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Living With A Monster

            She sat at her computer; fingers poised and ready to write her final paper of the year … but nothing came.  Her mind was far too distracted to even attempt to write her paper.  Monsters. 

“What do these writers know about monsters?” she said to herself as she fingered her copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  “Monsters don’t have to be ugly.  Monsters don’t just come from science.  They come in all shapes and sizes, and they tend to create themselves.”  She sighed and began looking through her copy of Einstein’s Monsters and took another deep breath as her husband opened the front door and promptly began screaming for Darlene. 

As Darlene jumped up from the computer desk and spun around just in time to see Daryl walk into the computer room with his eyes full of fire. 

“How was your day, honey?”  Darlene said hiding her fear under the mask of her practiced cheerful disposition.  Daryl’s response was not vocal, nor was it even verbal.  He merely lunged at her, grabbed her shirt and pulled her into the kitchen.

His voice was dark and sinister as he pushed her towards the kitchen table. “When I come home from a long day of work I expect to see my wife putting my dinner on the table!”  His face was merely inches from hers as he snarled, “What good are you if you can’t even have my dinner on the table?”

Darlene’s breath was heavy and labored as she tried to move past his large form that had taken on “superhuman” aspects as his anger had emerged.  As Victor Frankenstein had seen of the monster, Daryl’s “stature…seemed to exceed that of a man.”  She began to envision her love as the monster that plagued Victor.  His eyes going cold and bleak, his body taking on unnatural proportions, his internal ugliness seeping out through his pores.  As her face went blank with thought Daryl’s rage only grew hotter and he hit her across the face sending her onto the cold tile flooring. 

“What’s wrong with you?” he screamed as he stood over her crumpled and crying form.  “Why do you make me hit you?  Why are you so stupid?” She didn’t move, she lay there, sobbing.  “ Get up and get my dinner ready before I hit you again!” 

She started to slowly pull herself to her feet and make her way to the kitchen to remove dinner from the oven where it had been cooling.  As she did the cool air in the apartment stung against her face where her husband had struck her.  Her mind was reeling, trying to make his anger not real.  She tried to hide behind her schoolwork, using her mind to sooth her body. 

She began to think of her lover as a nuclear bomb.  His passionate nature had turned into a rage that rivaled the explosion at Hiroshima.  His violent outbursts sent a mushroom cloud of sorrow above their happy new life together and turned both man and wife into something other than human beings.  It was not possible to be human beings “on the other side of the firebreak.”  Darlene saw the explosive nature of her marriage as a form of mutually assured destruction.  If they stayed together he would grow more violent and evil and destroy himself by his own actions.  She would be destroyed by his anger as well, but her destruction would be far more violent and volatile. 

She sat silently through dinner, watching her husband eat his dinner she began to imagine him as a green glob of badly put together dead tissue that had been reanimated by some mad scientist.  The heat which emanated from him in his quiet sulking, brooding anger continued to simmer as she began clearing the table and doing the dishes.  It was as if her loving husband had mutated into a walking nuclear reactor.  His eyes were the uncovered cores that burned into her as he stared at her with laser precision.  She felt like Dan in the story “Insight at Flame Lake,” like she was breathing fire and the sounds of nature around her were merely background radiation.  As she was putting the last of the dishes away she dropped a small glass on the floor.  It was the final piece of the puzzle that led to his core meltdown.

He leapt up from the living room chair where he lay, drinking his eighth beer and watching football and ran at her.  She had such little time to react that when he tried to spin her around she fell forward and cut her arms on the glass she was trying to sweep up. 

“You stupid bitch,” he screamed “can’t you do anything right?”

Darlene was crying so hard as she tried to keep the blood off the floor and still speedily clean up the glass her lack of response only angered her lover more and his strength took on new proportions as he grabbed the back of her shirt and pulled up her upright.  He grabbed the broom and threatened her with it.  He screamed but to her the words were inaudible, as if they were chaotic sounds of people preparing for a massive explosion.  As his yelling ceased his fists began to fly, like missiles in the night.  His strength was superhuman and as he broke her bones and battered her body she felt like a child in the grasp of an undead monster. 

Days later, she lay in a hospital bed recovering and in protective custody.  Her husband had been arrested for beating his wife and she was in the process of filing for divorce.  She wrote her final paper while in the hospital and mailed it to her English professor.

“Frankenstein’s monster and the nuclear bomb were created by man, both with the purpose of doing good for the world.  Their actions, while full of good intentions, wound up hurting more people than it ever could have helped.  Modern day monsters follow this same pattern in many ways.  My monster, my soon to be ex-husband, thought he was making our life better by beating me, and wound up nearly killing me.  Are monsters real? Yes, I’ve shared a bed with one.  Are they always ugly? No, monsters become ugly due to their actions.  Frankenstein’s monster was ugly on the outside, but beautiful on the inside until provoked by lack of love from his creator.  My husband was beautiful on the outside and ugly on the inside, no matter what I did.  For Dan in “Insight at Fire Lake” monstrosity came from emotional and mental anguish caused by his father’s involvement in working with nuclear weapons.  The emotional scarring and psychological problems caused by his father’s contact with radiation turned the world into a place full of monsters and caused him to believe his cousin was tempting him to go into the fire lake with her.  Like Dan, I fooled myself into believing one thing was true and let my own internal monsters dictate how I acted. And, like Dan, I suffered the consequences in a most dire way.”

She slowly drifted off to sleep, finally knowing she was safe.  She no longer lived with a monster.