Member-only story
The Mother of all Monsters
a short monster story
Samantha sat at her kitchen table watching the clock tick. Her days were spent in pain, or waiting for pain. Kevin would be home soon. Then it would start. The battles. The struggles. The fights.
Sometimes, they just screamed at each other. Sometimes, it got physical.
Dishes would fly. Doors break. Once a knife was pulled. Never the same, always horrible.
How long had she felt his prisoner? It seemed like forever. Years.
She remembered when she was little, her father always chided her for taking in every lost stray. At least now, her father wasn’t around to shake his head in pity for what she’d become. In today’s parlance, a pushover, a victim.
She had just wanted to help Kevin. Now look where she was.
Why didn’t someone abandon him on a mountain top when he was first born? Before he had a name? That’s what the ancients did. To moderns it might seem cruel. But to the survivors, it was actually a mercy. Those ‘ancients’ really had it on the ball.
Samantha examined the pistol which was lying on the table. It was heavy and mysterious. So heavy, in fact, she feared it would be more lethal to throw it at him than to try shooting him with it. Could she aim it?
She reminded herself to take a practice course one of these days.
She chambered a shell. She liked the sound of it. The mechanical certainty it provided. Cold and rigid.
She knew it wouldn’t come to that, but she wanted that option available. Samantha was determined to make a change. It had been too long, living like this. She couldn’t do this anymore.
The things he would say to her. The demands. The liberties. The screaming. No more.
When he walks into the room, everything else must cease. It must be about him and his insatiable desires. Food. Attention. Whatever.
When he put her in the hospital, she thought that would be the end. But it was only the beginning for her. She saw no end in sight, if she didn’t act. Maybe not even then.
Samantha would hear about women coming out of the hospital and then not leave the abuser. It was incomprehensible. How…
