Monsters
by Stephen Graham Jones
When I was twelve and my parents were doing their usual thing of my dad living in an apartment to teach my mom a lesson, my mom finding something new of his each day to leave out on the lawn, I ended up spending three weeks of the summer with my grandmother and her new husband. My mother said she’d traded up for him after Granddad died, and that she deserved it. What she meant was that my grandmother’s new husband had a vacation place in a town that had a beach, and filled with tourists. He’d made his money consulting or something, like I had any idea what that meant. All that mattered to me was that I wasn’t going to be the go-between on phone calls for a while, and that I wasn’t going to be standing at different front doors every few days, one of my parents at the curb, their car in gear, the other in the kitchen thinking up the perfect thing to say across the lawn or sidewalk.
Needless to say, I’d pretty much decided to never get married.
Of course, though, it was summer, and I was twelve, and the world being what it was, a few streets over from my new granddad’s house — I had to call him that, ‘Granddad’ — there was a girl one grade ahead of me but the same age, and we kind of just fell in together the way you do no matter how old you are, when you each understand that this isn’t going to last, that it doesn’t have to matter.
This isn’t about her, though. She doesn’t even need a name here. Call her Elaine, I guess.