You'd best begin with truth, and when you 've lost your Labour, there 'sa sure market for imposture.
The goal of this volume: cause terror. Make the people notice. Inflict lasting damage on their psyches. The idea is simple and it's already been proven to work—no more absurd than any other Big Monster innovation lately. A lesson here: give people microphones and tape recorders and they will create Monsters. We had absolutely NO idea this would be a good thing. Then we knew we had to put an end to people thinking that Monsters are something in the back of the mind. So we made a plan. Could this plan work? The answer: A whole qualified thumbs up.
Under the direction of the Board of Engineers, we aimed at the root cause of the Monsters instead of thinking we could just lop off the whole thing. Meanwhile, The High Command was using every effort to bolster the people with replacement Monsters. Nasty stuff... at least to those of us who didn't grow up with it. We grew up with it. We knew what to expect.
We spent at least an hour every morning and evening reading the news and other Monstrous bits. Feigning disaster for the pleasure of it, the thrill of the chase. We built up a supply of ammunition, food, and blankets. We stocked up on lots of crap like batteries and pet food and various things. We thought we had enough to last, but we didn't realize the true challenge, being called out by a human being who knows your name, being hailed from afar, across a howling winter rent by flames, then to see right through the Monster, to see a clear fire glowing in their little eyes, that's as bad as you're going to feel all day because right then the day turns to night and never back again. We knew what was coming, so when we saw the first signs, we packed up our gear in record time and headed for the river. Feigning disaster, freewheeling down the hill squeezing our true buddy—the Monster. Fresh squeezed monster.
Of course, at first nobody else noticed anything, there were still plenty of Monster festivals with Monster tents and hundreds of people picnicing on the grass around them. But times had changed. Crossing the border of the human? This's what middle class life is. Get used to it. People die. No government anywhere can prevent that.
Keep in mind that Monster oils are in just about every food product you can imagine. While Monster fruits may be eaten whole, buying canned Monster is ill advised. Keep in mind that just about every food product you can buy is nasty stuff. For a while we cut out the crap food and ate fresh veggies—no dairy, no red meat or pork. We cooked more fresh food, we hardly ever fried anything, we drank pure protein every night. When that didn't work, we went totally off the clean diet and drank alcohol every night. For a while, we had to force ourselves to drink the nasty shit. Now we prefer anything with chemicals. This wasn't necessary back when people used real hamburger and made their own bread dough, when the overall shape of the nucleus resembled a thick hamburger patty with a Monster on top. Now, all that stuff vegetarians eat—bird food, healthy nuts—is used to enhance the physical appearance of Monsters.
Every morning we would make the rounds, and every morning we'd see the same skin jobs sleeping along the water. If only they could replace all the damn sleep we lost each night. We knew the terrible winds that filled the valleys, we could sense them in our throats, floating on the air, rolling along the waters. Yet, we'd find some of the old things as fresh and clear as the morning. The bright breeze sighing, the invisible hints of the sky and earth, the sound of the falling water, the open air.
But the Monsters awoke each morning with a pain in their sides. Under the direction of the Board of Engineers, they came up with a plan: aiming for the root cause of things.
The sky milky blue, the breeze over the Bay gentle, Ah! the feeling of the sun, of the light on your skin, the soft breeze and the cool water on your face and then to remember, to wake up to the taste of vomit in your mouth.
The morning silence is broken. The sound is getting closer—you can’t see the Monsters coming. A sodium glow smolders in the sky. The whole world lit up mysteriously by this yellow-gray glowing light. Never to wake up again to the clear morning, the birds singing, the green grass and the clouds walking across the sky.
Folk had said the roads were lonely, said there was no human traffic, no human stirring, but the Monsters moved along the shadows, their skin covered with rashes and poison ivy. And when they left the shadows they were like the shafts of fire. Our principal thoughts were of fire, a half-oppressive ceiling of fire in the sky that melted imperceptibly into invisible walls of men and women crying out like all hell, taking up the chorus.
On the slopes of hillsides would stand a dozen horses, gazing naïvely at destruction. The scene so tragic it's a kind of poetry. People understand those kinds of things.
Then to turn around again, to wake up out of touch with the Monsters, with a lot of ugly in our hearts, soaked to the skin in the ugly Monstrous pitch of it all.
Later, the horses would use their tentacles to suck our blood and fill their steel baskets with our juices. Their baked lips, with many a bloody crack, suck'd in the moisture, suck'd in the moisture, which like nectar stream'd. The horses leaping up in the air, that you might see the rolling muscles.
What tends to emerge after the dust has died down is a whole lot of nothing.
We look to see lines of dotted lights leading from one small town to another or to a larger city, a new city hall growing up out of the middle of it all. We've seen the blue sky, floating above the ceiling of this Monstrous world and we've seen the fire glowing from afar. It was so slow, almost impossible to see as the fire worked its way down through the city.
We've stared awestruck at beings holding the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, scared for them who've not plunged their harnds into the hearts of a Monster. The air round about them, capering frenetically, and in the face of this invisible fear, we cry out for the awfulness of it, we wake up in the middle of the night to see all who have existed here burned up by fire and everything knocked down by earthquakes.
When it wakes you up in the middle of the night, don't you think we know it?
We leap up with a cry and calls for this chant or that, and then to see the fire riding through the towns, and the people shouting, as they might well, as the news spreads and every child and woman and man take up the cry, and away they run to see as we could all see, the sky sucking up the whole scene, carrying it up into the air, dispersing all we ever knew, all but the Monsters and the few pitiful enough left to deal with the world that remains—time casts its eyes to the fiery ceiling of sky hovering above.
How cheerily we retell our misfortunes, as if they were blessings!
Beauty may be skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone—there's trashy beautiful and then there's Monstrously beautiful.
Then to turn around again, to wake up out of touch with the Monsters, with a lot of ugly in our hearts, soaked to the skin in the ugly Monstrous pitch of it all.