Monster in the Mirror (Short Story) ... read it already, you dog.

He didn’t want to listen to her cry. Not tonight, not ever. The faces changed, but they always cried. His iciness, they’d say, the way he looked on with dispassion as they wrung their clothes and squealed.

                

This one’s name was Vanessa. “Don’t you love me? After all we’ve been through, all I’ve done? I gave you everything, Zander. And this is what I get in return?”

                

Zander hated this part. He didn’t give, never would. There was no act of will involved, no emotion he kept hidden only to lavish upon more worthy amores. For as long as Zander could remember, he’d felt nothing. Cored at birth by God’s great steel spoon, he was a husk, a shell, a ghost.

                

“What can I give you?” He felt a headache stirring behind his eyes.

                

“Just love. Is that so much to ask? A flicker of interest when I talk about my day. An inquest. A curiosity. Something more than that wandering glare. A woman is a garden, Zander. A bed fraught with weeds and insects. Women die without a man to tend them.” Her lips trembled, full lips he’d kissed and pinched between his strong hands in an effort to rise himself, smacking them to draw the blood, the ripeness, hoping for a stir, a twitch, something other than emptiness.

                

“I do love you,” he said, wondering how many times he’d lied. “This is me. What you see is what you get.”

                

“I won’t believe it. I just won’t! You’re not a brute.”

                 

“But I am!”

                

“No you’re not!”

                

“Yes, Vanessa, I am just that. A brute. An ape dragging his knuckles from mate to mate. Picking the lice, and calling it commitment. Screaming and biting and fucking just to feel myself breathe!” And then, as with the others, he slapped her. “This is the man you love! This hollow shell pulsing with your wishes. Everything you hear, see, taste, and touch is an echo! I’m empty! I’m a wraith. A wraith!” 

He struck her again, watching the shelf of her auburn hair jolt, the momentary unveiling of her shocked blue eyes. And a strange thing occurred to him—as she tumbled naked from the bed and went sprawling to the threadbare rug—a beautiful, singular thrum of emotion.

                 

Zander paused to evaluate the sensation, his hand frozen above him, a smear of blood on his index finger where her tooth had snagged the flesh. A devilish smile broke across his handsome features. “My God.”

                

“Get out!” Vanessa pulled the sheets to cover herself. “You monster!”

                

Her words came in expanding vapor, a fog he could suddenly see, black and roiling and anthropomorphic, all hulking shoulders and wicker-sharp wings. The burning stars of its eyes regarded Zander, then disappeared into the air, an echo, her words—only her words.

                

“I said get out! I’m calling the police, you rotten, heartless … God, just get out!”

                

Zander didn’t feel like going anywhere. A thousand wasps spiraled upward from his core, a cyclone funnel of heat and hunger. Snips of higher learning flashed in subconscious darkness, the philosophy club, the phrase Racial Memory, the idea of unremembered inclinations hidden in a tomb of DNA. “What did you call me?” He turned, slowly. “Before you threatened to call police. What did you call me?”

                

“You have to get out of here, Zander. You have—”

                

“WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?” And there, in the thunder of his voice, he felt the pulse quicken, a building magma, leavening in sheets of cooling rock, an inner-staircase upon which, even now, he could hear the heavy footsteps of a buried thing, an ancient thing, climbing upward from the emptiness.

                

“I…” Vanessa wiped her lip, stared at the blood on her palm. “I called you a Monster.”

                

His gut throbbed with the word, his muscles clenching upon his bones, shaking him, throttling him like a baby from the womb-sleep of memory: Wake up, Zander! Wake up!

                

“A monster,” he whispered, the smile widening in a series of rope-tight creaks.

                

He walked to the window, the fire-escape beyond, saw Los Angeles burning, not in reality, but in the realm of to be. He examined the buildings, the parks, the nests of human lice, as a curator examining lofts for a future exhibition. Out there was a world dead of ambition, myopic in its tastes, a trough of porcine indulgence—mistakes begging to be rectified.

                

“I am a monster,” he said, feeling the rightness of it, the belonging.

                

Again, he saw the winged beast of vapor, with its sodium-flare eyes, floating over the fire-escape. Only when he stepped in for a closer look, the beast in the window moved with him.

                

Not until then did he realize he had no reflection.

                

“A monster.” He laughed. “Extraordinary! You little trollop! You’ve done it, Vanessa! Of all of them, you’ve done it!”

                

On the floor, seeing him laugh that way, she didn’t know whether the fight was over, or if he’d gone insane. His humanity seemed in question. There was a shift taking place beneath his skin, pronounced in the deepened color of each iris, the slaver forming in the corners of his mouth. “Zander,” she whispered. “Zander, I’m afraid.”

                

He stood at the window, looking into his nature, connected for the first time in his wandering. He wondered if Hitler had felt this. If Ted Bundy had marveled at the ease with which this glistening suit of violence slipped atop his skin. Zander rolled his neck, pops erupting in the silence. Then he held his hand out, at perfect ease. “Come look at this, Vanessa.”
                

She shook her head, scooted back, covering her breasts, a trembling kitten with blood streaked in its fur. “Please, no.”

                

“Darling,” he said, “It’s beautiful.” He opened the window, took a deep breath. “My God, have you ever seen something so spectacular?”

                

His smile broadened when he felt her firmness pressed against his clothing.

                

“What is it?” she asked. “Looks like it’s going to rain. And it smells like exhaust.”

                

“No, my dear. That’s opportunity you smell. Production, and progress, and the American Dream. That’s depreciation, and the clatter of nickels on the dollar gobbling all of it away; that’s trust deeds passing hands, and entire apartment-houses being kicked into the winter cold. That’s the smell of big dogs eating little dogs. The sound of sacrifice.” He clutched her arms and brought her gently before the window, so she was looking out, her firm buttocks trembling in the wind. It was cold.

                

Zander was sweating, pressed his lips to her ear. “Do you see the fire?”  

                

“Where?”
                

“Everywhere. It’s everywhere, and it’s beautiful, and you’re beautiful. Now I can see it. All of it. You saved me. You called me from the fog, Vanessa. I am your offspring. I owe my life to you. And what better way to demonstrate my love—my purpose—than to save you from the fire?”

                

She started to turn, but she was weak, and he threw her easily, her shoulder clipping the fire escape, her head crashing into the upper staircase. It was, he believed, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, watching her cry, and then watching the cry vanish as she was jostled to unconsciousness, her body going limp, falling straight back and over the railing. There was a whistle, a thud.

                

Then a woman began to scream.

                

Zander didn’t look. He walked up to the mirror, admiring his reflection.

                

“You should count yourself as lucky,” said that devilish smile. “Some people go their whole lives trying to discover what they are.”

(Thank you for reading! Comments are appreciated! Find Novelist Carson Standifer on Facebook!)