Thoroughly Modern Monsters

by Jennifer Rainey

  Thoroughly Modern Monsters

  Jennifer Rainey

  Thoroughly Modern Monsters. Copyright 2012 by Jennifer Rainey. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places or products are of the author’s own creation or are used fictitiously. Any similarities to persons living or dead or actual events or locations are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the author’s written consent.

  Textures on cover were supplied by user Playingwithbrushes on flickr.com.

  Purpose, Sacrifice and Other Things in a Marriage

  Present Day.

  When the man snored, he sounded like an entire symphony of African killer bees.

  He never completely closed the refrigerator door.

  I knew he thought about his work more than he thought about me, and he didn’t even like his work. He told me this all the time over dinner, before we went to sleep, at the movies, at my parents’ house, while taking out the trash.

  “This is not what I was meant to do. This isn’t me, Marsha.”

  And I’d say, “Well, this is what they want you to do, Todd.”

  He usually didn't have a response to that. He’d just look up at the sky like God could help him get out of his sad little situation.

  God was an associate of Todd’s in his old job. They used to work in similar fields; there was some overlap. They did business together. Of course, it was the kind of relationship where they would meet once or twice a year for lunch and eat expensive steak, exchange bad jokes and shake hands too many times before they left.

  They knew each other. Not well, just enough.

  Not well enough to introduce me, of course.

  Todd didn’t talk to God at all once he started administering shots and lollipops, taking blood pressures and helping Doctor Loveland deal with panicky mothers who called in if their kid got a paper cut.

  His new degree hung in the living room next to a painting of Greta Garbo—my own handiwork. “What a change of pace it’ll be! Things are changing, anyway,” he exclaimed verbatim every time he looked at it.

  Things are changing. That’s what the men in nice suits said when his department at his old job downsized. Todd occasionally shuddered at the word superfluous after he was let go, I noticed. I’m sure there was an old report somewhere that described him as such.

  For the first few months of working at the pediatrician’s office, Todd came home saying, “I love it. The people there are nice, and kids are fun.” And I’d kiss him quickly on the cheek, tell him I was proud and turn back to baking a cake or e-mailing my mother or something.

  Then it turned into “Kids are okay.”

  Then it was “Kids are annoying.” Their mothers did nothing but nag and weep, and all Todd really wanted to do was… well… kill them.

  I never blamed him. We all have our calling. I mean, sometimes I wished I would’ve stuck with art in college. Art was a nice way to escape, and I never did master the male anatomy.

  “The population of the world is growing, Marsha.”

  “I know, Todd.”

  “It’s rising too quickly,” he said nervously as he looked out the window one afternoon. I chopped up potatoes for a casserole I knew he wouldn’t eat. A couple jogged by outside, and I knew, dammit, I knew, he just wanted to knock them dead to the ground.

  Again, I didn’t blame him, but I couldn’t let him just run around all willy-nilly killing whoever he felt like killing.

  “I know, Todd. Just relax. Do something that relaxes you.”

  He looked to me with bulging and incredulous eyes, and his well-formed mouth gaped. I quite liked that mouth. Todd was a good looking guy. I got lucky. Most in his old field were less than attractive, I’ll tell you that much, unless you were into that whole goth thing. “You know exactly what relaxes me.”

  “Something else, then? Todd, you have to move on. They’re not taking you back, and this mid-life crisis thing just doesn’t suit you,” I said and noticed how he looked at the knife in my hand. His fingers twitched. I slapped the knife down on the counter. I knew that look. “Todd, watch some TV. You’re not killing anyone today.”

  He was quiet at dinner that night.

  I was as well, while I chewed potatoes and noticed the grey in Todd’s hair. I couldn’t remember how long it had been there. I considered calling for Todd a psychologist or a psychiatrist or anyone with an –ist on the end of their title and a penchant for the crazy.

  But Todd wasn’t crazy. He just needed assistance, guidance. He needed a hobby, for God’s sake! I couldn’t see my husband knitting or golfing or putting together one thousand-piece jigsaws with photos of cats on them on the weekends, but surely there was something he could do.

  Cars? Maybe he could’ve fixed cars. It would’ve gotten my motor running, at least. Cars are sexy.

  Killing is not sexy. Only in the movies. Sometimes.

  But he told me all the time that it wasn’t killing. He didn’t used to kill. He was helping those people, helping them when there wasn’t a single human on Earth who could.

  Todd had a whole spiel he could rattle off about it if he wanted to.

  He didn’t want to that night, and I didn’t want to hear about it, either.

  Granted, I also didn’t want to hear about it three weeks later when the neighbors’ pets all kept dying. Hell, the dog was found in our yard with its paws up in the air like it was playing dead in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. But it wasn’t the same. That was what I expected him to say as I prepared potatoes for another casserole he wouldn’t eat.

  “It was a relief,” he said.

  “Todd, stop. I already feel like I have to buy the Hendersons a new German Shepherd, and you know as well as I do those things aren’t cheap,” I said.

  “It’s never going to be like it was.”

  “You’re a trip, you know that? You talk like a damn Nirvana song,” I spat. “You’re a grown man, Todd. More than grown! You’re close to a thousand years old!”

  “I know.”

  “So, stop talking like bad high school poetry and pull yourself together. I loved you before, and I love you now, and goddamn, this potato. Got more eyes than a sea monster.” I slashed at the vegetable.

  He sat at the kitchen table and reached for an empty salt shaker that looked like a cow wearing an apron. I didn’t remember where it came from. Maybe it came with the house. He laughed at it when we first found it, but that day, he looked at that cow like a man looks at a Dear John letter. “I can’t…”

  “You can’t what? You can’t go on?” I laughed bitterly.

  “But I can’t.”

  He sounded anemic. I realized for the first time that maybe he really couldn’t go on without it. Until that moment, it truly never occurred to me that something physically held him back. He was not like me, not like my family, not like my friends. He was different.

  If he was so different, why did he seem so human? I should’ve just stayed with Barry Fawkes after high school. At least he was human, or at least I assumed so.

  There was a lot I didn’t know about Todd, a lot he said he could never tell me. I was never interested, and so I never asked.

  “Todd.”

  “Marsha.”

  I turned to face him, but he didn’t look to me. His skin was grey, and his eyes were lifeless like a fish’s eyes. He spun the salt shaker around and ruffled his hair with a half-assed sigh.

  And still I couldn’t quite decide if I felt bad for him or if I thought he was just being a baby.

  “Todd, it’s not okay they took your job from you. The Monster Relocation guys are awful. I know. But—”

  “I’m not a m
onster! The world needs people like me to keep going. It’s natural!”

  “I know! God, you’ve gone on that little tirade at least five-hundred times. I get it.”

  “Do you get it?”

  “Don’t start. Y’know, I don’t blame them entirely for what they’ve done. It’s integration. It’s not so bad,” I said, but I didn’t know if I believed it anymore. “It’s for your own good.” I sounded like his mother more than his wife, and it made my skin crawl.

  He looked like he was going to cry, and my brain didn’t seem aware of what my body was doing as I sat down at the table beside him. He fiddled with the hem of my tablecloth.

  There was so much I didn’t know, about him, about everything, and some part of me wondered if I was ready to find out.

  I held out my hand to him, and he begrudgingly reached to hold it. I shook my head and tossed my apron to the sink. I didn’t want to look like June Cleaver when this all went down.

  “No, Todd. Don’t just hold my hand. Go on, you asshole,” I said with a smile.

  He didn’t hesitate. That’s what got me the most, and I realized that the son of a bitch had been angling for it the entire time. But I didn’t get to think much more than that. I slumped in my chair and rolled unceremoniously to the ground. I died with my eyes open.

  Reapers are selfish bastards, and don’t you dare let anyone tell you otherwise.

  Frequent Shopper

  Present Day.

  I.

  The old woman’s mouth looked like a night crawler split in two, and it was always frowning.

  “You don’t carry my size in shoes,” she grumbled. “How am I supposed to get my shoes?”

  Nadia scanned the woman’s purchases—two bras in sizes Nadia hadn’t even known existed—and looked at the register’s computer screen rather than her customer. “We could always order them for you. We have a station at customer service where you can order from our website and—”

  “The internet?! I ain’t usin’ that!” the old woman growled. “That thing’s got eyes. People are always watchin’ you on the internet, girl!”

  Nadia still wished her a happy holiday and smiled at her when she left, but the old woman couldn’t even manage a grunt as she walked away. Nadia sighed. At least she didn’t ask for a manager. She turned and called for the next customer in line, her lips always smiling and her voice always like cupcake frosting with extra sugar.

  On your average Wednesday night at ten o’ clock, Collingham’s department store was getting ready to shut down. Customers were ushered out, and the employees on the floor made certain for the last time that no old folks had fallen in the fitting rooms.

  Nadia always worked after the sun went down. The lack of customers was a perk.

  December was the exception. With the store hours extended, Wednesday nights in December at Collingham’s were like every other night in December at Collingham’s: Hell. Jingle-bell-red-and-green-let-it-snow Hell.

  Along came December, and Nadia no longer had five or six quiet folks an hour come to her register; she had scores and scores of flabby-armed old bats who thought smiling was a sin and threatened Nadia’s death because she said Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas.

  Very un-Christian of them, she would think, and turn brightly to the next customer who would probably be a similar-looking crone, her sweater blood red instead of sea monster green.

  That Wednesday evening, December the sixth, he was her next customer, and he had one burgundy sweater vest in his hands. He wore one like it, but blue, and he smiled.

  He smiled.

  It was like seeing Haley’s Comet.

  “Busy tonight,” he said. “I had to beat off an old man with a stick just to get this.”

  Nadia had two laughs: her real laugh and her work laugh. The work laugh was pleasant, like music, like sunshine, like daisies. It was as fake as every mannequin at Collingham’s. Her real laugh sounded like a goose getting hit by a truck, and when she laughed for real that evening, a few cashiers and customers turned to see how a goose or a truck got into the store.

  She apologized quietly.

  “Don’t apologize. You’re out of these, though,” the man said as she folded the sweater. “Do you know when you’ll be getting them back in?”

  Nadia frowned and hated telling him that they were no longer carrying the sweaters. “I’m sure we’ll end up carrying something similar,” she said in her plastic retail voice. “But I am sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault, Nadia,” he said, checking out her nametag. “I’ll be back to look around later.”

  She asked him—timidly because she didn’t want to seem too corporate—if he wanted to give her his e-mail address.

  He quirked a brow. “What?”

  “To receive coupons from the store,” she assured him quickly.

  “Oh! Sure. It’s pursuedbyabear at mailbot dot com.”

  “That’s Shakespeare. Exit, pursued by a bear,” Nadia said with a grin. “It’s a stage direction from The Winter’s Tale.”

  “Nice catch,” he laughed. “I’m an English professor. It’s nice to find someone just as nerdy as I am.”

  That was the last thing he said before taking his bag and leaving Nadia to the wolves. But she got his name from his Collingham’s SuperSaver card.

  Dennis Crane.

  And he looked like a Dennis Crane, she thought, if they did indeed have a look: pleasant and bright and wiry. Nadia saw his face in her head for the rest of her shift.

  II.

  “Do you have a restroom? We’ve had an accident.”

  Nadia looked to the rotund woman with her jingle bell earrings and then to the oblivious and wide-eyed child at her side. The kid had something that was hopefully chocolate on her hands and cheeks. Nadia pointed them in the direction of the restroom, and the round mother was apparently too busy to thank her.

  “That lady thinks she can just cut in line?”

  Nadia flipped through the files in her mind and pulled out a prepared spiel for situations such as these (“Oh, I know. I’m sorry about that, sir. Some people just have no manners. Will that be all for you today, sir?”) and turned to the next in line. She sighed. “Oh. Iggy, it’s you.”

  Iggy Spalko dropped a basket of decorative candles on the counter. “Nadia! How’s the world of retail?”

  “Oh, you know… swell. How’s the world of fast food?”

  “Oh, you know… terrible. Greasy. Nauseating. I’m living the American Dream.”

  “You’re buying eighteen candles?”

  “For every woman on my Christmas list,” Iggy said with a shrug. “Chicks love candles.”

  “I’m indifferent to candles.” She zapped each one with her trusty pricing gun, a few of them shedding sparkles on her fingers.

  “You’re the exception.” Iggy ruffled his thin dusty-brown hair and shoved his hands into the pockets of his faded denim jacket. His eyes were hollow and dark like a drug addict’s, but that was just how he looked. She couldn’t talk. Hers looked the same. “So, I haven’t seen you at M.A. in a while, little sister. What’s shakin’?”

  Nadia cleared her throat and glanced to the line, which was regrettably growing by a person or two every thirty seconds. Most of them were frowning. Iggy was smiling his usual spacy smile, but it wasn’t like Dennis Crane’s smile from the night before. She looked quickly to a Collingham’s bag tied up under the counter.

  “My boss said I didn’t need to go anymore. It was cutting into my hours.”

  “You’re lucky,” Iggy said. “There’s a lot of crying going on these days. From the ones who can cry, anyway. Man, I’d cry if my bodily fluids weren’t all dried up. It’s getting pathetic over there.”

  Nadia hated bagging candles. They rolled around too much, and the ones in glass needed to be wrapped. The art of wrapping escaped her. She reached for brown paper. “And Harry? How is Harry?”

  “Still kicking over at least three chairs a meeting.”


  “I don’t blame him,” Nadia said. “They took him away from his wife.”

  “Well, she’s at the Bitch Hospital now,” Iggy said.

  “Iggy.”

  “That’s what it is, right? It’s for female werewolves, a hospital for mentally unstable female werewolves. Bitch Hospital. It works perfectly,” Iggy explained calmly, obliviously and cracked his jaw. He looked back over the line behind him as Nadia wrapped. “Hey, when was the last time you had the real stuff?”

  “Iggy!”

  “Just asking.”

  Nadia looked around from under her thick bangs. “I’ve been on the medication for almost four years.”

  “I’m going on three. Congratulations, little sister.”

  “Don’t call me that, Iggy,” she said with a laugh. “I told you, I don’t go to the meetings anymore. I don’t like the name, anyway. Monsters Anonymous. We’re not monsters.”

  “Well, it’s better than being an alcoholic, right? Blood doesn’t fuck you up,” Iggy said as he took his bag of candles.

  “Iggy, I’m at work.”

  He put sixty-nine dollars and eighteen cents—exact change—down on the counter. “And I’m not at work. I’ll say what I damn well please. I need a bit of freedom to be myself, little sister!” Iggy Spalko turned to the old woman behind him in line and said, “Ma’am, your wig looks just lovely today. You almost can’t even tell.”

  Iggy took off with a wink in Nadia’s direction, and Nadia turned to the little old woman with her wrinkled little old mouth agape. “I’m sorry about that, ma’am,” she said. “Some people just have no manners. Will that be all for you today, ma’am?”

  When all the customers had left and Nadia had cleaned up her register just enough so that her supervisor would be pleased but not so much that she would appear anal, she gathered the Collingham’s bag from under the counter. She lovingly took it with her to the break room where she clocked out, and she carried it nestled inside her coat to her car.

  Nadia no longer felt cold, but she still thought coats were lovely. They gave a person broader shoulders, a more ideal frame. She wished Dennis could see her in her pea coat. It was better than some soupy sweater and a Collingham’s nametag.