The Children on the Hill
Jennifer McMahon
For all the monsters of my childhood, real and imagined
I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
The Monster
August 15, 2019
HER SMELL SENDS me tumbling back through time to before.
Before I knew the truth.
It’s intoxicating, this girl’s scent. She smells sweet with just a touch of something tangy and sharp, like a penny held on your tongue.
I can smell the grape slushy she had this afternoon, the cigarettes she’s been sneaking, the faint trace of last night’s vodka （pilfered from her daddy’s secret bottle kept down in the boathouse—I’ve watched them both sneak out to take sips from it）。
She smells dangerous and alive.
And I love her walk—the way each step is a bounce like she’s got springs at the bottoms of her feet. Like if she bounces high enough, she’ll go all the way up to the moon.
The moon.
Don’t look at the moon, full and swollen, big and bright.
Wrong monster. I am no werewolf.
Though I tried to be once.
Not long after my sister and I saw The Wolf Man together, we found a book on werewolves with a spell in it for turning into one.
“I think we should do it,” my sister said.
“No way,” I told her.
“Don’t you want to know what it feels like to change?” she asked.
We sneaked out into the woods at midnight, did a spell under the full moon, cut our thumbs, drank a potion, burned a candle, and she was right—it was an exquisite thrill, imagining that we were turning into something so much more than ourselves. We ran naked and howling through the trees, pretending ferns were wolfsbane and eating them up.
We thought we might become the real thing, not like Lon Chaney Jr., with the wigs and rubber snout and yak hair glued to his face （my sister and I read that in a book too—“poor yaks,” we said, giggling, guffawing about how bad that hair must have smelled）。 When nothing happened that night, we were so disappointed. When we didn’t sprout fur and fangs or lose our minds at the sight of the moon. When we went back home and swore to never speak of what we’d done as we pulled on our pajamas and crawled into our beds, still human girls.
“Can you guess what I am?” I ask the girl now. I don’t mean to. The words just come shooting out like sparks popping up from a fire.
“Uh,” she says, looking at me all strange. “I don’t know. A ghost? Someone who was once a human bean?” And that’s just how she says it. Bean. Like we’re all just baked beans in a pot, or maybe bright multicolored jelly beans, each a different flavor.
I’d be licorice. The black ones that get left at the bottom of the bag. The ones no one can stand the taste of.
I shift from one foot to the other, bits of my disguise clanking, rattling, the hair from the tangled wig I wear falling into my eyes.
I love this girl so much right now. All that she is. All that I will never be. All that I can never have.
And mostly, what I love is knowing what’s coming next: knowing that I will change her as I’ve changed so many others.
I am going to save this girl.
“When do I get my wish?” she asks now.
“Soon,” I say, smiling.