Their mom doesn’t believe that there’s a monster, but their uncle has seen it, or at least a portion of it. He’d caught a glimpse of its oily shadow one night as it ran across his lawn. It had been a summer night, and he had been sitting on the porch, smoking a cigarette (this part was a secret from their mom) when he had heard rustling in the garden. He had tiptoed over, breath held, hoping to catch at least a glimpse of the thing he shared his property with.

The doorbell rings and they race to the front door, scrambling over one another to get there first. Their uncle is grabbing pizza boxes from a delivery boy, and the entryway smells like grease and cheese and they bounce on their toes in excitement because it’s the second night in a row that they’ve had pizza for dinner and their mom hasn’t asked them to eat a vegetable all day.

They find a dead cockroach with its molting body and tiny, twitching antennae. They find a marble that looks like an eye, both too afraid to touch it until the younger one accidentally bumps it with his toe and hits the baseboard of the room with the clink of something made of glass.

The donuts on their plates sit half-eaten, the soft dough squashed by their fingers, crusted sugar falling across their plates. One of them chews at the ends of his hair, leaving sticky spikes clinging to his head. The other one licks the frosting off of each donut until his tongue turns red, then blue, then, the dark purple of a bruise.

Waiting for them is a barren outcrop of rocks inhabited by pirates whom they have to fight and defeat, pirates whose faces remind them (slightly) of their dad’s. After the pirates have been conquered, they race one another back to the bottom, feet flying down the giant metal steps, shoes squeaking and belching underneath their feet.

One of them dares the other to jump higher, so they both sink low into their knees, pressing their weight down into the balls of their feet before they rebound higher and higher each time, both certain that they will poke through the clouds.

They are focusing on the smell of sulfur, the popping sparks that land around their feet. They are trying to ignore Mommy and Daddy, the words that they are or are not saying swallowed by the smoke. Tonight, they are not yelling, but are instead whispering in mean voices above their heads.

Each boy has frosting collecting in the corners of their mouths and melted candy coating their cheeks. Breakfast. “Have you been eating the candy?” she asks them. She can’t help it, neither boy would think of her as the fun parent.

When she opens them again, her son hands her a biscuit like a prize. Good job breathing through that one, Mom! Have a treat! It’s sticky and buttery and she is so thankful for the woman whose hands delicately cut this from dough.

As she hikes, her breath hangs in the air in front of her, small icicles of oxygen she wants to break apart and suck on, the way she did when she was a kid. She can hear the small voice of her mother creeping along her spine, the mean laugh, her mother’s words hard and sharp in her stomach.

“Da, da, da,” he babbles even though she is the one who is with him, the one who is always with him. She is the one who scoops him up whenever he falls and rights him back to his feet. She is the one who is out of bed in the middle of the night, the one who checks the warmth of his head with the soft part of her lips.

She finds herself breathless, the kind where she’s sipping through a straw and the straw is the size of a pinhead and she’s sucking and sucking, but nothing comes in. Her lungs are constantly hungry; her body is starving itself from the inside out.

Now, the surgeon comes in wearing his white coat, the smart peek of a tie underneath, the gleam of his stethoscope swinging like a clock around his neck. All she can think is how cold it must feel against her son’s small chest.

Her son climbs into the bed, his body bouncing onto the mattress beside her, and then, he’s on top of her, so heavy and solid. He’s saying good morning, but she doesn’t want to wake up, doesn’t want to open her eyes, doesn’t want the sweet dark of night to be over.

Even though he can’t understand what his mother is saying, she lowers her voice as she speaks, her words quicker and stickier than usual.

The thing now hangs limp on her shoulders, framing her soaked shirt, now see through from rain. She plucks at the wet fabric where it sticks to the roll of her tummy above the waistband of her jeans, hyper-aware of the way she must look and the way her body is shaking for warmth. The way the icy wind slicing through her wet clothing and sticking instead to her very skin.

He tries to place his hand where he saw his brother place his hand, place his foot where his brother had placed his. He even whispers the words that his brother shouted to him and Mommy as he climbed, mouthing them quietly so that his brother won’t know that he is copying. 

It was the kind of morning where she couldn’t tell what time it was; the sky outside a roiling dark cloud. Lights turned on in every room. It was hurricane season in the south: a dread feeling you can’t shake for months.

The too-sweet smell of pastry hits them as they open the door. Her son runs to the counter, bouncing from foot to foot, impatient for it to be his turn to tell the woman at the register which donuts he wants, impatient to taste the sweet hit of frosting on his tongue.

And then, the searing relief of nightfall. The sun dipping and dipping into the horizon, the excuse to go to their room and shower and change out of their dripping suits. Shuffling the boys into a quick bath, trying to scrub the sunscreen out of their hair, her and her husband flipping a coin for the first shower.