On the trail of a monster
Hunting monsters is something dangerous that should never be done.
So of course I tried it.
The thing about finding monsters is that it is a lot like trying to follow gravity, or keeping time from moving backwards. You are guaranteed to win because it is just the way things work. Monsters hunt people. To hunt down a monster, stand still. If you see him before he sees you, and you are fast, you may be able to get a shot in.
Quick reflexes are the key, that and a really big gun properly aimed at his stomach.
Never shoot a monster in the head, they have no brains being mindless creatures who live of the thoughts of their prey. Do not aim for the heart, because obviously they are heartless. Aim for their stomach. Without a stomach they cannot digest people anymore. And if a monster cannot eat people, it has lost it’s purpose in life.
Usually when you shoot a monster and destroy his stomach, he will become so depressed and disinterested in life in general that she will sit down and slowly turn into dirt.
Of course, sometimes they get pissed off at whoever shot them, or whoever is close by, and will first decapitate, maim, and basically kill anything within earshot before falling into their catatonic stupor.
If you shoot a monster and it decides to exploit option two, you are either dead or had the foresight to bring along several rounds and are busy in the process of shooting the monsters legs and arms off.
Standing alone, under a ice breathing sun whose glittering shards were flung down on me and shattered into a trillion pieces on the soft smooth ultra-white snow. The wind whispers, tree branches mumble, and I hear a creaky crunch under my feet as I sway side to side. Alone in the middle of a field. Not another person for 3 miles, not a tree within 2, not a road within 1. Me, the sun, the snow, the monster.
It doesn’t take more than 3 Mississippi’s for me to change my mind. The heavens opened up, I had a vision, a revelation, an epiphany, to kill is wrong I decided.
Killing is wrong.
Especially when it is me that is being killed.
Quickly I decide that what I need now is speed. Fast, quick, now, zoom. I must flee and how. But how, and to where, ar…
…and I blink again because I think I have gone blind. But this is now blindness that has struck me now, I realize as I make out the shape of the big dipper, follow in up to the north star, and watch as the moon streams past. I must have fallen asleep, but for how long.
I laugh as I think of this, this ridiculous question, such a typical movie plot device, even before them, in that great American myth of the guy who falls asleep and wakes up 140 years later or whatever.
Then I realize that I cannot move my legs, and that they seem to have grown into the ground. My arms are high above my head, 30 feet above my head, my skin is thick and brown and I have green leaves and I sway in the wind. Birds rest and nest on my head and among my branches.
I am subtle and euphoric, gloomily optimistic, 100 hundred years old an oak on the prairies and happily steadfast in my wintertime hibernation.
The monster will never find me now, the monsters are gone.
My roots reach out for miles in all directions, reaching towards the others who have vegetated, the others who have escaped from the monsters, intertwined, a network of synapses that reach across the continent, before email, and after, there always is tree mail. The telepathic slow motion transmission, not in words of a language, that virus that plagues us. Something true and unmaskable, the direct penetration of one entities thoughts into anothers.
Needless to say, this high degree of truthfulness means that there is very little small talk, no white lies sugared up to make us all feel at ease.
Of course, this is why humans can rarely understand what the trees are saying, if they even stop long enough to realize that they are talking. People don’t want the truth most of the time. The truth can hurt.
There is an important distinction between talking truthfully, and possessing the “Truth. The Truth, the real Philosopher’s Stone, that unobtainable thing, the ultimate knowledge of all that there is to know, is probably not even for real.
I don’t sing songs. Most trees don’t sing songs. Trees like to hum. Humming is a lot easier, and you don’t need to know the words, just as long as you have the general idea. Tree songs are very long, 3 to 4 days, up to a year or several. That is just because we have a lot of patience (we are not going anywhere anytime soon) and tend to become absent minded after a while and start a different melody.
One time a farmer stopped his tractor close to me and got out and sat in my shade. It was very hot and kind of windy, with the burning black dirt scorching anything on it. But my shade was cool, and I sang some pretty cool jazzy type song and soon the farmer nodded off comfortably.
He started to real get into a deep sleep. Too deep. I was worried he would start setting down roots. I didn’t think he would want to be a tree. He had a bunch of kids that I had seen a couple of times, and there were no monsters after him, not that I had ever seen. So I started to yell at him. Then I screamed, dropped a few leaves on him, but he slept.
He did wake up, a couple of hours later. Refreshed, he drove off in the tractor.
Being a tree gives one a lot of time to think about things. Like now, when I realize how fitting it is that this will all one day get printed out on paper, which comes from trees (see, this is an educational story, paper is made from trees, honest).
The farmer came back a few days later. With him he brought a chainsaw, and as the teeth cut into me and I shook and shivered and screamed and yelled and…
…blinked and realized I was staring at a strange looking tree that I had cut down to make fire wood. The tree was old and dry and burnt bright and hot. Cooking hotdogs over the fire, I cracked open Mr. J. Beam’s fine Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey. The only thing stupider than monster hunting is monster hunting whilst sober, a mistake I was not about to make again.
The hotdogs were good and the Beam even better and between the two it was guaranteed to be a lot of blood shed tonight. So I prayed to a god that never existed that it would not be me, and I prayed to the devil to just let me be, and I prayed to a lot of things that night, to the sun in hiding and the moon brightly shining and the snow on the ground and the clouds in the sky and the wind all around, all of the those things that we just don’t know why. And for some reason it helped to steady me, and another drink did not hurt either.
At about this point, I began to feel like Nick Cave, like some dark version of a old time gunslinger. A knight in darkened armour. I also began to feel drowsy and weezy, so another drink followed another and off we went.
Monsters hide in the strangest places. Places where you never expect them to hid. Places where nobody looks. Which is why they have survived so long, being here before us, they will be here after us, they will not thrive, but they survive.
Elementary school may seem the most obvious place to look for monsters. Being the most obvious, it is obvious that there should be none their (because they hide in the least obvious places.). And since it is so obviously obvious, obviously there must be a few there because everyone thinks there are none their. Truth ( that nasty fucker) be told, there are some monsters in the schools, but these tend to be minor monsters, mostly less dangerous than the ones that are beamed into our minds by the government, but that is another story entirely.
Good places to look are behind light switches, where they like to hid till the lights are turned off, in breakfast cereals where they pop out and chew at your mind while still asleep you vulnerably eat whatever is in front of you.