The Monitor came to me when I was 14 years old. I awoke in my bed. I couldn’t move. My eyelids felt stuck, like the barn doors after a heavy rain had swelled the wood. A weight pressed on my diaphragm.
This paralysis had happened before. The panic encircled my ribcage, crushed my lungs. I heaved my eyes open.
This time was different.
A huge black cat sat on my chest. Its circular eyes glowed bright enough to form a halo of red around its head that gradually merged into the humid darkness of my room. Somewhere in that ink, water dripped from the ceiling into a plastic bucket I had placed there yesterday. Plink. Plink. Plink.
Panic rammed at the back of my throat. The cat’s fluffy tail swished back and forth in slow motion. Then it began to speak.
fear not. i am the monitor. i am here to make a correction.
Speaking was not quite what it was doing. Its sexless voice echoed in my skull.
my friend, you have been selected for a task.
Its voice had a degraded quality, like a phone with bad signal. I noticed air washing in and out of my lungs, but I had no control over it.
I tried to speak but could only think. Who are you?
Apparently, the thought was enough because the cat replied. i am the monitor. this iteration is in danger. we calculate that a correction at this time location will have a high probability of saving many people with minimal interference.
To this day, I still wonder whether I was dreaming or not. In the moment, I decided I was in a lucid nightmare. Why not do it yourself?
we cannot act directly upon this dimension.
Even though I could not hear the cat’s voice, I felt vibration through its body on my chest. It relaxed me somehow. And you think I can? I’m locked in this room, you know.
your father has locked you in this room, but tomorrow at 6:13 seth will unlock the door. exit the room. go to the kitchen and open the window above the sink.
I waited, but the thing said nothing else.
Just when I felt my jaw unlock and opened my mouth to speak, the cat jumped off my chest with a viscous slowness. The red glow snuffed out.
Immediately, the weight suffocating me lifted. I sucked in gulps of air and tumbled off my bed, hands and knees hitting the cold wood—a welcome contrast to the sticky air of the windowless room. I crawled toward the faint string of light outlining my bedroom door, still catching my breath.
I grabbed the doorknob and twisted. Locked.
I could still see the whites of Dad’s eyes flashing when he caught me last night in the hayloft. I was up there with my flashlight, reading from my stash of books. Most I had gotten from girls at school—old-school fallen angel, vampire, werewolf romance type stuff. I was 14, after all. Even without a computer at home, I found ways to satisfy my curiosities.
“You must purify your mind to ascend, Norea,” Dad said as he tossed the books into the fireplace. He had the striking ability to speak in a genteel monotone while his gaunt face bloomed with fury, made even brighter by the contrast of his long white hair. Shortly after Mom died, it had turned white overnight. “Do you want to ascend?”
I said no. Somewhere, Seth was crying. The sound brought tears to my eyes too. Then Dad locked me in my room and ordered me to contemplate his scriptures. The Final Testament of the Second Coming of Christ.
Yes, I should have mentioned: Dad believed he was the second coming of Christ.
Not so long after Mom died, but before we moved out to the middle of nowhere, something happened. He stepped out of his bedroom in our tiny Chicago apartment, eyes wide and hair white, speaking alien syllables that slowly reshuffled into English again over the next week.
That’s when the craziness started.
He was constantly scribbling down new mental downloads from the Entirety, new instructions about how to wage spiritual battle against the daimons keeping humanity imprisoned in this dimension, new rituals and codes to hack through their layers of deception. I could never keep up.
I heard a click. I stood quickly. Dad did not usually let me out after only one night.
The door swung upon.
Seth stood there. The faint light from the hall backlit his frizzy dark hair. Even though he was already four, he was small for his age. He still sucked his thumb. He clutched a chewed white blankie in his other fist. “G’morning,” he said.
I crouched to his eye level and peered behind him. A few oil sconces along the walls were already lit—that was odd. Dad did not usually get up early.
Dad had long since shut off the electricity in this farmhouse. Only oil lamps and candles. He claimed he could hear the electric hum, and it interrupted his downloads from the Entirety. Another evil scheme. And besides, fire is a purifying element, he would say.
To which I would say, “But Hell is full of fire, and lightning comes from heaven.”
“Lightning is from the Demiurge,” he would reply. Sometimes he would laugh after saying this. Sometimes he would not laugh at all.
It seems strange to say, but I often got the sense that as much as I came to fear Dad, he came to fear me too. Sometimes, when I entered a room and he looked up at me, I caught a light in his eyes. It was like headlights reflecting off the pupils of a deer in the path of an oncoming semitruck. And then it was gone.
My eyes adjusted to the wobbly light. No sign of Dad. Just the foliage of handwritten pages carpeting the floor, alongside empty plastic bottles, various food wrappers, cardboard boxes taped up and stacked along the wall, and manila envelopes stuffed between them. Every day, Dad packed up scriptures to send to his growing register of followers.
“Seth, what’s wrong?” I whispered, stepping forward into the hall. Immediately, my shins hit the rung of a small object, sending it clattering across the floor—Seth’s child-sized stool, painted red, yellow, and green.
I froze. The noise wasn’t loud, but in the quiet of the sleeping house, it filled every crevice of my consciousness. Seth must have dragged the stool from his room to reach the bolt on my door—the bolt Dad had installed to lock from the outside.
“Bad dream,” Seth sighed.
Images of the previous night flitted across my mind. I had somehow already forgotten the black cat crushing my ribs and issuing strange orders. Its blood-moon eyes rushed back to my mind now, its flickering sexless voice.
you have been selected for a task.
“I’m thirsty!” Seth exclaimed.
I shushed him. “Where’s daddy?”
“Outside.”
Maybe he left while I was mid-sleep paralysis. It was not uncommon for him to wander into the woods, sometimes for days at a time. Or maybe he was on his way to the post office. Spewing his spiritual seed into the world.
“Okay, let’s hurry. I’ll get you some water.” I grabbed Seth’s sticky hand and began picking my way through the detritus. “Then you need to lock me back in. Else we’ll get in trouble.”
The smell of stale air and mold permeated everything in that house. Seth and I passed Dad’s study on our left—it was the source from which the endless reams of paper and boxes tumbled like foam from a waterfall. The faint smell of rotten eggs—which I knew was sulfur—drifted from the doorway.
Inside the study, the hall lights glinted off a huge metal prep table hosting an array of beakers, burners, double boilers, and twisting alchemical labware with no obvious purpose. A fire extinguisher lay on the floor. A big analog clock hung over the table, next to a window that had been papered over with yellowing newsprint. It was 6:15.
I kept leading Seth onward, past the living room archway on my right and toward the kitchen straight ahead. Seth began singing to himself, softly at first, then louder.
“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream…merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a—”
“Shh!” I pressed a finger to my lips and ushered him into the kitchen ahead of me.
I stopped dead.
Standing before the sink, piled high with dirty dishes, Dad stood with his back to me. He was naked but for a pair of boxers, his long white hair hanging in mats along the knobs of his spine. The light seeping in from the window above the sink gave him an almost angelic glow. The tang of rot wafted to me from the sink.
Every kid sees their parent at some point as a human weakling for the first time—sometimes in a moment of childlike rage, or the throes of grief. But sometimes it comes in a quiet moment. This was that moment for me.
His body, frail from fasting, twisted first, his gaze still locked on the window. His head turned next. His eyes came last, meeting mine—dark blue, like Seth’s. They were distant, undefined, clouded by a shroud of tears.
In that moment I saw a flash of the man I saw standing before my mother’s coffin, something breaking in him, or breaking loose in him.
I didn’t feel fear now. I didn’t feel love. I felt pity. Pity and disgust.
Dad’s brow furrowed, pupils twitching from me to Seth.
Weak sunlight filtered in from the gray miasma outside the window. The nearby mining operations had choked out the sun years ago. Water dripped from the sink. Plink. Plink. Plink.
“Seth was thirsty,” I said at last. It came out a half-whisper.
Dad said nothing. He turned to the sink again and plucked out a cup. His hands were shaking.
I crossed the room slowly. Takeout bags, crumpled plastic wrap, and more scrawled pages crunched under my feet. I stood next to Dad and grasped the cup in his hands. “I’ll get it, Dad.” I spoke gently, as if to a wild dog.
He let me take the cup. As he stepped back, he placed a spidery hand on my head. I looked up at him. His eyes were hard, but his voice was choked with tears. “I will do anything—anything—to make you ascend with me. That is why I must purify you.”
I nodded. Tap water overflowed the cup now.
“Put Seth in his room and come to my laboratory,” he said, and turned away.
My heart rate spiked. To this day, I don’t fully understand why I did what I did. I wasn’t operating on the level of conscious thought. I set the cup on the counter, between a sponge and a brown apple core. Then I reached across the sink and unlatched the window. Gray dust coated my fingertips. I hooked them under the sill and yanked. The window squeaked a few inches up its gummy track.
Dad’s footsteps halted.
I yanked again. The window squealed halfway open before he was upon me. He reached his long arms over mine and grasped the window. I slithered out from between his body and the sink, then scurried backwards to Seth, who had dropped his blankie. I grabbed his hand again as Dad struggled with the window.
“Unclean, unclean,” he hissed. “Shit!”
He jumped back from the sink. A small, oblong object shot through the last gap in the window, screeching.
“Birdie!” Seth grinned and stretched out his arms.
A little brown finch rocketed around the room. Dad abandoned the window and lunged after it, cursing the Archons. Instinctively, I ducked and clutched Seth to my stomach as Dad careened past, giving chase into the hallway.
A thud. A crash. Then, a cry. I let go of Seth and jumped to the doorway.
It took me a moment to fully comprehend what I was seeing. Dad was standing in the hallway, legs apart, hands at his sides, mouth agape. Blood dribbled down his right arm. On the floor, shards of glass glittered in the orange glow.
Dad and I stood there dumbly. The flame from the shattered oil lamp lapped at the paper on the floor. The oil accelerated its growth. In that eternal moment—probably only a few seconds—the flame jumped to the wall.
I blinked twice and Dad was upon me again. He must have jumped around the fire because his eyebrows were singed. He grabbed my arm with one hand while simultaneously reaching behind me to grab Seth. He shoved us both into the hall and toward the living room doorway. “Go to the McNams,” he said, voice calm as if we were going out to play.
I didn’t have time to feel afraid. I took Seth’s hand and crossed the living room to the front door, jostling the knob, almost forgetting to slide open the multiple deadbolts before shouldering the door wide.
I plunged into the gray morning. I didn’t bother looking back. I knew Dad wasn’t following us. I knew he was going back to save the lab.
Seth stumbled behind me and I picked him up, wrapping both arms around his skinny body. I ran.
The gravel driveway gave way to crabgrass. It sliced at my bare feet. I noticed the pain abstractly. A small object flew over my shoulder and into the sky, chirruping. I didn’t stop, not even when the smell of sulfur prickled my nose hairs.
I felt the explosion before I heard it. The wave of heat shoved me to my knees. I scrambled upright, Seth squirming in my arms. I didn’t look back. Seth was screaming words I couldn’t understand. I just kept running. The neighbor’s farmhouse got closer and closer.
The total blankness I felt in that moment has never quite left me—an unbearable lightness. Even now, it threatens to lift me away from this world.
I know if I ask myself too many questions about that day, I will tumble so deep into the possibilities that I may never claw my way out. I don’t know who I saved or doomed, or if I did nothing at all but follow the inevitability of a collapsing wave form. Either way, I don’t allow myself to feel guilty for what a 14-year-old did. After all, I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything at all.
My life continued. So did Seth’s. We spent the rest of our childhood with our maternal grandparents back in Chicago, the strange years with Dad fading away like chemtrails in the eternal gray sky.
The fear was over. That’s all that matters.
I waited, meditated, and even prayed for it, but I never saw the Monitor again.
Nicole Kurlich is a writer, editor, and amateur seamstress living in Chicago with her two cats, Toast and Jelly. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Poet Lore, Contrary Magazine, Gravel, and more. Her debut chapbook, girls are figs, was published by Milk and Cake Press.