Dreams Diminuendo — Monster Girl

She whispers, I’m sorry I take up so much space.

She is seventeen feet tall, give or take a vertebra. Her horns curl inward like a question she has forgotten how to ask. Scales the color of a dying star flash beneath a too-thin nightgown. In the dream, she is always trying to fit inside a room built for someone else—a classroom, a café, a childhood bedroom with a twin bed her tail spills off of like a wounded river. monster girl dreams diminuendo

The sound lasts for miles. Birds fall silent in respect. The moon flickers. She whispers, I’m sorry I take up so much space

And the dream answers: No. Stay.

So she folded herself smaller. Smaller. Until her spine curved like a bow. Until her voice became a polite, airless thing. Scales the color of a dying star flash

But in the dreams, she unfolded.

She walks through a moonlit forest where the trees have lungs. Each step cracks the earth in a pattern that looks like a language. A river rises to meet her ankles, then her knees, and the water is warm and full of bioluminescent fish that sing her name in a key only she can hear. She opens her mouth—really opens it, hinges unhinging, jaw unhinging—and a sound comes out that is not a scream but a release. Everything she swallowed. Every tone it down , every you’re too much , every sideways glance on a subway car.