Hil Hoover
I just wanted a cool monster
@wanderinghil on twitter (I have no idea what I'm writing anymore)
We could try to make it make sense, perhaps,
but why do it that way, when we have a whole world
at our disposal, centuries of folklore followed by
the modern multimedia landscape, the imagination
of every child who ever lived, the ambition of every
huckster with a little taxidermy skill, dream big,
pull out all the stops, close your eyes and
give yourself everything you’ve ever wanted
in this moment, breathe deep and change.
Start with the air in your lungs, the way it moves
through you, the organs in your body, the blood
that carries oxygen, the heart that beats inside you,
don’t think about what you look like on the outside
yet, think about what you are, how you tick, what
sustains you, would you like a different kind of
diet, and what would you need to change to
make that happen?
Ah, here we go, I see what you want, I see
your heart now, only already you are beginning to
lose heart, to shed muscle, bone, skin, it’s so quick
once it begins, always is, always has been, this
process of shedding, this process of becoming
something else, once the heart goes, and now
everything begins to be green, to be brown,
to be sprouts beginning to reach upward,
root beginning to seek into earth, is this truly it?
But then something shifts again, rootwise,
in the search for soil, for loam, for all that will
nourish, and the trickster god that has been
playing these games with humans for so long
has to drop the narrative, steps back a second
too late, feathers fluttering, wings flapping, beak
snapping at vines that have already begin to
multiply too fast, the situation immediately
out of control, unexpected and uncalled-for.
Now don’t you get cheeky with me, little one, if you don’t want to be eaten, you just take a
minute and be real sure this is what you want,
and we can start over if you don’t want to
live in the garden after all, but there’s still that
fluttering of wings, the ruffled feathers, the
roots that are burrowing into the ancient being,
drawing forth something that isn’t blood,
certainly isn’t water, nothing a vine should need.
And then it’s over, just like that, because the human
that is no more - that is already gone - chose well,
knew what they were doing, and it’s not just the
trickster who is buried, but the entire garden, the house,
a whole divine realm destroyed by a single game of
let’s play with this human’s fate
and still, to this day, it’s just another cryptid tale,
another weird myth passed down among the
strangest of strangers on the darkest of nights
that maybe no one really would believe
because honestly, how would you explain it
if your pleasant southern evening was interrupted
by a giant corvid covered in kudzu who wandered about
mournfully whispering I just wanted a cool monster