Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Tin House Books

After dinner and my bath, after my parents said good night and I was alone in bed, the doll had a palpable presence in the room. I thought, again, about the gas leak that killed the Mullens. How trustfully we went to sleep each night, certain we’d rise the next day, everything and everyone where we left it. We’d heard over and over that the gas was colorless and odorless, but I pictured it as a low-lying blue fog, the color of cigarette smoke or the last light of day.

I saw it seeping into their cabin through a door left slightly ajar, winding through the crack like jet stream over the wing of an airplane. Bounded loosely like a ghost, it traveled from room to room, finding each member of the family. It settled over the Mullens’ sleeping faces, getting sucked into their nostrils in thin runnels. Divided in substance and united in purpose like an army of insects, crawling into their soft tissues and orifices.

The gas might have been in my room right then, rolling over the lip of the window that had been left open to the late summer heat, entering me with every breath I took. I pulled the blanket over my head. My breathing had become fast and shallow, making me feel light-headed—or was that an effect of the gas?

The blue cloud grew squiggly, amorphous limbs that ended in smaller appendages, akin to fingers. It wandered through our house, tracing the photos on my parents’ bedroom wall, me as a fat-faced baby in the bathtub alongside a photo of them, much younger, standing on the stern of a boat. I’d never asked where that photo was taken, what marina and body of water shone in the background, why they were there, what sun could tan them so darkly and make them laugh so freely.

The fog-fingers reached the head of my parents’ bed. They inserted themselves into my mother’s mouth and up her nose, making her mind swim as the tissue of her brain softened. The gas liquefied her brain until it poured out her ears, onto the pillow, like a viscous gray paint. She and I drowned in dreams, becoming sleepy-eyed, pink-cheeked baby dolls. Posable and firm as plastic.

The fog then whispered to my father, sounding like his own voice, speaking to himself. It lifted him from the bed and onto his feet, wobbly and unbalanced—a flat-footed wooden nutcracker. The fog dressed him, wrapping a button-down shirt around his stiff wooden shoulders like a shawl, and put a suitcase in his hand. It blew open the front door with the force of a windstorm, pulled the sun up from behind the horizon like a stage prop on a string. My doll-father wandered out, blinking awake, down our driveway and down our street and down an endless, open road beyond, two rows of smiling, levered teeth painted on his face.

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