The Monster

Dear Eugene,

I saw the Monster.  The loneliest, out of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

He (or was it a she?) circled me and the sheepish dog I was walking.  I asked him to leave.  I asked with a very loud voice.  He answered with his steady pace, no faster than before my request.

No slower.

Matter-of-fact steady.

I first saw his silhouette walked out of a gully of the shadow of death, poised, nonchalant.  Ready to do what he was determined to do.  Ready to give a reason to what needs no explanation.

"Where is your leash?" I asked.

"I have no master," he said.

No mother.

No family.

If there's a Creator, I've lost sight of him.

Or he did me.

Just let me be.

I again asked him to leave.  I hated that he could hear the terror in my voice.  By now I've picked up my sheep.  Very wet feet.  He whispered to me that he wanted to meet the Monster up close, get to know him better, know him as a person, break down barrier, hostility.  Possible peace.  Seek understanding.

"You don't know what you are asking."

Glenn Gould hummed very quietly in his recording of Goldberg Variations.  His teacher tried to stop him to no avail.  Gould's father said ever since he was a child he would hum when people expected him to cry.

"Never-cry wolf, is that you?" I asked the Monster.  "I could hear your hum.  And I detest it.  It makes me sick."

It made me shake.

"I don't know what you're talking about.  It doesn't matter anyhow.  I am in bad need, as you can see.  You can give up what you can afford to give up, you can afford the good to remedy my bad, and you know that."

I turned around, ran, stopped, looked back.

Still there.

"If there is a home," he said, "take me there too."

"There is no home," I explained, "for you."

"Why?"

Earlier in the day I walked around town.  I will take only one picture, I said to myself, just one and no more.  The road not taken is no road at all.

This is the one.


Yours, Alex

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