The storm came across the water, a wall of rain pushing toward shore and obscuring everything beyond it. Soon, it swept across the yard and hammered the large, glass windows.

Will took another sip of his tonic water and orange juice cocktail and welcomed the sound of the precipitation. Yesterday had been sunny, and that hadn’t seemed right. Not for a day when so much had gone wrong. This was better. At least now, the weather was matching his mood.

He sat down in his green armchair and looked at the stuff of his life: the handmade Turkish rug, the coffee table they’d made together out of an old door and a pane of glass, the series of monoliths comprising the home entertainment center, all of them quiet now, powered off.

Why wasn’t he drinking yet? He’d always imagined that if Mary died, he’d start drinking again, yet here he was, sitting alone with a non-alcoholic drink in his hand. Was it hope–some idiotic idea that she might come walking back in the door?

She’s gone, pal, he thought to himself. I don’t know what you’re waiting for.

But he’d done nothing. He’d prepared food, he’d eaten, he’d slept. But he hadn’t turned on the television, opened a book, or played any music since yesterday morning. He sat and stared. A day had passed. He continued to sit and stare, numb and frozen as the storm intensified, shaking his house, and his house withstood it,

staying right where it was.

“That wasn’t what I meant at all, John.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No, it wasn’t!”

“Well, what did you mean, then?”

“I want a program like this, but I don’t want this one, you understand?”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Don’t make me smack you.”

“But how am I supposed to do it? This is exactly what you want, by your own definition. What would be wrong with just using this one?”

“I don’t like the instructor, ok? Her e-mail grammar is atrocious.”

“Her e-mail grammar?”

“Her fucking e-mail grammar!”

John sighed. “She made a mistake. You should give her a second chance. Besides, why does a spin instructor need to be a good grammarian?”

His boss shook his head, swiveled in his chair, and stared out the window. He steepled his fingers. “I try so goddamn hard.”

“What were you e-mailing your spin instructor?”

“She asked me out.”

“Really?”

“Fine, I asked her out. That’s not against the rules, is it?”

“No, that’s fine.”

“Well, it’s not. She turned me down, and now I can’t go back there. She’s hot. Hot as hell. But I can’t go back there. Just another hot woman I’ll probably never see again.”

“You make it sound like such a tragedy.”

“It is a fucking tragedy.”

“What did she screw up?”

“What?”

“Grammatically. What did she screw up?”

“Oh. She wrote that I was a nice guy,” his boss said. “I mean, she wrote, ‘Ben, I think your a really nice guy.’ You know, with the, what do you call it?”

“Oh, the possessive instead of the contraction?”

“Exactly.”

John grimaced. “That’s awful.”

His boss shook his head. “I know, right? So bad.”

The fake blond walked just ahead of the fat man on the sidewalk that morning. The fake blond was skinny, attractive; the fat man was bald and had a misshapen nose that made his face interesting but not attractive. The fake blond was in sales; the fat man was a successful character actor.

The day felt equally hot to both, and it caused them both to sweat profusely as they walked, yet their thoughts were rather different.

For the fat man, his perspiration was suffered most acutely between the wrinkled loaves of his ass. He felt the rivulets form and the water drip into the crotch of his boxer-shorts, and he imagined his moist, shit-smeared posterior in the most negative of ways. He grew quickly paranoid that everyone on the street around him could smell his filth, and what he wanted most was the coolness of an air-conditioned bathroom and the ability to wipe himself clean again.

He didn’t know it, but his ass was being stared at by the fake blond woman walking behind him. She too felt the discomfort of the day’s heat, but she felt her sweat mostly around her breasts and the swath of bare flesh where the sun was hitting her back and her shoulder-blades. Unlike the fat man, she relished the sensation. Being regarded as beautiful so often, she found every moment of filthiness refreshing—mainly because it helped her to feel like she was part of the rest of humanity.

She stared at the gray pants of the man in front of her with a feeling of satisfaction, for that is how the beautiful eat the ugly.

Whatever there was between them, it was long gone. Freddy couldn’t look at the monster anymore without thinking about what it had done to the young boy, and the monster couldn’t look back at Freddy without feeling like it was being chastised for eating too much peppercorn salami at a dinner party.

The monster reflected on its chains and held them in its claw.

“I understand that it’s just what’s in your nature,” Freddy said. “So, really, you shouldn’t blame yourself. You’re just being you.”

The monster had nothing to say, as it couldn’t form words. Its language was only grunts and cute mewling sounds that it used to make people believe it was cute and not hideous. It made neither of these noises now.

“I know I dragged you here from that swamp, too, and I know that it wasn’t what you wanted. Maybe if I’d left you where I found you, none of this would have happened,” Freddy said. “So, you see, from a certain point of view … this is all my fault, isn’t it?”

The monster was tired of this man and his desire to absolve the creature of all its sins. It was just another way the human was anthropomorphizing the monster. The monster was a monster. The monster knew that. Why did this pesky man have such trouble with it?

The monster would have recited the story of the frog and the scorpion to the human if the monster had been able to use language. It was a funny thing being so well read without the means to speak or write, but that was how it had always been for the monster: a brilliant mind distilled through powerful and unceasing hunger. It was a dilly of a curse, really. The monster wasn’t even sure where the reading voice in his head came from (it sounded like a gentle soul—bit of a tenor, really; it was a voice you could get bad news from and still feel like smiling). Every time he bent eyeball to text, there it was.

“It was the best of times,” the voice would read, “It was the worst of times.” At no point would there be a sibilant ‘s.’

“So I guess that’s it, then,” Freddy said. He looked at the monster, and the monster could see tears in his eyes. This had clearly affected him.

The monster dropped its chain to the floor and waited. Any minute now, the man would unlock the monster with promises to return the monster to its swamp. The monster could see this coming, as it could also see itself consuming Freddy and ripping into his salty flesh. The monster was looking forward to it, and it realized that it would forever be grateful that it couldn’t communicate beyond its two sounds. It would never end up like Freddy: pouring the internal out to the external world, and making everything sad and pathetic in the process.

The demon threw the decapitated baby on the floor and said, “Your point?”

The human in the room found this quite disconcerting. “I really didn’t think it was going to come to that.”

Five days ago, he’d been eating ice cream in the park with his mother, who’d wanted nothing more than to explain the virtues of some magic hooks she’d bought from the home shopping channel.

“You should buy them. You’d see,” his mother had said. “But you don’t care about how cluttered your apartment gets. That’s the problem with you.”

Not the only problem, Harry thought now. I also let babies die in front of me.