My lover and I do not like conflict. We have worked very hard, sometimes denied ourselves and each other of everything, in order to deflect discovery by real trouble.
But secrets are the trouble-seeds of virulent petri-dishes,, the greater the secret the more potent the bug and faster its replication.

Go ahead. Imagine a laboratory.

Imagine the doctor-man between my love and me as Frankenstein’s monster-maker and imagine his creation not as the dancing with top hat Mel Brook’s version played by Peter Boyle- imagine Shelly’s original monster, and hear his berserker cracked voice demanding a mate from his creator.

When denied, imagine the collage gone wrong’s multiplied wrath and feel those hammer and tong hands go to work disassembling his maker’s brother, and then snuffing the light from his creator’s newly-wed bride.

Think of me as Dr. Frankenstein’s second terrible creation. Think of me as the intended, the promised inamorata of his first, catastrophic experiment. Think of me as the product of the monster’s rib, a newly minted Eve.

Think now of the monster happily ransacking the laboratory for his favorite after-pulling-the-wings-off his bride snack. But instead of rice crackers and low-cal-jam, he finds (hidden behind the bottles of Monster-Viagra, and the Jumbo Monster Tooth Whitener) the petri-dishes of our fermenting big and the small secrets. There in the wisps of sub-zero vapor, scraping ice off the hand-written labels, my keeper, the monster, discovers on the frigid shelf: the virus of true, a culture of love, a speckle of hope, and glowing green agar of Monster Bane.

 

Yes, you see now, don’t you? My lover is an innocent. But I am made of the monster’s own bone, animated by the same hot-white fire that created him. The Monster-bane is my very own secret. Created from my own spilled blood, it is
a deadly virus.

Together, my lover and I did not like conflict, but now- separated by my fear of discovery, abandoned-in my unexplained terror of a monstrous vengeance snuffing out her precious life- my lover, who was way smarter than even I gave credit, denies herself everything to keep real trouble from discovering me. And alone with the monster, I weary of this half-life. My lover’s loneliness is also a constant torment.

Now, imagine the Monster-Groom has discovered my lover’s whereabouts and he has carried her up the face of a snow-crusted mountain with the intention of crushing her and, with her, forever destroying my beating heart.

Imagine her struggling to see if I too am found, if I too am in trouble.

Imagine her fear.

Imagine her relief when she does not see me.

Imagine me following.

 

---

 

Lesley C Weston lives on a Sweet meadow surrounded by surly trees. She writes fiction, and reads to her large and overly anxious genius dog. Her stories may be found in Narrative Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, The MacGuffin, Ars Medica, Caketrain, Opium Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, and Per Contra, among others.