What Kind of Monster are You?
You start seventh grade at a new school. Your only friend invites you to a slumber party. You don’t have many other friends. Boys find you too plain, girls find you ugly. You blame your monolidded eyes and thick glasses and hand-me-downs. Your friend offers to help you practice kissing for your future boyfriends, and you decide you like the way she fits against you. You know you are a monster.
The next day, you discover you have grown scales on your legs and snakes in your hair, and your parents send you to the doctor. His advice: undergo expensive treatment to remove the snakes and the scales, even though they will keep growing back. What do you do?
Agree to scale removal, and continue to be a good girl. Your fear of failure and fear of disappointing your parents have written your life plans for you. You will become a doctor and marry a nice boy and having two children in the suburbs. You want this future too, or so you tell yourself until you are fifty-three. Instead of sitting still during your annual scale-removal appointment, being told your pain is imagined, you eat the doctor. You swallow him whole, stethoscope and all, before spitting out his white coat in one piece. He tasted delicious, better than roasted duck. But you know the consequences. Your children will hate you and your husband will fear you. So you leave before they can find out.
Refuse scale removal, and let your parents forbid you from going to school. Nobody wants to look at a snake-fish-monster-girl, they say, forgetting that in their own stories, all of humanity was created by Nüwa, the first snake-fish-monster-girl. They test whether an all-carrot diet will turn you back to normal. In the middle of the night, you sneak downstairs and eat the raw meat your mother was saving for tomorrow’s dinner. You walk out of their house, asphalt scratching bare feet. When the police officers find you the next day, you turn them into stone with your monolidded eyes. You leave for the sea.
Agree to scale removal, and go in dutifully every year for the operation until the girl you kissed at that fateful slumber party marries the prom king and moves to a city two states away. You stay in your hometown until the doctor who plucks out each of your scales one by one every year retires. You see the girl twice a year, then once a year, then no times a year, until she vanishes like sea foam, survived by seven grandchildren; you never find a new doctor. You go for a swim by the lake where her parents’ vacation house once was, and you touch the scales on your legs and face until the scales are nothing more than your scales and the slime is nothing more than your slime. You descend into the cold water, leaving your past life behind.
In the end, you always discover: you can be a monster. You can be free. You can be.
© 2024 Tina S. Zhu
About the Author
Tina S. Zhu is a Lambda Fellow who reads out loud to her plants in her apartment in New York. Her work has appeared in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread, and other places. You can find her at tinaszhu.com.