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.