MONSTERS

The beach was cold that year: the kelp like crushed newspaper underfoot. Gin was dressed as an astronaut, in a silver crinoline jumpsuit with odd buttons sewn haphazardly down its front. Under his ice cream bucket helmet, he made sounds with his mouth: motors and engines and gushing galactic winds. Every so often his oversized gumboots would stick to the slick foreshore and he would nearly fall over, only steadying himself at the last moment with a strange bird-like movement of his arms. Mostly, though, he was used to the conditions, and sent through crackly radio messages about gravity and atmosphere. He was conquering this new world.

Gin enjoyed the constant reinvention of the beach, the way the tides created a nascent planet for him twice a day: the small joys of unmapped terrain and fresh alien souvenirs. Every new world needed a hero. This morning he was Captain Marvel, but this would soon have to change. Beyond him, further up towards the scrub of the headland, his older sister skulked like a winter shadow, holding a pair of thongs in her right hand as if they were a weapon. She was weaving in and out of the sea-strewn timber that monsters sometimes dragged up and made homes out of. The day before, Gin had even found one. He had forgotten to tell Audrey.

“Audrey,” he shouted, with his hands in a dramatic cup around his mouth, “there’s a monster up there!”

Audrey didn’t respond, but the wind caught up her skirt and it billowed out in front of her, as though if she had jumped, it would have carried her along and down the beach. This thought both excited and bothered Gin.

“Audrey,” he shouted again. “Audrey!”

Audrey made a sound with her mouth that, had Gin been able to hear it, would have reminded him of a heavy book hitting a wooden floor. She kicked her bare feet deep into the sand, welcoming the jamming pain as it wedged up under her toenails. It was soft grey squeaky sand: the worst kind. It always appeared in winter, when the beach turned cold and constantly felt slightly damp, like clothes that wouldn’t dry. Things were always worse in winter. The sky turned to stainless steel; the waves slowed to an unnatural pulse, catching and missing each other in the wrong places, colliding spitefully. Even up on the headland, where the air always blew freshly, there was now just lonely silence. Winter had come suddenly, stalking unsuspecting summer spaces, sewing them up impalpably and ruthlessly. Thoughts bunched up, movements tied themselves together; everything was wrong.

“Guess what Audrey, guess what?” Gin approached like a beached fish struggling to find water, flapping to keep the gumboots on his feet.

Audrey crossed her arms so the long ends of her jumper stuck out where her hands should have been. “What is it?” she said.

“This is where the monster is. Did I tell you I saw one? Yesterday?”

“What monster?”

“In the—um, castwood. I saw one.”

“You mean driftwood.”

“Yeah. I saw a monster there.”

The wind made a whistling sound as it went through the holes in Gin’s plastic helmet. Audrey imagined it went through his head as well.

“What did the monster look like?” she asked.

“Big. Like a person, but big.”

Audrey started walking again. “Looks like it’s gone now. Probably sleeping under the sand.”
Gin followed his sister, nodding sagely at her comment, adding it to his impressive compendium of monster knowledge.

“That’s what the squeaking is,” Audrey continued, “under the sand—that’s your feet touching their skin.”

“Are they asleep?”

“Yes. That’s why you have to walk softly.”

Gin did an unwittingly amusing impression of himself, slow motion, carefully measuring each heavy-booted step against an imagined lesser gravity. “Is this right?” he asked.

Audrey gave him her most serious look. “Perfect,” she replied.

ALL IS ALL

She’s an almost perfect vegan chef, and she cooks you something swimming in sauce. You dip your fork in nervously, and as it disappears beneath the swirly bubbles of semi-solid ghee, you think you get a sense of what it’s like to drown. The worlds above and below the waterline inverting like some magnetic switch and you’re breathing thick water and the sky invites you to dive right in.

Then she’s tucking hair behind her ears, but it’s the cheekbones, baby cottonbud cheekbones, that you want to see from closer up. You want to be at those cheekbones, arriving at them like they’re a destination and then you are, sweeping bowls and candles with your arm and the crash is clean, and nothing shatters. It’s all arms and a quick view of a skylight before you hammer your teeth into hers with the pure romantic violence of an urgent kiss.

She tastes of nothing more solid than rice paper, dissolving under your tongue. But everywhere else, well, it’s klaxons screaming from a midnight silence; her body is one big heart-stopping shock, slippery and solid so mighty real. You feel the sensation of her fingernails at your shoulder, and her hairclip flails at your eyes, unstuck and desperate. The hallway is a series of washing-machine spins as you slam against the wallpaper, with hardly time to watch its pattern repeating.

Her hands fumble at the doorhandle and as you try to help it seems that this is something no two humans have ever tried before. The wriggling latch suddenly unhooks and you’re in her bedroom, shredding clothes with inevitability so expected it actually hurts. The darkness you expect is not there. Light streams in from some unseen streetlamp, picking up the corners and edges of her room. The curves and folds of her body. You see those parts of her so exposed and you watch a red rash swarm up over her breastbone and through her throat making you think hopelessly of heartburn. Then you push through her hair and in the fragile skull beneath you tell yourself you feel all her thoughts moving. Then you kiss again, slower, tongues more like one muscle than two.

Everything else dissolves. Just you. You’re there, an echo of the body beneath you. Her face is translucent. Her skin nothing but a translator for a thin pulse. Her hair thin and light, invisible in movement like a thousand knives showing only their edges.
You’re on your back. She rolls on top of you. The earth becomes the air, and you’re breathing thick water, and you dive right in.

THESPS

Jonny is getting high on fresh printer's ink, so I know I have a few minutes free. I roll my Rs out onto the page in front of me, counting them. Cracking open my lexical piggy-bank. Jonny keeps saying, "Arg, right in the duodenum!" and I know then this is his Big Line for the day, his jumping-off point to greatness.

He has three auditions today, and will probably nail all three. I have had fourteen successful auditions in my entire life, including ones I went to under duress as a burgeoning child star. I am Max Entere, he of the cherubic blood-bloom cheeks. I am that boy who held that candle in that television ad looking at you beseechingly to donate to prostate cancer research. Yes, the why isn't daddy coming home? kid. That is pretty much where my career has stayed.

Jonny wears a beaded skullcap in public and actually owns three separate sets of bongos. Jonny had a walk-on part in this country's most popular drama, the one with the police officers who work as vets as well. Jonny has invented a different handshake for everyone he knows, and some extras for strangers. I have mastered every exercise in the entire oeuvre of The Complete Voice Exercises for Professional Actors. I buy expensive imported New York newspapers concerning professional entertainment news.

Jonny will be famous one day. Of this he is sure and so, unfortunately, am I.

Theatre is dead.