Monster | Girl Dreams Diminuendo

The sound lasts for miles. Birds fall silent in respect. The moon flickers.

Her human hands. Her human teeth. Her spine still curved from years of apologizing. The alarm clock reads 4:47 AM. The radiator clicks. Somewhere a neighbor is coughing.

The dream always starts the same way: a sound like a cello being drawn across the ocean floor.

And the dream answers: No. Stay.

She wakes up.

She whispers, I’m sorry I take up so much space.

But in the dreams, she unfolded.

She closes her eyes and whispers into the dark: Tomorrow night. I’ll stay bigger tomorrow night.

She remembers the first time she grew teeth that didn’t fit behind her lips. The orthodontist called it overcrowding . She called it becoming . At night, she would press her palm against the mirror and watch her nails darken into something closer to talons. She practiced retracting them before breakfast. She learned to laugh with her hand over her mouth. Monster , the other children said—but they said it like a color she shouldn’t wear.

She is seventeen feet tall, give or take a vertebra. Her horns curl inward like a question she has forgotten how to ask. Scales the color of a dying star flash beneath a too-thin nightgown. In the dream, she is always trying to fit inside a room built for someone else—a classroom, a café, a childhood bedroom with a twin bed her tail spills off of like a wounded river. monster girl dreams diminuendo

And then—

Her shoulder blade aches. Not with pain—with memory. A phantom weight where wings almost were. She touches the skin there, and for a second, it feels like velvet over bone. Like the dream is not finished with her yet.

But something is different tonight.

So she folded herself smaller. Smaller. Until her spine curved like a bow. Until her voice became a polite, airless thing.