Katie Setzer

Monster

May is seven-years old, but today, there is no school due to a gas leak, so she is my teacher. Draw your favorite things. Keep your crayons in rainbow order. I start with her—a smiley face with a circle around it, spirals for her curly hair, a box for her shirt and the word guess. What are you drawing, I ask. Peepers on your own papers, she says, like she’s been doing this for twelve years. I draw the cat, and a heart—Your favorite is ‘favorite’? May will say later, frowning & now she’s drawing the clock above the kitchen sink, the one with Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein printed on its face I bought two Octobers ago to go with the Frankenstein chia pet that Helen gave me. I know it’s really Frankenstein’s Monster, she said after I opened it, like she knew I would care about that sort of thing, But what can you do?

Frankenstein, because after I read The Strange True Tale of Mary Shelley in college, pregnant, I could not stop thinking of the eight days Mary spent in that hotel room, where she gave birth, watching Clara move her tiny pink fist, her body something impossible, the miracle of life—there and real, until the eighth day when she was gone & Percy Shelley, still married to another woman, rubbing the small of Mary’s back, while she considered the ways the creation of life could go wrong—which were numerous, she knew—her own mother had died giving birth to her.

Frankenstein, because my own mother had died, not while giving birth to me, but in a car, at the intersection of Drake and Main (while I was pregnant and thinking of Mary) & the cop said she had probably just been focused on something else & I still have night-thoughts about what the something else was.

At the end of Frankenstein, the scientist dies, and his monster commits suicide on the same page.

More favorites, May says. I draw spaghetti, my purported favorite food. A book, an ice cream cone, a cartoon Pegasus, the Frankenstein chia pet. May is studying my paper, and tells me, I am drawing something that will make you sad. It is a monster, but not a monster. It is not spaghetti. I am worried she is drawing me as a gelatinous pool of red sludge—The Blob. A Minotaur? A dragon? Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I am shocked that I am one unified thing & I haven’t left an arm in a grocery aisle with the bulk potatoes. No, no, May laughs and shows me her paper where she’s drawn a red circle with a slash-through like those no smoking signs, but instead of a disembodied lit cigarette, inside is a green man with pink bolts protruding from his neck ready to devour a floating plate of spaghetti.