My Name Is Monster by Katie Hale

Author:Katie Hale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

PART TWO

MONSTER

‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t

Is, I know how to curse.’

The Tempest, William Shakespeare

My name is Monster.

I am small and bony like a blackbird. My feet turn in when I walk and there is nearly always dust in my knuckles. My hair is thick and dark. When I sweat it sticks down the back of my neck and I can feel it clinging there.

Mother says I am like water.

You can’t grab hold of water. It has nothing to grip onto. It goes where it wants to, like a thought, except that thoughts can run uphill and water can’t.

There’s nothing true about water. It fills the shape of whatever bowl or cup or tin you put it in. I think what Mother means when she says that I am like water is that I am good at filling the shape I am supposed to fill. What I mean is, Mother cups her hands and I lay myself in them and she thinks that is the shape I am. And I do try to be that shape, the way Mother wants me to be. I try, but I am not very good at it.

Mother thinks all my words belong to her. I know this, because when she tells me a word, she does it like she’s giving me something precious and new. But sometimes the words she gives me are more like things that used to be mine already, so really all Mother is doing is giving them back.

She thinks I don’t remember any people but her, either. She thinks I get confused by the pictures of people we find in the City, but I know they are pictures of people who are now all dead. I know that the woman in the shiny picture is also dead, that she died when all the other people died. And I know that now there is only me and Mother.

But I know that there were other people before. I’ve seen them in the buildings where the wolf-dogs haven’t got at them. And I remember a woman.

I don’t know who she is. She’s not Mother, so she must be one of the dead people, but I know that she was more than just a dead person. I remember holding her hand, and how her hand felt warm and happy in mine. And I remember that she was beautiful. Not beautiful like the shiny woman in the picture, but soft like a petal, with big eyes and a small pink smile.

Mother is not beautiful, not like the shiny woman or like the soft woman. Mother is sharp and spiky like me. We are two not-beautiful people trying to keep ourselves alive in a tumbledown farmhouse on the edge of the City. But maybe that is beautiful as well.

The soft woman did not try to keep herself alive. She wasn’t hard and certain like Mother.

I only remember her once. I mean, I only remember one moment of her.

It was on the edge of a city.

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