Everyday Monsters
By Jenny Milchman
When I was twelve years old, I met a monster.
I was walking with my friend down the block where I lived. I’m going to call my friend Katie, even though calling things by their true and proper name—like monsters—is the point of this piece. Which is that all too often we turn away from the bad stuff, turn our heads and ourselves away from reality.
And this allows monsters to flourish, to do their nasty work.
However, I am telling this story for my own reasons, through my own lens, and my friend gets to choose for herself what to do with her monster.
Katie and I were headed to town, which in my head was spelled with a capital T so that it looked like this: Town. We were free roam kids before such a thing had a term or needed one—it was just the way things went. How childhoods were spent. What kind of normal kid had parents with enough leisure, wealth, or anxiety to generate constant oversight and supervision? All of those things were still to come.
The anxiety partly born of things like what was about to happen to Katie and me.
Ahead at the corner, a car paused at the stop sign. One of the big, boat-like cars that traveled the roads back then. It probably paused for a little too long, but that wasn’t the kind of details two tweens—a term that also didn’t exist yet—years away from driving age would notice.
The driver rolled down his window. With a crank. One rotation at a time to get the glass to lower. From inside, he laid his arm on top of the door and beckoned us over.
I remember hanging back.
But Katie walked up to his car, stood by the driver’s side, and looked in.
When she returned, she was running, and I followed her. She didn’t slow down as we passed my house. I assumed she was headed back to her own, but I didn’t know that for sure then, and I still don’t. I do recall her shouting as we parted, “The man had his pants down! He wasn’t wearing any pants!”
I went inside and told my parents, who both were home, if not with enough time to have accompanied me on that walk—nor the impetus to do so. That style of parenting would not emerge for years.
But my parents had prepared me to hesitate on that corner, not to cross to the car.
They both knew, but especially my father, that monsters existed.
Childhood can be depicted as a haloed, idyllic place, although mystery and suspense and horror writers know it to be thorned. So much is unknown to children—they are just beginning to figure out how massively complex is the world into which they recently arrived—and withheld from them—go out now, the grownups are talking—that it can hardly help but be so. The unknown is inherently scary.
One thing my parents did right was to let me know that frightening things were real.
When I explained what had happened, they called the police. I drove around in the back of a cop car and looked for the man, although we didn’t spot him. As an adult long past this incident—in some ways at least—I’m aware of the layers of privilege in how that aftermath went. That my parents felt entitled to help from law enforcement, first of all.
But also that they believed me and took what in the end was a near miss for my friend, and made me a bystander of sorts, seriously.
How many times, when we meet a monster, do we hesitate to talk about it, deny its identity, even to ourselves?
In years to come, I realized that Katie was lucky that day. Stories would come out about children far less so who were tragically taken, with all that usually follows such abductions.
Monsters started showing up in the news and on TV and people started to fear them everywhere. The media is responsible in part for this phenomenon—fear-mongering is clickbait, gets people to lock in, to use the terminology of today.
But monsters really are everywhere, and as the years progressed, I came to realize that. Not necessarily ones like the man in the car, still less his even more evil counterpart—that kind is relatively rare, though tragically not rare enough, of course.
But far more ordinary people carry monsters inside them. My father did, and it’s one of the things that makes it most impressive how he prepared me for the monster in the car, and made himself accessible afterwards. Katie did not tell her own parents, I would later learn. I can only imagine she either didn’t feel able to or didn’t believe that telling them would accomplish much. Perhaps it never occurred to her to do so.
My dad was raised by an abusive father, and while that experience certainly left my dad with a world of struggle, it did not make him deny the fact of monsters, nor the need to face his own. This is one of the things I most admire about him and my mom—the way they accomplished that hard, ugly work over the course of a long, mostly beautiful marriage.
If it didn’t save my life that day, it certainly let me avoid seeing something traumatizing and disturbing.
A monster of the kind Katie and I encountered is relatively rare, although non-family abductions number in the tens of thousands annually worldwide, and the explosion of online predation increases that amount.
Far more common, though, are the monsters we grapple with in our own lives and within ourselves. The everyday sort of monster my father worked to vanquish so that he and my mother could raise a child who’d be prepared when another sort of monster came along.
Jenny Milchman
Jenny Milchman is the critically acclaimed author of seven psychological
thrillers that feature everyday and rare monsters. When she isn’t
spending time giving workshops and speaking to readers and writers about
books and the pursuit of a dream, she lives in the mountains of New York
state. Jenny's most recent novel is The Fairest and she is now at work
on a horror novel about a monster nobody's ever seen before.
The Fairest
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