In her cave, the Monster doesn’t mind the dark too much. It is usually dark. She used to get out more into the sun to find mountain goats or climbers to eat. Climbers were spindly and there was a lot of gear to spit out, but their muscle was something, at least, to go on. Now blue ice and snow block the cave opening. She’ll be waiting for meat for a while.

There are bats hibernating in a bony brown clump in the far corner of the cave, but she has felt them to be her companions, not her food, and she vows not to eat them.

She dreams of her youth closer to the village, when she ate livestock from fenced farms, easily skewered with her claws and tossed into her mouth. Whole lambs and pigs, plenty of house cats, dogs, and chickens. She’d been an orphan. She hadn’t known to be more careful about who and what she ate and how often. Once she snatched up a rosy, round man by the river. After she snapped his spine, she stroked the folds of his neck and his belly with her claws. His fat became her fat and it was luxurious. Sinking her teeth into him was such pleasure, tearing the meat from his shoulders. Each limb burst succulent. Then she chewed and chewed and nibbled and sucked each morsel of his bones clean. Her belly was warm for four days after eating him.

Taking a human was what set the village after her, how she ended up in this cave high in the mountains. She shifts her crippled leg uneasily. The leg never stops aching. But she likes remembering the slope of the man’s shoulders.

 

The Monster Remembers

The Monster has a memory. She is following big, gray, furry legs, black padded feet cracked with dryness, flashing dirty claws through a meadow. There are white flowers like stars in the grass. The Monster is trying to keep up with the legs. The Monster is small. They move with a pack of other legs, but the Monster follows only one pair, as familiar as her own paws.

She doesn’t know what happens after this memory. She knows that she knows the legs. She knows that her mother’s legs are gone.

 

The Monster’s Fury

The Monster is restless. It had never happened before, the icing of the cave entrance. She is amazed that she didn’t realize that the unthinkable could occur. That just because it hadn’t happened yet didn’t mean it wouldn’t.

Her hungers are enormous and her capacities vigorous, but even that which seems mighty can be caught and trapped. She paces the cave, debris rattling against her padded feet.

She feels a mounting fury. She lunges across the cave and hurls herself at the snow wall. In her mighty chest there is a choking, heavy rage. She opens her mouth and roars. The bats awaken. They flitter and swoop in and out of their roosts. The Monster pounds the snow. She digs with her claws. She roars and roars until the bats are swirling over her head in a chittering cloud and her own head rings with the noise.

 

The Monster Thinks of the Bear

In her cave, the Monster can’t stop thinking about the bear she’d seen foraging on the mountain face that summer. The bear had been rolling rocks, sending them scattering down the steep, jagged slope, while he did what? Ate tiny insects flying up from the rocks? The Monster had peered through her nearsighted eyes. The big grizzly nuzzled and scattered rocks with snout and claw.

The Monster had dreamt of finding another monster someday. She didn’t expect to have this flood of sweet feeling for a great beast on the side of the hill trying to stuff itself on bugs. She moved closer, and she could see there was a flock of whirling, gamboling moths pouring from beneath the rock. The bear was big and bony and clumsy and agile all at once. He was hungry. His haunches and back trembled with his might. Huge and delicate. He buried his face in the holes and drank moths.

The Monster moved closer, but her leg dragged, and she knocked a boulder loose.

The bear stood to his full height and turned. He cocked one rippling shoulder down and huffed, big claws cupping his own great torso. He released a hoarse, vicious roar, his mouth open like a grotto, gorgeous with fangs and pearly drool and a fierce red beckoning.

The Monster swooned.

 

The Monster Imagines a Different Life

Once, the Monster saw a small female bear with two cubs. She followed them at a distance. The mother bear, she thought, cannot feed only herself as the Monster does. She must feed the cubs. She must protect the cubs. They tumbled after her, balls of fur and play, nipping at each other.

The Monster considered. Would she enjoy having cubs to feed? She might. But she could not enjoy, does not enjoy, the thought of something happening to them. The feeling of anxiety on their behalf. If one fell over the steep cliff edge. If one grew sick. If one hungered. If one was eaten.

Something hard, an old pain, shivered up inside the Monster. She would not want to risk the losing.

 

The Monster Hunts

The Monster tracked the Grizzly-Who-Ate-Moths that summer. She learned to beware his sense of smell, learned how far she should stay away, got quick at scrambling away from a breeze. She was as big as he was, maybe bigger. She wasn’t worried about a fight. Their chances were even. But she was tantalized by watching the bear maneuver. He moved differently, succinctly. He roved with purpose. (He would never follow another creature for enjoyment.) He ate mindlessly, scarfing the food down. He inhaled moths or a marmot or a squirrel and then climbed and climbed. The Monster watched the Grizzly’s rippling hump as he dug and climbed. She admired the thickness of his fur, the way his long claws lit up in the sun. She followed his musky scent, her own snout high in the air.

She told herself that she didn’t want anything specific from him. She merely wanted to be a monster among monsters. She knew this wasn’t entirely true. In truth, she hoped to provoke a wild and fierce connection, to endure an ecstatic clash. She wouldn’t mind a wound or two for the pleasure of it.

 

The Monster Starves

The Monster is hungry. The cave entrance is blocked and now she understands what she has not yet fully understood. This will be the longest, hardest winter yet.

Here in the caged dark she is beset by images. Someone. A sibling? A little brother? Someone that means something to her with a blood-spilling wound in his chest. He reaches out to her.

Then, another memory, her leg shattering in the blast of a bullet.

She feels all the pains whirling deep in her gut. It’s a sickness she can’t purge. She paces, the path in her cave now swept clean by the pacing. The bats sleep on. She tries not to lift one arm and snatch them from their beds to cram them into her salivating mouth.

Before she even realizes she’s stuffed a couple of bats into her mouth and she’s stilling their slowed hearts with her teeth, chewing them down, drooling sick with her betrayal of them and she’s sick with her memories and she will not allow herself to think of the bear.

 

The Monster Thinks of Stars

The Monster misses the night sky. The reeling hordes of stars, how these calmed her, quieted her, while simultaneously filling her with tiny pricks of possibility. As if each one said, Maybe this will happen! Or maybe this! Or that!

Frozen into her cave, she can feel that she missed some of those maybes.

 

The Monster Remembers

The Monster startles awake and remembers. Her mother laughing, all fangs and a great shaggy matted face. The Monster’s mother laughed at her, using the other language that the Monster barely remembers. Her mother called her names, mocking her softness to the rest of the Monster horde.

The Monster had been cleaning her little brother at the time, combing nits from his fur with her claws, enjoying the small purr that came from him as he sat before her, feeling the golden love between them, something exquisite.

Their mother’s cruel laugh interrupted. She cuffed the Monster hard across the head. The Monster scrabbled away, loping up into the mountains for days, climbing, trying to rid herself of her tenderness. She suspected there would always be something wrong with her. The implication was that if she was capable of love, she was not a true monster. But couldn’t, the Monster thought, love be as monstrous big as anything?

 

The Monster Pines

The Monster suspects that if she had interacted with the bear on those summer slopes he would have been a brute, indifferent, yet she feels tenderness for him.

Her softest parts yearned to feel him though she knew he would slash them to ribbons without regret or interest. If she let him, he would gobble her muscle to feed his muscle. He would drop her bones and rove on, pitiless, to continue his daily feeding. She would be the rosy round man, the bats, the moths.

 

The Monster Suffers

The Monster twitches and stirs awake. She remembers hunting with her pack in the low valley hills. The first blast hammered them, bouncing sound across the valley. The pack turned or dropped or ran. There was a second blast. Not enough of the pack was running. They were turning, growling. They lurched into violent dances when the bullets struck them, flinging their limbs or spinning and falling. There was the Monster’s mother, already crumpled upon the ground. The Monster hidden in the trees. Out in the meadow another blast thundered and she watched as her brother’s chest poured red. He turned, lifted his arms toward her, and fell.

She ran. She ran and ran.

She feels like she is still running, even here in her frozen blocked cave by the lake.

 

The Monster Contemplates Her Size

The Monster used to revel in the largeness of her appetites. Her glory days in the mountains were after an elk kill. She would eat and eat, hardly able to move after gorging herself. She imagined that the heaviness anchored her to the forest floor, all the meat weighing her down, placing her where she belonged. This was one of her pleasures, reveling in her own vastness. She felt unconquerable. She could not be taken in her deepest self. Even if torn to shreds she was massive beyond scale, impermeable, unbowed. Even in death, she thought she would know her own might.

This confidence slips away, freezing inside of her like the lake in the cave, one edge at a time.

 

The Monster Rejects

The Monster rejects the yearning. She will not, when she is free again, follow bears or remember lost family or wish for a steady flow of food. She will not seek pleasures of sun or body. After the ice melts she will be rendered. She will be vicious, all teeth and claw. She will go back to the village and eat anything she wants. She will show them what a real monster does.

Still, some nights when she isn’t on her guard she wakes and thinks of the bear, pulsing and bright. In her half-asleep state, she worries that to be a monster requires massive desire and then massive loss. That losing and the threat of losing is what makes any monster whole.

 

The Monster Shuts It Down

The Monster knows that she must pretend there is nothing else to the world, that the cave is all there is, that she must vanish the mountain. The Monster’s body aches, and the aching wakes her. There are waves of hungers, a terrible ache in her joints, the endless dark of the cave.

She crawls to the lake and drinks from the last lip of unfrozen water. Her claws are tender in their sockets. Only her breath fills the cave. She’s eaten the bats. All of them.

She pushes herself heavily away from the lake and spreads her mass out on the floor, her shaggy fur a weight on her head and her limbs. There is no telling how long before she will eat again, so she lies back, closes her crusty eyes, and dismisses the passage of time. It is an effort to quiet her needs, but she does it, one by one. No food. No light. No pain. No yearning. She shuts them down, tiny deaths, until she is perfectly still and time whirls on.