Monstrilio: A Novel

by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

Genres: Horror; Humor & Satire; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A “genuinely scary” horror debut written in “prose so beautiful you won’t want to rush” about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes (Ana Reyes) 

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life. 

A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human. 

 

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Release date: March 7, 2023

Publisher: Zando

Print pages: 306

Sample

 

Her son dies in a child-sized bed, big enough for him but barely enough to hold her and her husband who cling to the edges, folding themselves small so they fit one on each side of him. She savors the constant shifting and squirming needed to keep her in place.

Her son was alive and now he isn’t. No thunder, no angels weeping, no cloaked Death, no grace; just his silent body, unbreathing, and the blunt realization that this is it.

How dull, she thinks. She could scream, get on her knees, pull out her hair, curse God. Take me, she could plead while beating her chest with her fist. She won’t. She can’t rally the drama she once imagined.

In her fantasies—is it too morbid to call them fantasies? She doesn’t think so. In her fantasies, her son died in a shopping mall, one of the big ones in Mexico City, because in a mall there is an audience, and she wanted an audience but thought dying in the street was too sordid. At the mall, her son collapsed, and as she held his little body in her lap, mall-goers surrounded her in hushed awe of her sorrow, unimaginable to all, while she became a Pietà, marble and gorgeous. Tears, fat and clean, slid from her cheeks and pooled on her chin. When she imagined this, she cried along with her kneeling self.

And now, nothing. This is the moment—Death!—and not a tear. Perhaps she needs an audience, and her only audience in this room, this bright room, is her whimpering husband, and one whimpering man is no audience.

Her husband nuzzles their son in the space the boy’s squat neck allows, as if her husband were the fawn and her son the doe. Her husband squeezes their son with his whole body: arms, legs, head, and chest. He grunts as he squeezes. His breaths are loud against their son’s neck, smelling him hard. She squeezes their son too, tries what her husband tries because he seems to know how to grieve, and she doesn’t. Her husband grabs her upper arm and pulls her toward the middle of the bed, toward their son. It seems her husband figures that if they push themselves hard enough, they might be able to bear him again. I bore him, she thinks. I won’t bear him again. Her husband’s blond hair falls on her son’s face. She sweeps it away with the back of her hand, even when she realizes it can’t tickle her son anymore. Her husband lets go of her. He makes no sounds. Maybe he has died too. She is too tired to check.

She is not too tired to leave the bed and open a window. A rush of cool air blows in. It’s spring and the air is fresh, very undeath-like. Her hair is loose and because it’s loose, she feels it flutter on her neck. A quick flutter, not enough to whip her fully awake. She hasn’t slept. She will but not yet.

A CHILD’S DEATH IS THE WORST, they say, but she won’t die of grief. Perhaps her husband can—he is romantic.

Their son’s body will be taken away for cremation, then a funeral, black clothes, sad family, and sad friends. They are away from Mexico. In her fantasies his death was in Mexico. But instead, it happened in this middle-of-nowhere house they have secluded themselves in. She feels anger, a faint anger, only a lighter’s flame of wanting to blame her husband, but her husband is too wretched to be blamed.

In this house in Upstate New York surrounded by trees, an owl hoots in the mornings thinking itself a rooster. Her son loved this morning owl, his tiny body wound in rapture. She listens for the owl, but perhaps it has already hooted and she has missed it. She mumbles a list in order to hear something—there are events that follow a death—and this reminds her of her friend Lena, always thinking steps ahead.

But what needs to come will not come yet. She is not done with her son, not yet ready to hand him away.

HER HUSBAND IS NOT DEAD, not sleeping, simply slack and raggy. She folds him. First, she folds his fingers into his palms, prying them from their son’s pajamas. Then, from his wrists, she folds his fisted hands into his chest; his legs she pulls down off the bed. She enjoys his thick thighs and remains holding them for longer than she needs to, and he lets her, his muscles soft and heavy. His thighs are a comfort to her. Perhaps her touch is also a comfort to him. She swivels his head away from their boy, and her husband shuts his eyes, squeezing out tears. If she wanted, she could make her husband dance like a puppet, crawl him forward until he rolls down the stairs. But she won’t do this. She holds his head close to her chest so he can muffle his sobs on her skin. She will let him lean on her as they walk out of the room, she holding more weight than she thinks is possible. When he stops and asks to be let back into the room to see his son, she shushes him, says he needs to sleep. She walks her husband to their bed, where he curls defeated.

Their son is only hers now.

She lies next to him and licks his ear, like an animal would.

He remains dead.

Her son wears cream-colored pajamas illustrated with silly dinosaurs in bright colors. He fits in them though they were meant for a younger boy. He loved these pajamas. They show thinning patches where the soft material has wearied. He would have worn them exclusively, roaring his way through the day, if she hadn’t forced him to wash himself and change.

She wants to learn one last secret from her son. What part of a person’s body is inextricably themselves? Not hair, though many people keep lockets of hair. Hair is too public and not a secret. His finger or his toe, these she knows well, how thin and long his fingers are, like her husband’s, and how small and pudgy his toes, like hers. His tongue quick and lispy. His heart, a quiet, solitary heart engaged to her and her husband.

It has to be his lung. Her son, Santiago, has only one lung. This is it, this lung, the core of his Santiagoness. She loves and hates this lung, a mystery to her, a tiny lung that carried her son way past his expected life span. She wants to thank it, and also spit on it for not having carried him further. Mainly, she wants to see the lung and hold it.

Excavating one’s child isn’t a difficult task, if determined. First, she has to break skin, easy with a sharp knife, and her husband keeps their knives sharp. A sharp knife is essential for a good cook, her husband claims, and he is a great cook. She performs the first incision on her son’s belly with the utmost care, lest Santiago wake up in a sudden rebirth.

He doesn’t.

Her next cuts become bolder. Once he is open, she sneaks her hand under her son’s ribs—she will not break them—to find the lung. She is no doctor. The procedure is messy. His heart does not pump anymore, so what oozes out is the blood his veins already carried.

Years ago, she saw a Lorca play produced at the UNAM. She remembers the girl who played the mother, a mother older than the girl could ever be. The girl was a stupendous actor. There was a wedding, and at one point, she can’t remember why, this mother kneels on the floor and delivers a short monologue about what it means to see blood spilled on the ground, her son’s blood. The girl in the play mimicked soaking her hands in blood, and when she licked them, palms and fingers, her tongue swiped every side of them. Because the blood is mine, the mother said.

There isn’t enough blood for her to soak her hands. She smears and licks them with her tongue anyway. She savors her Santiago’s blood, a taste of iron and warmth. She could suck more blood out of his veins, but she won’t; she’s not a vampire though now she understands the impulse—the craving to drink deep and thirsty in her bowels.

She finds his lung toward the right of his chest. Lighter and more inconsequential than she thought it would be. She wants to rip it out and keep it for herself. She pulls but not too hard, still thinking she can hurt her son. It won’t detach.

The bed is a mess.

She whispers her son’s name, like an apology. Though she made this lung the same way she made the rest of him, she decides her son should keep his lung. She’ll only take a nugget. With a paring knife, she slices a piece, the downmost tip. This chunk is hers.

She takes the chunk of lung and places it in a clear jam jar her son used to keep pencils in. There’s no lid, but she knows where to find one.

She wraps her long hair in a bun and fastens it with a pencil. As best she can, she puts her son back together. She unfolds the skin of her son’s open belly, soaks a piece of sheet in her saliva and wipes dry blood off his body.

Her husband comes in and freezes, trying to make sense of what he has walked into. She planned on changing the sheets and wrapping Santiago in a clean set to spare her husband of seeing their son’s maimed torso. She doesn’t know whether he will scream, or hate her, or understand her.

“You’ve destroyed him,” he says, and she finds the word destroyedcurious. Has she really? No. She has destroyed nothing; nothing was left to destroy.

But she has made a mess.

“Magos.” He says her name, as if it could summon an explanation.

“Joseph.” She returns his name to let him know that she sees him standing there, gaunt and pale green.

Joseph brought our cremated son home the day the dogwood filled up, its branches fat with flowers. I didn’t know what the tree was called when I first saw it. Even when my husband called it dogwood, the name meant nothing to me. I understood the wood part, after all it was a tree, but the dog part was odd, as nothing in the tree resembled a dog. I had no name for it in Spanish and this made the tree seem even more otherworldly, because for things to become real, I must be able to name them in Spanish. I later learned the tree is called cornejo florido. Florido made sense—some dogwoods don’t flower, and this one did, so one must specify—but the word cornejo, the true name of the tree, I didn’t understand. I thought Cornejo was a last name. Like the dog in the English word, cornejoremained a mystery. I liked the tree’s resistance to make sense.

The tree managed to enchant me right at first glance. I was baffled, as the tree had little to flaunt as extraordinary. Sure, it was leafy and extended its branches in a pleasing canopy, but lots of trees accomplish that. It wasn’t even flowering when I first saw it, and all white, fat with flowers, is when it’s at its most beautiful. Perhaps I foresaw the dogwood’s potential, that it would become white in spring and stand stark against the evergreens behind it.

That first day in Firgesan, the dogwood stood fully green at the farthest edge of the water as if floating on the large pond my son, Santiago, called a lake. We had moved from Mexico City to Upstate New York because of that house where the dogwood stood, because it was smack in the middle of nowhere, just woods and fresh air. Santiago needed a place to recuperate, like the sick people in English novels who went to the seashore.

The house was called Firgesan, and I got an aristocratic thrill knowing I would live in a house with a name. “A manor,” my husband proudly explained to Santiago and me. “My ancestors built it in the late eighteenth century.” It had started as a modest farm and had grown from there. From outside, his manor resembled a cube with a gable roof, not very large, white, and, in every way, unmemorable. But inside, it was grand with its high-ceilinged entrance hall, huge stained glass window, mulberry runner, and grandiose wooden banisters. Off to one side, through a dark corridor, there was a library with tall shelves and dusty books. Farther, at the very end, a sitting room with wood-framed windows along two of its walls, large couches, plush chairs, and tables with spindly legs, the way I imagined the word parlor to look: crowded, cozy, flowery, and comfortable. Santiago, like me, was in awe.

The grounds outside the house extended into fields that led to the woods that surrounded the property. The pond curved around the back part of the house, where a more contemporary deck had been built. The deck was outfitted with minimalist wooden garden furniture, its cushions upholstered in grays and dark teals. Joseph has excellent taste. He spent the month before Santiago and I arrived cleaning and arranging the house, a house kept but not inhabited in years. Joseph built the deck for me, so I had a space for myself to enjoy the house from.

The first day at Firgesan the sun shone with a shy light that softened all edges and made everything warmer. Joseph was lucky for that light, and the dogwood tree, and the flickering pond, and the breeze that blew as I sat on the deck, because it made it difficult to complain further, to question the move once more, to find fault with the house, to discover its loneliness. I was happy for our seclusion, then.

In winter, my first and only winter at Firgesan, the dogwood stripped down to its bare and feeble branches—it looked so skinny, a pauper a step away from death, fighting to survive the cold. My husband and son told me not to bother when during frosts I walked to it carrying steaming pots of hot water. “You’ll kill it,” Joseph said, and Santiago nodded behind him because he thought his father knew everything about everything. Still, I melted the snow and frost around my dogwood—I called it mine then. I knew I wasn’t going to keep the tree from being cold, but I could offer it some comfort.

My dogwood bloomed in the spring, plump and gorgeous. “This dogwood has been on the property for more than a hundred years, Magos. It didn’t need you to bloom again,” Joseph said. By then, it didn’t much matter that the dogwood had lived.

Our son died before the dogwood pushed out its first flower, a bloom so simple with four white petals and a burst of yellow-green in the center—a beginner’s flower. I believed that flower was my son reincarnated. One believes the stupidest things in grief. I spoke to the flower and called it my son. And then I laughed because how ridiculous—how cruel, really—it would have been if my son was reincarnated as something so ephemeral, frail, and beautiful. I killed that first bloom with one swoop of my hand. Dead again, my son could become something else: the shell of a tortoise, strong and ancient, or a hideous fanged creature deep in the sea where he’d see wonders even he could’ve never imagined.

JOSEPH AND I HELD THE urn together and poured our son at the base of the dogwood. My son, turned to ash, flew, landing on the tree’s trunk and on the grass and weeds that grew around it. When the weather was still kind, Santiago would sit under the dogwood and draw monsters. Perched on the deck, I would observe him, his colored pencils on a blue cloth case next to him, his knees folded up, notebook on his thighs. He would push one colored pencil in the case, making sure they stayed in their rainbow arrangement, before he used another.

As ash, everything Santiago touched now turned gray. Carried by the wind, some of him landed in the pond. In the pond, he became mud.

WITH SANTIAGO DEAD, Joseph and I had little to do in Firgesan. We didn’t so much exist as much as we haunted, and with no one else to haunt, we haunted each other.

I grew observant and silent. I followed Joseph around, lurking through the house, in corners, behind doors, watching him like a scientist or a ghost. Joseph became fascinating to me, as if I were just then learning him. He cried. He stared blankly. He tried to draw, but he could only doodle little squares that overlapped each other. He’d go into a room, the library for example, and stand in the middle, among shelves of old books, lost and befuddled as if aliens had just beamed him there. I watched him shower. How tender he was with himself, with his hairy belly and chest, the slow way he scrubbed with soap, using both hands to lather. He massaged his thighs and passed the tip of the soap through the space between each of his toes. He stroked his penis clean.

I desired his body. I wanted to taste him, but the time I tried he took part without any spirit, without any of the hunger I felt, a deep, lustful hunger that needed him to squeeze me, bite me, push into me. So I gave his body up.

I watched him sleep, his hands tight in fists like Santiago’s when he slept. One night, Joseph woke up to me staring by the side of his bed, screamed, and scampered away. In the same sentence he called me a monster and asked me to hold him. I watched Joseph not eat, fork his leftovers into the bin, rinse his plate, and set it in the dishwasher.

I can’t remember if I ate or if I showered or if I slept.

I only remember him. Joseph. His hair grew opaque; it used to be luminous, multicolored, light blond, deep gold, and brownish depending on how the light hit. I had first fallen in love with his hair. And his forearms, thin and hairy, now thinner and balding. I pulled at the few remaining hairs. I pulled hard because I wanted to extract their brothers from where they’d hidden. He cried “Ow,” but when I pulled harder, he let me.

If I spoke, I cannot remember my words, or the language in which I would have spoken them. I had lost language. I didn’t need language; I was there to observe.

When Santiago used to grow bored of drawing or staring into the woods in his dinosaur pajamas, he would follow me around Firgesan, the way I now followed Joseph. He wouldn’t speak, just observe me as if I were the most fascinating creature. It was annoying to have the kid follow me around, so small and so serious. Every task I did, even if it was folding sheets, became important. I didn’t ask him to help me because I preferred him as a spectator. When he tried to help, he was clumsy.

Joseph demanded I do something else but follow him around. Joseph called me the worst shadow. A demon. He asked me to go away, but when he couldn’t see me, he called for me. I was always around; I only had to come out from where I hid.

He did not mention how I had opened up our son, cut him, destroyed him, ...