We Won't Be Here Tomorrow by Margaret Killjoy

Author:Margaret Killjoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Bones of Children

To most of society, I am a monster. Oh, I don’t have tentacles, or horns, or goat’s feet, or anything of the sort. Nevertheless, the first entry in Liber Monstrorum, the oldest known Western book of monsters, is a man who dresses as a woman. Sure, I’m a woman who dresses like a woman, but most of society doesn’t believe me about that because trans women are still seen as deceivers. That book was written sometime in the seventh or eighth century, and I’m not entirely certain I can say that much has changed.

It’s strange, then, that I should wind up hunting after monsters. It’s strange that I should be referring to ancient tomes—both real and fictional—as potential sources of truth. It’s strange that I should come to take Lovecraft’s work far too seriously, especially considering what I assume he would make of me. It’s strange that I should be searching in attics for portals into unknown and unknowable dimensions.

Okay, that last bit would be strange for anyone.

I mean to say only that I was a reluctant scholar of the occult—as though any claims I might make of my inherent skepticism will make what I have to relate any more believable.

I want to be clear that I understand H.P. Lovecraft to be a writer of fiction. I don’t think he believed any of what he wrote to be true. His work is fanciful, and while his prose was outdated even for the time, I enjoy his ability to weave stories and touch at the horror hidden inside the human mind.

What I’ve come to believe, however, and what I expect to fail to convince you of, is that H.P. Lovecraft worked from sources—sometimes near to plagiaristicly—that were not nearly so fictional.

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It started for me with dreams. I’ve always been a deep sleeper, never bothered much by dreams. No dreams so beautiful that waking life cannot compare; no dreams so horrid I wake screaming. I’ve always had mundane, forgettable dreams. Until two years ago, in my fifth decade of life.

I moved in with a partner, a woman named E—, two years ago. Along with a small group of miscreants and queers, we’d bought a derelict farm in western Massachusetts. Everyone else wanted to build their own houses on the property, so E— and I moved into the old farmhouse. Things were fine for the first six months, when we lived in the library on the ground floor, but as soon as we finished renovations on the master bedroom and moved upstairs, the dreams started.

Most of the dreams, though bizarre, were non-egregious. I had dreams about washing blades and washing bones in a skyscraper overlooking a dead city. The city was always the same, full of brutalist structures shorter than the tower. The tasks I was engaged in changed from dream to dream, but they were always mundane and generally contained enough traces of what I’d done that day to convince me that nothing untoward was happening to my mind as I slept.

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