Mac and his Monster

hear Kate tell it (mp3)

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Mac who liked to sing and draw and play baseball. He was also being followed by a large and gruesome monster.

It happened not suddenly, but slowly over time. First, Mac got the sensation that something was back there, but when he’d turn to look, there would be nothing to see. After a while, by looking very hard and squinching up his eyes, Mac did start to see a sort of heaviness in the air, like heat waves above hot pavement in the summertime. And slowly, bit by bit each day, the monster became visible.

It was huge, ten feet tall at least, with a sort of hinoceros-like weightiness to it. It was a sickly greenish-purple color and its skin had the texture of rough tree bark covered with a thin shiny film of slime. As it breathed out behind him, Mac would first smell violets. Such a sweet smell would invite him to breathe deeply and then...a blast of foul stench would follow, full of decaying meat and stagnant water and unpaid bills. And the monster said, “Hroo, Hroo, Hroo.” It was horrible.

At first the monster simply followed Mac, shadowing his every move and breathing heavily on him. Strangely enough, no one else could see it, but they did notice that Mac seemed uneasy, blinking his eyes a lot and stammering.

Later, the monster became more bold. It coiled its rat-like tail around Mac’s ribs, making it difficult to breathe and poked him from behind with sharp claws. The stress was getting to Mac. He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t eat much. He spent all of his time worrying about what the monster would do next and whether the monster would ever go away and what hell his life would be like if it didn’t.

One night, Mac decided he’d had enough. The next day, he began fighting back. He sprayed mace in the monster’s face and stabbed at it with knives. The monster roared with glee. The fight was on! As big as the monster was, they were well-matched. They scratched and bit and sliced and hit. For all that day and half the night they kept fighting. Every time Mac felt a surge of strength, it seemed the monster did too and every time he felt his energy fail him, the monster weakened as well. By midnight, they lay panting next to each other, exhausted, hurt and out of hope.

The next day, Mac wearily got to his feet and dragged himself out the door. Right behind him was the monster, drooping over him with its hot breath and saying, “Hroo, Hroo, Hroo.”

This went on for months. Mac hardly bothered to go out anymore. He and the monster stayed home, fighting each other one day and then moping around nursing their wounds for a week.

One day, Mac had to go out. He was walking down an alley, the monster slobbering along behind him saying, “Hroo, hroo, hroo.”

“This monster is ruining my life!” thought Mac and he felt the anger come up in his chest as though he had a monster inside him. The beast behind him said, “Hroo, hroo, hroo.” And the monster inside him turned him around and yelled, “Hroo, hroo, hroo!” And the monster shouted, “Hroo, hroo, hroo!” And Mac said, “Hroo, hroo, hroo!” They had a conversation, of sorts, there in the alley. Mac was pouring into it all his fear and anger and frustration and hurt. Sometimes they were loud and sometimes they were quieter and sometimes they hrooed at the same time and it was like...it was like they were singing together.

And when Mac went home that night, he picked up a pencil and he started to draw. He drew the monster, over and over again, and as he drew, he sang, “Hroo, hroo, hroo.”

Things were a little different from then on. Mac and the monster still didn’t go out much; Mac was too busy drawing. And because he was drawing the monster, he looked at it more and he discovered that sometimes it was bigger and sometimes it was smaller and some days it was more purple and some days more green. And somehow, knowing that about the monster made it seem just a bit less fearsome. And Mac and the monster sang to the pictures, they sang, “Hroo, hroo, hroo.”

One day, there was a knock at the door. It was some of Mac’s neighbors. “We were going out to dinner,” they said, “and we heard music coming from your apartment. It made us think of you and we wonder if you would like to come with us.” So Mac, who hadn’t been out for a long while, went cautiously to dinner with his neighbors. And, sure enough, the monster came along, saying, “Hroo, hroo, hroo.”

While they were having dinner, Mac glanced back at the monster, who was still (by the way) truly hideous and looking at it almost made Mac lose his supper. But when Mac turned back to look at his friends, a strange thing happened: sitting behind each of his friends, Mac saw a monster. Some of them were large and some were smaller, some looked even more revolting than Mac’s monster and some were almost cute. And when one of his friends said, “You know, that music you were singing back in your apartment was the most moving thing I’ve ever heard,” Mac understood.

He understood about fighting monsters and singing with them. He understood about having a monster and feeling different, but being so much the same. And Mac looked back at his monster and smiled, and the monster brought down one huge puce eyelid in a wink and said, “Hroo, hroo, hroo.”

Join the mailing list—get a free booklet!

20 Tips for Dancing with Monsters – A Practical Companion to the Book

Get monthly updates, including new creative experiments: