This was the last of our adaptations that we thought we needed to move forward. And we’d achieved them all within a matter of days, rather than years or centuries like I was used to.

It turned out that becoming aware of how we both inhabited the Strands was the key.

It’s hard to articulate how or why that was the case, but seeing myself in full helped me to understand myself more completely, and to see new ways that I could apply the principles of shapeshifting.

That done, I put myself together and stepped out of my domain, and walked out into the world to stand on the sidewalk of my street.

It was just past noon of some Winter day, and there were cars. I had myself wearing a wool peacoat over a thin gray hoodie, with pink earmuffs and gloves to match my purse. My sneakers were their usual pink as well. I had pants of some sort I didn’t really care about.

And I took a moment to look at the Strands again, now that I was outside of my domain. I wanted to see if my perspective of them had changed, and to discern whether or not the masses of the material world related to them at all in any way.

I’m familiar with quantum and cosmological theories. I know that some mathematicians and physicists have determined that it’s highly likely the universe has more than just the four dimensions of x, y, z, and time. That the other dimensions are maybe bundled up in the knot of a quark, or something smaller, or behind the equation of the universe itself. There’s a certain point where even scientists have a hard time describing these things that they can work out with numbers.

Some people think that what we perceive as three dimensional space is just a holographic projection from a two dimensional brane, the true surface of the universe.

All of these theories really closely resemble what I perceive of the three realms of my own existence: the monster realm, the Strands, and physical reality. Or whatever I call them on any given day.

And the Strands, to me, really do appear to be some kind of representation of those excess dimensions that make reality work right on paper. Or cosmic string. Or something. Sort of.

But I have absolutely no idea if they’re the same thing, or something else entirely that humanity has yet to be able to imagine or detect.

The only way I could learn more was through my own experimentation.

And I was about to continue watching the Strands as I made my physical manifestation take a walk around the city, to see if I could find the other local Supraliminal emanants that were supposedly here.

I was about to take a step to the right when I heard the rustling of leaves and a voice behind me.

“Oh!” exclaimed Cassy.

The Strands had moved ever so subtly as she’d approached to within a couple yards of me.

I didn’t know what that meant.

---

A person who looked remarkably like Synthia, with Synthia’s coat and purse, stood on the sidewalk where she’d started. As if this person had just left the same path that Cassy had been exploring.

Cassy blurted out an overly clichéd, “Oh!” And then felt self conscious for doing so.

But Synthia turned around to see her and smiled.

“Cassy!” Synthia greeted her. “How are you?”

“Oh, I, uh,” Cassy stammered, and then remembered that this was Synthia and she could just dive right into the details. Synthia actually wanted to know. “It’s been bad. Weird. Lonely. Hayward split us up. We’re all working different shifts and sleeping at different times, and it’s harder to meet and talk. But we’re moving forward with the union thing already. Still, you haven’t been around, and it’s really not the same. I think I hate my housemates.”

“Yeah,” her friend acknowledged. “I’ve been working on stuff. Improving myself and trying to help Felicity.” She furrowed her brow and looked around a little bit, appearing to consider what she was saying. Then she brightened up and gestured up the street, Eastward. “I was about to go for a walk to do some experimenting! Want to go with me? We could catch each other up. I can tell you what I’m doing. Do you have the time?”

“Yeah, um,” Cassy second guessed herself for a moment, a tiny voice in her head trying to say something about stranger danger, but seeing Synthia again was such a relief. Something was real here. Her friend might be talking a little bit like the strange being she claimed to be, but she looked real enough. The sun illuminated her hair, earmuffs, and coat, casting the shadows of tree branches across her chest and face, just like it should. And she was offering to let Cassy into her world, whatever it was. “Sure!”

As they took their first few steps up the street, Synthia looked over at her.

“Were you trying to find my clearing?” Synthia asked.

---

previous

next

[monster-rinds]

Chapter 6: Not the world’s greatest gangster movie

As I crouched and leapt away from the violence, several people outside the restroom screamed as if they were being killed, too. Not just fear, terror, and surprise, but indignant rage.

My ability to sense the emotions I was feeding on made it more acute to me. They felt like echoes of the goth’s death cry.

Frenzy.

I was surrounded and in the middle of it, with nowhere to go or hide.

In the restroom, I had the most space between me and anybody else. But I couldn't see what was happening in that stall of death and feeding. And noises kept coming from it. Something was struggling with the seat of the toilet as it messily swallowed its meal.

And when it was done, it could burst out and come for me. It clearly didn't care about being obvious.

That made me want to run for the exit, and I was definitely putting space between myself and that stall.

I turned to look at the entrance of the restroom to consider diving into the crowd outside, where the frenzy was, but a man (I presumed) in school janitor coveralls and a navy blue trucker cap sauntered in blocking my path.

Everything was off about him, but not in a way that could be enumerated. The two key giveaways were that he wasn't trying to look like he belonged, not even by demeanor, and when he locked eyes with me he grinned with shark teeth.

Ah.

I had a brief thought that Felicity had set me up, but I didn't have time to think about it.

Now I felt like my only escape was straight up through the roof somehow. And I was definitely being charged with enough energy to make that effort possible.

It still wouldn't be easy.

Transformations for me aren't instant. I have to exert skill and determination to make them happen. It doesn't hurt, but each body part changed requires attention. And I started with my legs, to give myself more power to dodge my assailant.

Two steps back toward the accessible stall drew him further into the restroom.

He walked crouched over, arms out to each side like he was trying to corral a chicken. I was his chicken. And he clacked his teeth in anticipation.

Whatever had eaten the goth finished up its meal and crawled off the toilet with a series of slaps and thumps on the floor.

I jumped and Sharky started, both of us glancing at the still closed stall door.

We both watched as two clawed flippers the color of algae infused clay slapped down on the floor below the stall door, and the chin of a heavily toothed jaw made itself briefly visible. And there was a snort.

I leapt before I was ready.

As I rose up in the air, I forced my fingers to catch up to my now quite bulbous and shoeless toes, deepening my fingerprints dramatically and altering their molecular structure. I barely managed to do this fast enough.

Sharky saw me crouch briefly and made his lunge just as I left the floor. But he missed.

And I was well above his head bringing my hands and feet up to the vaulted ceiling of the restroom when the door of the accessible stall broke and slammed outward with the force of the people eater’s weight behind it.

I don’t use a fancy word for that kind of monster. It’s a people eater. It eats people. And probably also monsters.

I was so glad that the theater had taken out the false plaster ceilings in the bathrooms for better viral control, thanks to covid 19. It gave me more room. But without looking up, I slammed into the exposed ventilation duct, my feet and hands going further back than expected to clang into the sides of it, to cling there like a gecko. The noise was startling and distracting, and my posture was awkward and weak.

But the crashing noise of Sharky being pushed into the line of sinks by a broken stall door, driven by what looked like a long limbed hairless walrus with the face of an eyeless sarcosuchus, was louder.

There was a deep fluttering noise that made my whole physical emanation feel like it was gently imploding, and then Sharky shouted like an enraged sportsfan. And the door and people eater began to rise up in the air as Sharky exerted his inhuman strength to get them off of him.

Everything about this was alarming and untenable.

And the duct I was clinging to started to buckle.

---

Felicity was stretched thin and hurting badly.

Part of her had been riding the young woman in the accessibility stall of the restroom when she’d been attacked and eaten by the sewer beast. The horror and pain of that, experiencing it as if she’d been the one consumed, had gripped her entire being and wrenched shrieks of terror from all of her hosts simultaneously.

Later, they’d all have flashbacks they wouldn’t be able to explain.

To say that she herself was shocked would have been a dangerous understatement. To say that she was in shock would have been closer.

Part of her was missing, amputated with the death of one of her hosts. And she felt that loss acutely in a way that was fundamental to her very being. Like how a vertebrate might feel right after a traumatic brain injury.

Almost immediately, she recoiled and recalled herself to her primary host’s psyche and curled up deep in her subconscious. Not even thinking, she wrapped herself in darkness and quaked, giving her host the shivers.

Later, as she regained consciousness, she would remember with a start that she’d made a new friend and left her to die at the teeth of two other emanants. But it would take her a while to remember her friend’s name or the details of the agreement they had made.

Some memories she’d have to reconstruct from second hand accounts.

---

And my section of the duct collapsed, hinging on the end closest to the door. The screws and fasteners nearest to my feet gave way, and as that end swang down it collided with the head of the upward moving people eater as it was being shoved by Sharky.

And I let go and let my momentum carry me forward toward the door, windmilling my arms and working my feet to stay upright. But once I gained my balance, I ran.

I did not even bother to look back.

The panicking people in the hallway of the theater, what few were left there by the time I stumbled into view, might have seen me as half wearing a costume of some sort. Boots, leggings and gloves of some sort of alien or horror movie monster. And if that startled them further and caused them to pick up their pace, so much the better.

There was a people eater in the city. In public. Careless of the teratovore attention its antics might cause.

Their survival depended on their fear and panic.

As did mine.

And as I ran through the building after the people retreating before me, I continued to alter my anatomy for speed.

By the time I reached the front door I was leaping in a long gallop on all fours.

I got lucky.

Nothing was chasing me when I zigged and zagged and glanced back. But I also didn’t slow down. Speed and darkness shrouded my bizarre appearance, and my body language adapted to resemble that of a fearful deer more and more closely.

And by the time I reached my wooded lot, I no longer resembled a b-movie frog woman but had fully adopted the appearance of a doe.

Before entering to reach my clearing, I came to a stop on the sidewalk and glanced around to be sure I was safe and away from any predators.

And then I turned and tentatively strutted into my home.

And there, I curled up and rested as a deer, to regain my composure and consider what had just happened, before returning to my disguise as Synthia.

I found myself worried about Felicity. She’d clearly been hurt, if not killed, by the people eater’s attack. And though my life could very easily continue as before without her, I guess I’d developed the habit of caring about the people I knew, even if briefly, whether human or monster, apparently.

But the implications of the people eater’s hubris worried me.

People eaters, by their nature, are the most corporeal of monsters. Even if they can do some wild things like squeeze a pinaped’s worth of bulk through the pipe of a toilet, and reconstitute boney jaws strong enough to crush a goth, the fact that they can eat a living being and draw sustenance from that biological matter means that they are more strongly rooted in physical reality. And therefore they are more vulnerable to the defenses that living beings can bring to bear, like guns, knives, fire, and the like.

People eaters rarely, if ever, come into a city. And if they do, they typically lurk in the shadowier, more secluded places, and hunt when their prey is alone. Not only do they want to avoid the attention of other monsters, but of the humans they feed on as well.

People eaters are the first to die in a monster hunt.

Think about how rare the monsters of urban legend are. That will give you an idea of how careful people eaters tend to be.

It had been so long since I’d been around the antics of a careless people eater that I was looking forward to the human gossip of the next few days. The headlines and what people might say during checkout would inform me a great deal about how modern humanity deals with such things.

It would be a lesson I could use to further my own chances for survival.

But also, I wanted to know more about the goth who’d died right behind me. I doubted that their identity would be known right away, or even revealed, unless someone reported them missing. The people eater had likely left no identifiable remains. But as I cared for Felicity, I found myself caring about them as well, and simply hoped that something regarding their life would be shared.

And with that second stray thought about Felicity, I felt the urge to talk to her. I wanted someone I could trade notes with, and she’d been there.

Focusing on my fake human life had immersed me in a world of discourse, and I’d gotten used to it. Whenever something in the human world vexed me, I could always look forward to talking to Cassy, Ayden, and sometimes even Greg, about it. We could ask each other questions, share our experiences, and try out ideas together.

I know that there are groups of monsters, or emanants, who get to do this same thing with each other. Epialivores, with their tendency to collect in numbers within a single psyche, tend to be social like that. Other affectivores congregate or move in herds for safety, and I’ve done that a few times myself. But I wasn’t currently among any of those groups. It had been a long, long time since I’d had a monster friend I could confide in.

I wasn’t sure exactly why I had become solitary, but looking back I could see that I’d started to drift away as I’d become more and more interested in humanity.

Humans were a great novelty, and always full of new insights and perspectives. A great source of discourse!

But if you’re an emanant, you can’t really talk to humanity about emanant matters.

It eventually draws attention.

So, now I had two reasons to find Felicity.

I felt at least a little bit of responsibility for her well being, even if she’d been the one to lead us into that situation. And I felt like I needed her as more of a friend.

Someone I could talk to.

But I couldn’t figure out right away how to go looking for her. Not safely, at least.

So I let myself rest.

I don’t sleep. Not in the same way that most lifeforms sleep. But I do relax completely and revert to my base state for a few hours at a time, because I’ve learned that that’s beneficial to me.

I let my physical projection dissipate, let go of my thoughts, and dropped into the ambient probabilities of my clearing, to wait until morning.

---

previous

next

[monster-rinds]

Chapter 3: Not a trick

What we eat is not all that we are.

It shapes us, and sometimes defines just who can be our friends, but as the universe is diverse so are our lives. All of us.

If you can read this, you are no different.

Light from a floor lamp that was currently plugged into a tree glinted in the rims and feet of a pair of wine glasses that were sitting on the polished cedar table. An opened white plastic package of saltines sat next to them, with pre-cut slices of cheddar piled up nearby. And I paused before pouring the wine.

“Does your vessel get drunk when you’re fronting?” I asked.

“Maybe, but I don’t notice it,” Felicity said.

“Interesting,” I poured the wine.

She shrugged, “Different metabolisms, I think.”

“I’m not sure I’d call what I have a metabolism,” I said, and then poured wine into my glass, too.

“Fair.”

Putting the bottle back down, I looked at her and asked, “So, you consume epialivores?”

Felicity coughed a startled laugh and said, hand to her chest, “Oh, dear no. All five of my hosts are safe and sound in here. We’re kind of a family now. No, that would be counterproductive from my point of view.”

“Oh?”

“They’re my bait,” she said, picking up her wine. “And I proudly protect them. It’s a tidy agreement. Kind of like the tarantula and the tiny frog.”

I leaned back and studied her.

She’d told me to use “she/her” for her pronouns, to practice for the public. Which made sense. I was pretty sure she didn’t give any more of a shit than I did, except for the purposes of hiding. But since getting to know Cassy and Ayden, I’ve started to be thoughtful about these things.

She and her host seemed to express themselves a bit more femme than I did. I didn’t really think of my disguise as falling anywhere on that spectrum, actually. I just didn’t wear any makeup. I had sort of a young mom look. Too tired to care, but too in the routine of skin care and brushing my hair to completely stop grooming. And Hayward’s was the kind of a workplace where that was fine.

I did “dress up” for Halloween, because that was fun. I had presented myself as wearing a replica costume from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. I’ll let you guess which one. A single customer had recognized it.

I didn’t actually own any clothes or anything at all. Everything about me was a projection, a fabrication of photons and magnetic fields or something like that. Real enough for physical contact, but all a part of me like a voice is a part of a human. Whereas Felicity’s host probably had a closet full of clothes and was actually really damn good at applying eyeliner.

“I’ve never really explored your side of things,” I told her. “I can’t really imagine what you’d eat, or how they might prey on epialivores.” I sipped my wine. It didn’t mean anything to me, but it’s good to practice appearances. “What’s your interest in me?”

“Oh, Synthia,” Felicity said. “You’re cute.”

“In all the time that that word has existed, I’ve never figured out exactly what it means,” I said, reaching for some cheese.

“Well, OK,” she replied. “I have a proposition for you. I’m finding that I need to branch out. Word has gotten around that this vessel is bad news, and nobody comes around anymore. Which is great for my little family. But, that leaves me starving, and I don’t want to change my diet so much that I eat my friends, you know?”

“I suppose that makes some kind of sense,” I commented, chewing on my cheese and then washing it away with some wine. “But I’m feeling really uneasy about having your attention. And even more so at the sound of the word ‘proposition’. All of my experience tells me to get as far away from you as possible.”

“Yeah,” she said, swirling the wine in her glass. “You can probably guess that what I’m going to ask you is to be bait for my new targets.”

I sighed. Yes. Exactly. I had seen that coming since just before pouring her wine. It had been my own kind of hunch, slowly confirmed with every word. Her explanation had been entirely predictable.

“You’re very good at hiding,” she said. “And you smell ancient. So, I imagine you’re very good at running, too. Both are traits that would be very good for this arrangement. And, if you always ran toward me, I could make sure you were very safe. And, of course, we’d only do this when you were off the clock. No need to jeopardize your family and livestock.”

“They’re not livestock,” I protested.

“Sure.��

“Felicity,” I said, putting my wine glass back on the table. “That word alone makes me want to say, ‘no’. If you can’t see people as people and a symbiotic relationship with them as mutually beneficial, I can’t bring myself to trust that you’ll see me as priceless as I see myself, regardless of how benevolent you are to your host and her epialivores.”

“You really like those terms, don’t you?”

“Do you want me to work with you or not?” I asked.

“So, you’re actually considering it?” she asked back.

“Really, I’m not. But I’m giving you a chance,” I responded. “If we are going to work together for any length of time, we really need to have a better rapport than this. For something this deadly, we have to get along so well that there’s no room for misunderstandings. Ever. And I trust myself to be able to adapt to anyone. It’s what I do. But I find myself really curious about you. More so with every word.”

“What do you mean?”

“Can you adapt to me, Felicity?”

“I… think so?”

“Not remotely good enough,” I concluded, plapping my hand down on the table.

“Well, shit, I guess,” she said, reaching for the crackers.

“Keep trying,” I prodded her. “I want to see if a teratovore can adapt to me well enough that I can fool myself into trusting her. Can you see me as not just your equal, or your benefactor or ward, or however you think of your companions in that crowded little psyche, but as a person?”

She popped a cracker without cheese into her mouth and chewed on it for a while, studying me with eyes that sparkled in the lamp light.

If she tried to lunge across the table just then, I could have stretched and extended the table forcefully into her vessel’s gut, pushing her away from me. If she leapt out of that mind to sink deep into mine, to eat me from within, which I suspected was more her style, I could turn my domain into a nightmare specifically for her before she made the distance, trapping her in a loop of metaphor. Because this was my place. She’d have to fight my home and destroy it before she could get to me.

Of course, she could also just go outside and then wait for me to leave. Which I’d have to do in order to feed.

But, at the moment, I didn’t really feel threatened by her gaze, and I couldn’t quite tell if that was because she wasn’t being threatening or if I was just that confident.

Which bugged me.

But I let her take her time with that.

After swallowing that dry cracker without even a sip of wine, she clasped her fingers and placed both hands on the table in front of her, and looked down at them, to say, “I’ve probably bitten off more than I can chew here. I’m fairly sure of that. I’m sorry. Now that I’m talking to you, I’m realizing I have no idea how to build trust with someone who I don’t have cornered. Not with words alone, at least.” She sighed, “Especially after screwing up a couple of times, using a different language than you.”

“Hm,” I said.

“The truth is, neither you nor I are people. Not by human standards, anyway,” she said. “And I don’t see myself changing my view on that. But the ideal of being a person, a being that’s worthy of ‘human rights���, as humanity has framed it, is something that humans do a pretty damn bad job of affording themselves, or each other. And you have to know that. It’s an illusion that they sell themselves, while they injure, traumatize, and kill each other for lesser reasons than nourishment. At least we emanants are honest with each other about what we do, and why we do it.”

“Sure.”

“I think it’s funny that you call us monsters, honestly,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

“A monster is a horrific creature that does terrible things to innocent people for no particularly good reason at all,” she said. “It’s an aberration and an affront to life that endangers every living being around it. A monster has no decent purpose for its existence. And don’t you think that describes humanity just a little better than it describes emanants? Like, sure, it doesn’t do humans justice, but I don’t think it fits us at all.”

“Mm, see,” I said, leaning forward and pointing at the table. “I’ve always liked the broken myth description of a monster. A monster is the thing that’s there to teach the hero an important lesson about how the world works, or about themself, or both. And I think that describes both humans and emanants pretty well equally, actually. It all depends on who the hero is, after all. But humans think of us as monsters, so I go with it.”

“OK, I do like that definition,” Felicity said, pushing leftover soggy cracker goop around in her mouth with her tongue, and then swallowing it.

“I really like your word, too, though,” I said. “emanant seems more descriptive of how we come to exist. It’s pleasing.”

“Thank you. I am rather proud of it, even if it’s not my idea.”

“Well thank you for introducing me to it.”

“You’re welcome.”

I cocked my head, “You don’t happen to know if a human or an emanant coined the term, would you?”

“I’m not really sure. I’d like to think it was an emanant. The vast majority of humans have no idea we exist as we do, anyway. So, the meaning we’re applying to it comes from us, I’m sure.”

“How long have you been around?” I asked. “Do you predate humanity in any way?”

She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes to the point where they both looked like little shiny black marbles. She seemed very reluctant to say.

“One good way to build trust with words, Felicia,” I said, “is to tell the other emanant important things about yourself. And I’m curious how much you understand the value of words themselves.”

She frowned so deeply I wondered if her host would feel a muscle cramp later, but said, “The most recent word for the era is the Chibanian. I am pretty good with keeping up with words. Inhabiting a human brain is good for that, of course. Middle Pleistocene, it used to be called. My first host was taken in by another species of humans, made part of their family. Forcefully. Gave her nightmares, and suddenly I had my own first family of emanants to protect.”

“Precambrian,” I said, and tapped the cork of the wine on the table. I had been playing with it.

She looked up at me, “What?”

“Yep.”

Her incredulity could have fed me for a decade if it came from a human. “But you feed on emotions. Did life even have emotions before the Cambrian?”

“I didn’t always. Emotions were an adaptation, both for life and myself, which I witnessed,” I said.

I could tell that she really didn’t believe me at all, but she chewed on her words as she spoke them, “Did you predate life itself? Were you an… an enthalpiphage?”

I held up my hand, fingers splayed and tilted it to the side and back, “Not quite that old. I don’t predate synaptic proteins. I needed those. I’m a product of synaptic proteins. I fed on pain.”

“Oh.”

“And, because I know you’re wondering, I survived the extinctions by feeding on the emotions and pain of emanants.”

“What? How?”

“It takes a lot of work to adapt to it, that’s for sure. I can do either emanants or life at any given time. Not both.”

“Why didn’t you stick to emanants?”

“I love the excuse to interact with life. It’s interesting. Especially humans. And the emotions of humans are rich.”

“Nobody feeds off the emotions of emanants.”

“Not nobody, Felicia. I’m not the only one.”

“I didn’t even think we had emotions.”

“Oh, you so definitely do.”

“How can you be that old?” she asked, finally.

“By never ever trusting anybody,” I replied.

“But you let me into your home,” she pointed out.

“Yep,” I smiled.

---

previous

next

[monster-rinds]

Prologue: About Gresham, Oregon

Gresham is a real city, but I have not been truthful in my descriptions of its layout. I want to preserve the privacy and safety of its citizens.

I imagine the residents of Gresham will have mixed reactions to what I have to write about their city. But there isn't any particular reason that it's the setting of my story besides the fact that I moved there a couple years prior, and I may have brought my trouble with me.

If I were to describe the people of Gresham, I'd be inaccurate about it. I was a relative newbie and only ever interacted with a small slice of the population. I just know that there's more diversity there than anyone will admit.

But to give you something to visualize, when I first arrived, I did so via the MAX from Portland. After riding into Union Station in downtown Stumptown, I knew the bigger city wasn't for me and I needed to head to the outskirts. And I thought it might be nicer to be closer to a mountain or two, and headed east.

The only way I noticed the moment I'd entered Gresham, which is technically a separate city from Portland, was that the signs at the next MAX stop were labeled with the township's name. The two cities had blended together so seamlessly.

And then, from there, it was ten more MAX stops before I reached the city center. Each one was in the middle of a sprawling suburbia of small mid-twentieth-century stick built houses interspersed with larger apartment buildings of various ages and repair, and lots of gnarled and ratty trees (it was near the end of that Winter - they looked better with leaves during the Summer).

And when I got off the MAX and started walking around to look for a good place to work and another to stay at during the night, I found more of the same. But also, lots of strip malls. The streets were wide, and there was plenty of sky.

It was sunny, and sure enough, I got wonderful views of Wy'east (Mount Hood). And also, occasionally Lawetlat'la (Mount Saint Helens).

I eventually found Gresham's “historic downtown” hidden amongst the trees and other slightly larger buildings and decided it was cute enough to stay near. It was mostly one story buildings, but the streets were narrower and lots of the shops were lit up and open, which made it feel cozy.

I found what I was looking for within walking distance of there.

I didn't have a thing to my name when I started there, and I still don't. But that's not really what my story is about. Just a relevant detail.

Anyway, there's a big chance that if you live in the U.S. you live in Gresham. Which is to say that there are so many places just like it, statistically most people live there.

I wouldn’t exactly say that I ever have, though.