Father is an investment banker. Mother studies The Monster.

Father works in Galveston, Houston, New Orleans. He trades oil. He smells like the dry cleaners, all the time. His hands are dry. He wants the best for me.

Mother is a professor at the University. She studies The Monster - the role of horror in cultural history. She smells like old books and sometimes like someone else's cologne. Her hobby is making lists of things a person can do to be exceptional. She wants the best for me.

I want the best for everyone. I was raised that way. Born in a mansion, looking down all the way to the Hathian slums. Every night as a child sounded like bedtime stories and distant fireworks. Hathian sang me to sleep with sirens and gunfire as much as mother did.

I met The Monster when I was fourteen. Mother had Her court me all my life, telling me of what she was teaching the soft brains at the University. I did not meet Her until I came across pictures of the war in the Balkans she had been collecting for class source material. In a shy pink folder tucked under the files on her desk, there was a picture of a woman split from crotch to chest by a land mine. Under it were images of the Serbian rape camp victims.

And there She was: The Monster.

Seeing Her got my blood singing like tongueless angels. It put mercury and vitriol in my heart. Ghosts in my bones, whispering, pressing, all fetal ectoplasm and constant insistence.

I began to seek Her out: More photographs. More facts. I found a cat, and used a scalpel, some wire and a blow torch to make it look just like the woman in that photo. The Monster felt stronger than ever.

It made me nervous. Mother and Father saw this, and took me to a doctor. He gave me pills. And the pills kept the ghosts entombed in their bones and the vitriol unlit and my blood all shushy and quiet. Everything was very quiet for what now feels like a very long time.

Then it felt too quiet. I had the SATs coming, the AP exams, the senior year Yearbook, Student Council to run and college applications to write. I had to turn the volume up. I stopped taking the pills.

The Monster came back loud and what She said and showed me made it all clear.

I am doing better than ever now. Better in school, at the new University. Better in body; I can hardly sleep at night I have so much energy - I have to vault fences and scale walls and my hand never gets tired with a knife in it. Better in mind, now that The Monster keeps my thoughts rinsed clean with fresh blood.

Mother studied The Monster. I know The Monster. She lives in me, urging me to find her: Knife and rope and strap-on and whip and fire are my tools of discovery. She lives in the flesh congesting the city, and to the city I go. I go to Hathian, where She sang me to sleep every night, only able to rest after I sink into her arms.