Brule had a monster.

No one mentioned it. It is, after all, impolite to talk about monsters.

It formed slowly, growing as she did. Her parents did not even think to fret, mistaking it for one of childhood’s transient monsters. But this monster was no small thing that could be safely ignored until the maturity of adulthood washed it away. This monster had been with Brule from the beginning and had no intention of leaving before the girl drew her final breath.

It is difficult to say what monsters look like. After all, no one will talk about them. People prefer to pretend they don’t exist. For Brule, they looked like deep shadows, anchored off the body of their host.  Each one a parasite, leeching energy to sustain itself.

There was a man down the street from Brule whose monster was so large he could barely walk with the weight of it. Its tendrils were sunk deep into the skin of his shoulder, where he had lost an arm in some forgotten war. He had a haunted look on his face, his skin pale and paper-thin. Brule often wondered what had happened to the arm. What about it had been so horrible that it had spawned a monster so dark and huge. Had the monster always been so big, or had the years of pain and nightmares made it so?

She wondered if her monster would consume her like that.

When she was little, Brule could ignore the monster easily. It was very dark but small, and it anchored itself in the middle of her back. She could feel it sometimes reaching tendrils inside her body. Wrapping its coldness around her heart, her lungs. She felt it when she cried. When she yelled. When the world seemed dark and cruel. But mostly it left her alone, only taking enough of her happiness to keep itself alive.

If she bent her elbow awkwardly, the way you have to if you want to reach the middle of your back, she could touch it. Her hand went right through it, but it felt greasy and ice-cold. It felt like despair. It was a horrible feeling. She understood why people avoided them.

When she was a teenager, she noticed one day that she could see the monster over her shoulder. It had grown. But she didn’t think much of it. After all, she was in high school, and having a monster was all the rage. It was a symbol of depth and intellect. No one talked about them, but they would look at hers with hungry eyes.

She felt him more often now. His tendrils were everywhere. Her stomach. Her heart. Her lungs. Her brain. They were thin and unobtrusive when she was happy. But she was a teenager. She was rarely happy. When things were especially bad, the tendrils would swell and stretch, painfully constricting around her organs.

Brule knew that the physical pain was an illusion. That the monsters didn’t feed on anything so tangible as organs. It was the emotions that sustained them. And whether the monster grew in response to her awful feelings or if his growth caused her awful feelings she couldn’t say.

She almost asked. But even touching on the subject was so taboo that she found herself flushing and spewing excuses before she even got to the question.

Brule’s best friend, Marcie, had developed a small monster. She was quite proud of it. It protruded from her left forearm where an angry Rottweiler had bitten her as a freshman. She liked to fold her arms across her chest to show off the small inky parasite.

It was crass of her to be so obvious about it, but no one said anything. She had a monster. That was her ticket to the in crowd. One day when they were walking down the street, a German Shepherd pulled at his leash and barked at them. Marcie went pale and stumbled backward, her monster engorging on the fear until it was the size of a basketball. The crowd laughed. Brule didn’t find it terribly funny, but she joined in.

Marcie didn’t walk with them any more after that. Brule felt bad, but didn’t know what to do. You couldn’t talk about the monsters, so what could she say. It was summer vacation. She didn’t see Marcie again for several months. When she came back to school in the fall, her monster was gone.

Brule walked up to her. She didn’t like things being unresolved. “I’m sorry,” she said awkwardly.

Marcie crossed her arms. “I didn’t like it anyways,” she said, sidestepping the apology. She paused. “You know there are doctors that make them go away.”

Brule stood transfixed as Marcie walked away. It hadn’t occurred to her that monsters could be removed. She had grown so used to hers. She couldn’t imagine life without him.

Marcie never spoke to her again.

The summer after high school ended was the first time Brule realized how much the monster was taking from her. Without the distraction of omnipresent homework and tests and college applications, despair seemed to set in heavily every day. Every sidelong glance that could—without too much imagination—be interpreted as a rejection caused the monster to rise up. Every time the ending to a book turned tragic, the tendrils dug deeper. Every word from her mother’s mouth seemed to strike a chord of anger and rebellion and the monster swelled.

College would be different, she promised herself. Childhood monsters don’t last. Everyone says so. They’re just a phase. College would be different.

College wasn’t any different. If anything, it was worse. She had put it on such a high pedestal that it could never have lived up to her expectations. There was no sudden end to the despair, the crushing loneliness. There was no sudden epiphany in which she figured out who she was meant to be. The end of college loomed like a sheer cliff, like the veil of death. She couldn’t fathom what lay beyond.

The monster grew and grew.

After graduation, Marcie did something. A job. She could barely remember what it was half the time. The monster was so huge that supporting him took all of her energy. She could barely see for crying. She couldn’t look at another person without feeling a sting of rejection. So she kept her eyes on the ground and plodded forward.

She wondered, more and more, why she bothered to get out of bed. All she did was trudge to work. Trudge back home. And then collapse in a fit of exhaustion and tears until sleep claimed her.

Brule looked her hands. Disgusting things. She could almost see the tendrils, there, in her fingertips. There was no part of her that wasn’t His. Breathing was a struggle. Moving was a struggle. She just wanted a way for it to stop.

She thought of Marcie, and how her monster had disappeared all those years ago. She thought of finding one of those doctors. But their job—their actual job—was to speak of monsters. No wonder they worked out of dark alleys.

For one does not speak of monsters.

Brule rarely slept. Hardly ate. Never smiled. And still the monster grew. That’s when Brule knew she was dying.

People saw her, on the street, and averted their eyes. Her parents pretended to believe her assertions that everything was okay. Her friends faded away, uncomfortable around her but unwilling to say anything. Because one does not speak of monsters.

Later, when people asked what happened to their daughter, her parents would only look away. They would say she wasn’t strong enough. They would say how she had given up.

They would never blame the monster who swallowed her whole—and everyone who watched it happen.

Sarah Bricault has a PhD in neurobiology and currently works as a postdoc in that field. Her fascination with the mind and how it processes information often finds itself in her poetry, as do themes related to mental health. Sarah’s work can be found in Brown Bag Online, Beyond Words, Serotonin Poetry, High Shelf Press, and elsewhere. For more information on Sarah, check out SarahBricault.com.

Header image precarious by Alan Bern