Excerpt: Beautiful Monster

Every day, Tosha insists I tell stories. He is adamant about hearing something of before, of my life. “True stories,” he says, “are the ones that keep the mind active. If you’re remembering, your mind is awake. And if your mind is awake, the snow won’t put you to sleep.”

He says this every single day, and every single day I want to tell him to be quiet, to leave me alone. He knows about these things, about how to stay alive, but I don’t want to listen. I don’t want to remember, I think, I want to forget about it all – about how I got here and about the hazel eyes that drive me forward. I’d give up every single memory I have in order to start over, pain free, anew…happy.

“Tell me a story,” he says. His eyes are green, but they aren’t the same as my mother’s. They’re dark and deep and there’s an element of awkwardness there; I imagine he’s been in the mountains for far too long to know how to really talk to other people. “Talk to me.”

I know he does this for my own good. To keep me awake, to ward off the cold, to keep the demons at bay.

It’s the worst near the end of the month, when the moon gets full and the wolf’s eyes start to look less and less human. There’s less compassion in there around that time of the month, and that’s when I can’t think of anything but my brother and the hatred between us now; that’s when, on the good days, Tosha takes me aside and pulls stories out of me like a surgeon cuts away malignant cancer from clean flesh.

Something, anything, to remind me that there’s more to the world than winter and fur and death, that there’s a destination at the end of this journey – that eventually, after the snow is done falling and the season is over, that the restlessness of everything…I don’t even know anymore.

“Tell me something of before. What came before Newerton and these” – he briefly runs his icy fingertips along the fresh red scars just beneath my collar bone – “Tell me about before.”

“Before is very vague,” I insist, crossing my arms and move in closer to the tree at my back – cold, always.

Somewhere behind us, the fire snuffs into nonexistence in the unbroken silence.
There is nothing here but us and the trees.

The snow falls heavily around us, but it’s been falling so long that it’s little more than irritating anymore.

“Just tell me.”

I laugh a little, more than sure he doesn’t really understand that there isn’t a beginning and there isn’t a middle or an end or anything like a starting or ending point, but settle in against his heat unconsciously, trying to ignore the snow, and begin at the beginning.