Real Monsters

thethemeis: Monsters

theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   Standing up from his chair before the word Cut! has even finished leaving his lips, Greg Tourettes pushes past his assistant to clear the way to his trailer. Scott, his assistant, is a ratty little kid with a hunchback who visits strip clubs at the weekend, and takes an Action Man doll with him to place naked on a stool next to his own. 'Don't dance for me,' he'll snarl, as nearly-nude exotic teenage dancers grind their thongs against his knees, 'Dance for him. Only then will I pay you.' Greg's assistant, he gets off on their awkward movements as they struggle to keep dancing, knowing that their customer is a lifeless doll and its owner is a soulless pig only out to degrade them. Then he comes into work on Monday and tells Greg all about it, as if Greg is supposed to care. 

   The set is for Greg's next blockbuster horror, Suburban Evil. It's been billed as Greg's "most exciting project to date", and the "horror of the decade", and it hasn't even been filmed yet. Greg has spent his life making feature films about monsters, and now he sees them everywhere.

   'Mister Gregory,' pants one of the caterers, whose name Greg Tourettes can't even pronounce, 'we have no steak sandwich. No steak sandwich and no crisps of any kind. I so sorry, Mister Gregory. I so sorry.' Rumour is, this caterer comes from some eastern European country where she's wanted for killing her whole family in the middle of the night. Her seven brothers and four sisters, her mother and father and grandmother, she suffocated them all one by one and fled the country before their bodies were even cold. The cast and crew avoid her because the rumours grow more extreme and the body count rises by the day, but Greg ignores them because even if they are true, she makes a shit hot steak sandwich. 

   'Yeah, yeah, alright,' he says, waving her out of his way like a bad smell, 'just give everyone their food, will you?'

   Greg wants nothing more than to be alone in his trailer, sleeping off this whiskey headache. If his beeline wasn't so littered with obstacles and yapping mouths he wanted to avoid, he'd be there already. 

   'Hey Greg?' comes a female voice from the set behind him. Turning, Greg sees the bloodied, bruised face of Zeph Manson, the sexy young star of this pantomime he is filming. In the scene they've just finished taping, she was being raped by a man with shotguns for hands and seven inch screws for teeth. She managed to release herself from his grip by spraying body spray into his eyes and lighting it with a lighter. His eyeballs melted onto her pert breasts and she ran away screaming, as her tits jiggled from side to side spraying fresh eye juice all around. The makeup and pyrotechnics were incredible. 

   She still has no bra on. 

   'What?' sighs Greg. 

   'Do they have any steak sandwiches today?' Zeph is the kind of girl who will sleep with a guy once, and become obsessed. She is so insecure, this miniature psychopath, that she will shamelessly call him at all hours of the night asking when they can see each other again. She'll wait outside his house, ready to beg him to bed her as soon as he embarks on even the shortest of trips. Hell, she'd do this even if she hadn't slept with him - a guy asking for a picture of her tits in an MMS is enough to spark her crazy. Then, when she's decided enough is enough, she'll spend the rest of her days warning his future conquests, 'Oh, honey, I know what it's like, being seduced by him. I know how easy it is to succumb to that charm. But he's bad news, sweetie. He's only out to hurt you, like he hurt me.' Thinking about the big ball of crazy in that tiny little venus flytrap head where so many men want to stick their penises, Greg shudders. It disturbs him to think that although her behaviour seems odd, the majority of women are capable of it. Greg has known more insane women than normal ones. And because Zeph is another typical fucking mental bitch, Greg tries to steer clear of her whenever he can.

   'Yeah,' he says, his limp lips curling into a crafty almost-smile, 'you can have mine, too. I'm not hungry.'

   ‘Awwww, thanks, honey,’ she says, pouting and pushing out her chest, still uncovered. Greg flashes her a polite smile, then a sly grimace, then walks away. On his continued journey to the trailer, he manages to avoid Carl Steamer, the lighting guy who’s so addicted to gambling that he sold his kidney and his wife’s kidney and his child’s kidney all to fund his failed football predictions; Jenny Trump, the graduate sound technician who has spent the last three weeks sucking off the male members of the crew after work for ten bucks a pop; and Steve Whateverhisnameis, the fat fuck who seems to get paid by the film company to watch every scene with Zeph Manson in it with one hand down his pants and one hand fingering his belly button. All these people want some face time with the director, and the director manages to avoid every one; but not Taylor Dansen. Greg Tourettes has no hope of avoiding Taylor Dansen, when he’s sitting on the steps of Greg’s trailer in wait.

   ‘I need you,’ Taylor says, twitching and tossing a lighter from hand to hand, wearing a vest and sweatpants stained with testosterone.

   ‘I don’t need you, so get the fuck out of my way,’ growls Greg, his head pounding to a crescendo.

   Taylor Dansen is the male star of the piece. For the first half of the film, he was the boyfriend of Zeph Manson’s character; but halfway through, in a scene that was filmed just twenty-three hours ago, Taylor’s character was torn limb from limb by a seven foot tall hulk in red overalls with a samurai sword for a cock and ears that leaked puss. After his arms and legs were torn off, he was fucked in the mouth by samurai dick until his brains fell out of the back of his skull.

   ‘I was thinking,’ Taylor blurts, standing and twitching with equal enthusiasm, barely able to keep eye contact, ‘maybe what if my character wasn’t dead? What if perhaps he didn’t die in the last scene?’

   Taylor Dansen wasn’t Greg’s choice of male lead. If Greg Tourettes had had more of a say in it, Taylor would be just as dead in real life as he was in the second half of Suburban Evil. Taylor, you see, has been calling in favours to get himself back into the A-list again for months now, ever since he fell from grace when he beat that film star girlfriend of his up so bad that she couldn’t walk for a week. He’s hit girls before, obviously; but never before has it been the most famous film starlet of the moment, and never before have the photographs of her wounds been uploaded to every news website that has ever been read by human eyes. That boy is a monster; after breaking her heart and her face, he begs for jobs to repair his public image so that she has to see him on the TV every day. He ate her heart, and then he ate her brain. Greg Tourettes hates the cowardly, whiny, talentless little prick, and he has made no effort at all to hide that fact.

   ‘Fuck off,’ he replies through teeth that grit a cigarette he plans to light as soon as he gets into his trailer, ‘I hate you, you cowardly, whiny, talentless little prick.’

   Taylor Dansen just laughs, stepping out of Greg’s way. ‘So you’ll think about it, yeah? Thanks, buddy!’

   Greg Tourettes slams the door in the slimy little cocksucker’s face.

   He wets a towel with hot water and drapes it over his eyes as he lies back on the shitty old sofa in his trailer and lights his cigarettes. With his eyes closed, he prods his hand around searching for the bottle of whiskey to pour into his mouth. His mobile phone rings in his jeans pocket, and the door rattles loudly from whoever is knocking on it from outside.

   Whoever these people are, Greg doesn’t want to hear from them. They can fuck right off. Greg’s mother, with her racism; Greg’s brother, with his flagrant homophobia; Greg’s agent, with his hatred of disabled people; the executive producer, with his crystal meth addiction; Greg’s girlfriend, with her addiction to cocaine and starring in budget adult movies; Harold Janks, who only phones when he needs to borrow a large amount of money he never intends to pay back; Terrence Goldman, the journalist who spends more time committing fraud than he does writing; Kevin Kaplan, the billionaire heir who was cleared of killing that pedestrian he ran over last year purely because he could afford the best lawyer in town… whichever toxic fuck is calling his phone and knocking on his door, Greg doesn’t want to know them.

   Tomorrow, Greg is filming a scene where Zeph Manson tortures the film’s villain with a rusty corkscrew, before beating him to death with a hammer and eating his lungs with mashed potato as a side.

   But today, Greg Tourettes is sick to death of monsters. He’s sick to death of monsters not because he has spent nearly two decades making films about them, but because real monsters surround him every minute of every day.

The Cost of Saving a Life

thethemeis: Deception

theauthoris:  LiamD

She once told me that her biggest strength was her ability to deceive others.

It wasn't something I immediately agreed with; as madly infatuated as I was back then, I didn't think her capable of lying to anyone. Yet once the shroud of infatuation began to diminish and a deeper rooted, more rational love began to grow, I started to understand what she had meant.

When we were first dating she would never agree to come out on weekends in favour of tending to her father, whom she said was in ill health. Of course, I found this to be yet another endearing trait of somebody so kind and innocent as her and thought little else of it. She was also unkeen to rush into any sexual activity at first and our physical relationship moved very slowly because of it. But at the time I put this down to her innocent and chaste nature. In my eyes she was perfect. Any expression or action of mine that upset her was always a fault of my own and never an intolerance on her part. Some might say I was a fool in love, that I was safely under her thumb as it were. But the simple truth is she was the only person left alive that I felt strongly for - and how dearly I loved her.

We met shortly after I had finished university. Entering the freshers' year immediately after attending the sixth form college of my secondary school, I was easily entranced by my fellow student's cultures of excess drinking, drug abuse and promiscuity. I lived unashamedly; I was a single, open-minded adult with a lot of sorrows to drown and bad memories to forget. I'm sure by the time somebody reads this, that latter point will be old ground re-trodden upon. Suffice to say if you are unaware, my parents died when I was in the peak of my adolescence. If you wish to know any more on that subject, the information will no doubt be easy to find (and I daresay largely blown out of all original proportions by the tabloids) but it is not a topic I wish to go into now.

Of course, the excessive lifestyle eventually wore thin. By the beginning of the final year of the course I felt so unfulfilled with the disjointed mess my life had become that I came home from the university of Portsmouth without graduating. I returned home to work wherever I could be needed and after a few months of temporary jobs in exceedingly dull factories, I was offered a full-time position at the local branch of Starbucks. It was hardly the most glamorous work in the city but it certainly beat canning Coca-Cola for minimum wage. After serving all morning I would sometimes sit down and drink a coffee (an Americano, with cream and two sugars) myself before making my way home. It was on one of these afternoons during my third month of working there that she walked in and ordered her favourite Hazelnut Mochaccino and a regular Macchiato. If she hadn't sat down at one of the few tables in front of me, I may never have spoken to her at all. But surely enough, she sat just where I could see her and my aforementioned infatuation began in earnest, captivated as I was by her hypnotic green eyes and lusciously smooth black hair. I started conversation with her, most likely about her delightfully unusual drink. She was shy at first, but my desire to get to know this beautiful creature was stronger than any reluctance on her part. The rest, as they say, is history.

She came by the coffee house once a day to buy her poorly father the Macchiato he enjoyed so dearly. I marveled at how we had never seen each other before but she explained how she used to visit the neighbouring Costa before it closed down. Compared with the scantily clad females I had been used to fraternising with during my 'studies', she was a breath of fresh air and our early relationship blossomed quickly. She didn't like her father having visitors due to his condition, and that was a wish of hers I respected, if not fully understood. She didn't like to go into specifics regarding her father's illness and I could only assume he suffered from some form of mental illness with anti-social tendencies. It upset her when I asked her more details so I mostly refrained from doing so.


It took me six months to realise the full extent of her troubles.


When my birthday came around on January 14th, I begged her to come out to our local public house for a drink to celebrate. I am generally not a man of many friends, presumably because most of the people I have met feel an overwhelming responsibility when they discover my past. Similarly, I have always struggled to stay in touch with the few friends I kept from school and university. Thus, she was the only person in my life I wanted to celebrate my birthday with and ultimately she gave the impression I had made her feel so much pity for my lack of company that she was forced to obliged to come out for a drink just this once.

What followed that night was mostly harmless fun until we retired back to my flat for the evening. I admittedly drank more than I had done in the best part of a year that night and may have been slightly forceful with her when she told me (as per usual) that she wanted to wait until marriage before going further with our physical relationship. But any shame I felt later about unzipping her dress against her harshest protests would be immediately dispelled by the evidence I found upon her bare skin which documented her rich years of domestic abuse. The sight of the deep wounds in her back immediately sobered me and I, perhaps coldly, pressed her with questions about the origins of her hidden scars. She proceeded to tell me the whole story, between intense bouts of weeping. About how her father had been sexually abusing her for the majority of her life. About how he had beaten her mother to death. About how he had skilfully forged a document that told the world his raving daughter was insane when she attempted to report him to the police. She had now been covering for her abomination of a father for fifteen years, lying to everyone she met about how he was ill and needed her constant attention.

'No more!' I exclaimed to her, amid tears of my own. 'You're not going back there, we're moving away from this place for good!'. She gave me no response, but I could see from her face what she was thinking. She was psychologically bound to this man. She would never feel safe if she knew he was still around, still able to find us, I had to make sure he would leave her alone.

'Okay,' I said, after we had both calmed down. 'Take this, just in case...' I handed her my flick knife, more of an heirloom than a weapon in my mind, but it was large and still sharp and could seriously wound an aggressor if needed. After showing her how to extend the blade safely, we made our plans for the morrow and rested for the long day ahead.


The neighbourhood was quiet as we walked towards the door of her familial house that morning. I slid her key into the lock as quietly as I could before slowly edging it open. We attempted to stay silent but as we crept through the yellow-walled hallway a loud creak of the decaying floorboards betrayed our presence.

'Uurrrrrh,' A wheezy, aged groan emanated from the living room. I gave in to the rage that had been slowly building into a crescendo of hate for this monster who had ruined my beloved's life and I charged into the room to meet him. What I saw sitting on the chair checked most of the boxes against the perverted child abuser I had imagined him to be. Her father was thin, lank and though his greying hair was combed over,   hewas clearly balding. His teeth were mostly yellow, in some cases completely brown, and protruded at various angles from a mouth that constantly drooled. The upper half of his body was covered by an old green jumper that was riddled with holes and questionable stains. Above the blue slippers upon his feet were grey trousers also stained around the thighs and groins with a deep unsightly brown colour. I was pondering on this and all the disgusting things he had put his family through when he noticed me. His eyes widened and he attempted to thrust himself towards me..

'You... CA-!' I interrupted him mid-sentence with a hard punch to his face. It connected well and I felt his brittle jaw crack as a necessary pain flared in my balled fist; I had never learned throw a punch properly.

'You are disgusting!' I was screaming at him, throwing more punches, barely restraining myself from beating him to death. 'How could you do it, to your own family? You SICKEN me!'

I finally stopped, in fear of killing him. The old man was sobbing in his chair, quivering like a small, frightened animal. I suddenly felt an uncomfortable mix of satisfaction and guilt, but remembered my reasons and what this monster had done.

'You will leave her alone, do you understand?' I had managed to calm myself down by this point and spoke to the old man in calmer, more reasonable tones. 'We are leaving and if you ever try to come and find us, I will kill you'. He nodded between his mucus-filled sobs and once I was satisfied he had understood, I briefly entered the kitchen to wash my hands of the old man's blood. I had barely dried them on their dog-themed tea-towel when I heard her scream.

Running back into the living room, thinking myself a fool for leaving him alive, expecting the worst, I found her standing over her father's chair with my bloody flick-knife, her face white in shock.

'He lunged at me... I didn't know what to do...' Her father sat dead in his chair with a glazed look in his eye, a profusely leaking wound around the area his heart would be.

We had cleaned the place as best we could. We had to stay another day before we were satisfied there was no evidence of any bloodshed or our being there at all. Driving away from London on the M3 I felt like a complete fool, having found nowhere to effectively hide the body but the boot of the car. I still think it a miracle that we were not caught that day. Once a safe distance, we stopped at the most obscure, unmarked wood we could find and I buried her father using a shovel we had taken from his own shed. We drove on, unsure of ourselves, praying he would never be found, that we could live happily thereafter, no questions asked.

I drove us to the apartment I was still renting in Portsmouth by the canal in the Gunwharf Quays - it was the only place I could think of to go to and I could only hope it would put us far enough away from the crime scene. Once we had arrived at the flat, we collapsed onto the double bed, exhausted. I looked into her green eyes and in spite of everything that had happened, couldn't help but smile. She smiled back at me and pulled my head towards her. Suddenly she was kissing me confidently, intimately. I pulled back, startled and confused.

'It's ok,' she said calmly. 'I think I'm ready now'. This time, when I attempted to take her clothes off, she gave no resistance. Sometimes I still wonder what she thought at the time but for myself there is only one word that can describe the love we made that night: perfection.



The next day I awoke in a state of confusion. I was sitting in the living room with no recollection of getting out of bed. I was acutely aware of a dull pain in my legs and arms.

'Good morning darling!' A familiar, yet somehow strange voice greeted me. I looked up to meet her eyes, shuddering as I realised the implications of what she held in her hand.

'I gave you some pain killers, quite a few in fact, and they'll help for a while, but I wouldn't try to stand if I were you.' I looked down to my thighs and recoiled in horror at the deep red stains below them slowly turning an off-brown.

'Why?!... I saved you...' my voice was hoarse, I was stunned, reeling from the situation I had not expected to find myself in. Of all the things I had expected today - the police sirens, an interrogation, a prison sentence - this certainly wasn't one of them. 'Why would you do this...'

'Oh darling, can't you see? It's because I love you! I've always loved you.

'Daddy never understood, he killed Mummy and thought that would be the end of it, but he didn't know Mummy had shown me how to look after him.' She took off the t-shirt of mine she had slept in and turned around as she blindly scraped the dripping knife across her back. She moaned with pleasure as the blade punctured the surface. 'One for me...'

Guessing what would come next, I tried to move but my legs seared with pain and I unhappily realised I would be rooted in this position for some time. I tried to covered my face with my arms as the knife cut deeply into my right cheek but they too were immobile and I screamed out in agony.

'There, I knew you'd like it, we can do this every night. Now, I'm going out to get us some coffee, don't go anywhere will you?'

She skipped out of the apartment and left me in the chair, trying to figure out how I could get away.

That was twelve years ago. I have long since given up hope of escape. I don't know how she's keeping me alive, and I sometimes wish she wouldn't, but I'm always far too weak to attempt to move, even if she didn't insist on cutting the tendons. I feel too weak to even call for help. There is no telephone; I didn't use a landline when I lived here all those years ago and I even if my mobile's SIM still works, she has hidden or destroyed it.

So no, I no longer dream of escape, I now dream only of death. Sometimes I think of her father sitting in his old blood-stained chair. I think of the disgusting green jumper he wore, and of the ones just like it that she has bought for me over the years. I wonder if he was happy when she finally killed him, if he still harboured thoughts of escape or if he had been driven too mad by his deranged family to care.

She came back with the coffee, it has become a regular occurrence. The skin on the right side of my face is blistered badly from where she pours the hot liquid directly onto me. Sometimes she is unhappy with the results and boils the kettle for another round. I cherish the days that she doesn't. She has taken to working in the local hospital. Sometimes I wonder if the document proving her insanity was real or, alternatively, if it even existed at all.

Recently she has started seeing somebody else. He's young and handsome, and she sometimes meets him outside the Quays by the canal. She looks shy but comforted around him and I'm not sure what she has told him about me, but from the way he looks concernedly toward the window I can only guess. I wonder if he will be the one to put me out of my misery, or if he will be too chivalrous to reveal her scars.

Most of all, I wonder if she has warned him in the covert way that she warned me, I wonder if she has given him any clue at all. For over the past thirteen years, one thought has recurred to me again and again.


She once told me that her biggest strength was her ability to deceive others. I wish I had believed her.