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Toby Litt
(for Ali Smith)
The Monster
Just after waking, it knew that the time of dreaming had passed in
a different way to the time it was now in; just before sleeping, it
felt joy: something was about to change and for the better. One
definite experience was pain. When our monster hit its head against
a tree, by accident or at full force, it knew for certain it had done
it. The sharp stab at first and the dull ache afterwards helped it
locate parts of its body in relation to one another. The monster
wondered whether this behaviour, being cruel to itself and proud
of its badness, was bad behaviour. For periods, the monster gave it
up - but then it came to an indistinguished lump of time, usually
during the middle of the day, and its desire for certain knowledge
grew into an unbearable anguish. If the monster could have been
content with the pain of anguish rather than the pain of pain,
perhaps it could have been content in all areas of its life - though
this thought was beyond it. The monster wandered around the
areas of creation it knew best, aware that certain features were
identities: trees were always different or the plural was a lie; in
other words, there was only a single tree which was sometimes
close to, sometimes far away from, where the monster had slept,
or there were multiple trees but placed so far apart that they were
not visible, one to the other, and by the time the monster had
walked far enough away from one tree to find another, it had
forgotten the memorized features of the first, and so was able to
make a comparison. On the tree or trees were fruit, which were
tastily colourful - the monster reached in the morning to touch
their brightness, then found itself with half of one in its mouth.
Eating had been reinvented, yet again - and the monster knew it
was something that had happened before. It knew this because the
action felt, like mother, both comfortable and comforting; the
sensation of chewing seemed repetitive and, thus, repeated from
before. This was probably, apart from the moments just after a
headbash, when our monster came closest to happiness. Excretion,
too, unexpectedly occurred. But, being a business of the unseen
nether regions, beneath the belly, the monster wasn't all that
involved with it. Just as the fruits were bright, off the ground and
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Nigora
Adam Thirlwell