When are monsters made?

When Are Monsters Made?

By 

T.L. Ralston

 

 Horror happens after eleven

It emerges like a corpse, risen, 

Manifested in the twilit hour.

It trudges along the periphery

Shambling off the backdrop of the diminished sun, along the horizon's curve.

As your hemisphere's diurnal life dwindles

As owl and opossum and rat and bat 

Skitter and scuttle and flap overhead and underfoot 

And then as even they burn what calories they possess, and succumb to the demands of rest;

The corpse now, there, at the top of the street,

Now rapping at the door,

Now leaking viscous rot, palm pressed up against window pane,

Now whispering.

The monsters are made here, made now,

With the accompaniment of the Bygone,

The rusting shrapnel of days and years set adrift in the inky sea of memory,

The hands broken by toil,

The blood spilt by men misguided,

The guts rotted by liquor, by wine, by beer,

The lungs crisped by tobacco, by chemical, by wildfire,

All the dead comprise a world their own.

Here, at this hour, their messenger speaks a tale all his own.

So you transcribe it; so you must.

You orate, or you paint, or you sculpt,

You commit to art the Things from the Dark.

In this way you make peace with the World of the Dead.

In this way, Death itself makes peace with you.

Digest the stories that drift by on candle-lit balloons.

Drink the tales that sail past on burning longboats. 

Inhale the prose proffered by the centuries dead, blown to bits by blasts spent by nations hellbent on what?

What, but sending droves to the World of the Dead.

By cancer, by bullet, by knife, by arrow;

By hanging, by burning, by crucifix;

By drowning, by stoning, blood eagles, keelhauls;

All dead writhe together on the infinitesimal hereafter.

Make your peace.

I make mine. 

No matter how we strain,

All is revealed on the other side.

The sun crests horizon.

The corpse sinks into soil.

As the macabre hours end and dawn doth set in,

My work concludes for the nonce.

Farewell for now, I say, gazing out toward the garden.

Farewell til the night,

Or until we meet again under the dim glow of Corpselight.