Mother’s Monster by Jennifer Brock A woman goes to extreme measures to keep her child hidden from a dark and dangerous nightmare.

It happened when I was around four years old, so I’m not sure I remember all the details exactly. I was in my bed sleeping and some loud shouting and crashing noises coming from downstairs woke me up. I was scared and I think I started to cry a little, but then my mother rushed into my room and scooped me up and I felt safe and happy again for a moment or so until she told me we were leaving. I didn’t even have time to change out of my pajamas. She wrapped a blanket around me and carried me down the hall to her room, where she grabbed her purse and a couple things from her drawer.

She surprised me by opening the window and kicking out the screen, and then we climbed through onto the garage roof. She told me to hang on and close my eyes, so to this day I’m not sure how we got down, but the next thing I knew we were on the ground and she was smashing the window on the back door of the garage with a rock so we could get in and get to her car. She had me get down on the floor of the back seat, and almost didn’t wait for the garage door opener to finish before flooring the gas pedal and driving away.

We drove for a long time. I was asleep for some of it, but I think she only stopped when absolutely necessary for gas and food, and I think an ATM a couple times. I’m not sure if she slept at all between New Jersey and Illinois. We were somewhere outside of Chicago when I remember her talking mostly to herself about how she needed a plan; we needed to hide. The first thing she did was to sell her luxury SUV and bought a used van. I think she went to a slightly shady dealer; I vaguely recall she walked away with an impressive roll of cash.

Not long after that she made the decision that most impacted my life. It was time I changed my pajamas for real clothes and she’d been wearing the same things for over a day, so she went to a Wal-Mart off the highway to get us some new clothes cheaply. She told me that we needed to be disguised to stay safe, and there was one sure way no one would recognize me. In the back of the car she stripped off my pajamas and dressed me in my first pair of panties and then a little blue dress, white tights, and shiny black shoes. She told me I was now a girl and my new name was “Sally.”

She tried arranging my hair in a girlish style but wasn’t satisfied. She drove us around until she found a store that sold costumes where she could buy a wig for me. When we left the shop, my Mom and I both now had long blonde hair, a new color for her and a new length for me. It was itchy and uncomfortable, but she grabbed me tightly by the shoulders and said, “Sally, this is very important. You need to keep your wig on and stop fiddling with it. It could mean very bad things for us if you were found out.” She was so scary and serious that I just blindly obeyed without question.

We bounced around for a couple years, living out of the van, changing names every so often. Even after my hair grew out we still wore wigs sometimes, and other times my mother dyed our hair. The one thing that stayed consistent was that I was always a girl. I was blonde Sally Smith, and then Rachel Goldman the curly-haired brunette, and then Angela Delvecchio with black pigtails, and blonde again as Daisy Fairchild. For a fortunately brief time, I even wore corn rows and a whole lot of bronzer under the name Lakeisha Jackson.

My mother worked a series of odd jobs, usually under the table, and would leave me in the van when she was working, with only a few toys and books for company. Eventually she decided that she could no longer pass me off as too young for school. We moved into a shabby apartment in Portland, Oregon and she used very convincing paperwork identifying me as her five-year-old daughter Tiffany Potts. She told me to do my best to act just like the other girls, and try not to stand out in class. I was nervous and shy for a several months, but gradually I learned how to pretend to like to play with dolls instead of trucks and to flee in disgust when the “icky boys” teased my friends and me.

We stayed there for long enough that I almost thought I was going to be Tiffany forever. But something spooked my Mom and we left Portland a month before I was going to enter second grade. I’d even gotten some new pretty back-to-school clothes that I couldn’t wait to show to my best friend Sara. But I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to her.

We just hit the road and I ended up going to second grade in Albuquerque as red-haired Bridget Murphy, and I started third grade in Sedona, Arizona as mousy Mary Brown. But halfway through the school year we moved again, and then Jessica Masters started her new job in Boulder, Colorado as a veterinary assistant and free spirit who home-schooled her pink-haired daughter Calliope.

She’d planned ahead. That job gave her access to things she needed, and since I wasn’t in school she wouldn’t have to explain a long absence. On my tenth birthday, the real one not the one on Calliope’s birth certificate, Mom had a serious talk with me. She said that very soon my body would start trying to turn me into a teenage boy, and that would ruin our disguises. There was only one way she could stop that from happening, and I wasn’t going to like it. Then she stuck me with a needle and I lost consciousness.

I only know from seeing the result, so I can’t say exactly what she did to me. She used either a technique she’d picked up at the vet’s or some of her skills from when she’d been a nurse back in her old life. But I do know she castrated me and arranged what was left so that it looked female. I don’t know if she cut my penis off or somehow sewed it up inside me, but it was gone. She kept me drugged for a while, so my memories of that time are really vague and hazy. I kind of remember her sobbing and apologizing a lot. I think I might have gotten some kind of infection before I was completely healed.

At this time she also started injecting me with hormones. I don’t know if she’d gotten them on the black market, or if she’d borrowed veterinary grade estrogen from work, or for all I know she might have robbed a pharmacy. She explained that like other girls my age I was going to start to become a woman. She promised that my new body was a good thing — I wouldn’t need to be afraid to be seen undressed anymore, so I’d now be allowed to go on sleepovers with my friends (not that I had any just then) and I could use things like public changing rooms. She said since I was going to start to get my figure soon, we’d be moving to California where everyone hangs out on the beach in bikinis all the time.

So I had to endure the shock of being neutered, the trauma of recovering from amateur surgery, and the beginning growing pains and hormonal mood swings of the wrong puberty all at the same time. I did not take it well. I threw a lot of tantrums and was not very cooperative with my mother’s demands. At one point I broke down and just screamed at her, “Why are you doing this to me?”

She went and got a stiff drink from the kitchen, and then came back to sit beside me. She said that I was probably old enough to know the whole story. She said that when she was a little girl, for big holidays the family would gather at her grandmother’s, all the aunts and cousins and everything. And one year when she was around seven, one of her older cousins had showed up at a gathering pregnant and everyone was taking turns touching her belly and asking if she wanted a girl or a boy.

And the grandmother spoke up and said, “You’d better hope it’s a girl. This family doesn’t have sons.” This was a true statement. My mother looked around the room and noticed that except for a couple of uncles there were no boys there, their grandmother and all the aunts had only had daughters.

But then her grandmother went on to tell a story. She said that many generations ago back in the old country (Mom wasn’t exactly sure what country that was), one of the family’s ancestors was a young bride who was having difficulty giving her husband children and had become so saddened she wandered off into the wilderness in the hope that some beast would end her misery. But it wasn’t a boar or a lion that crossed her path. In those days there were magical creatures in the hills and forests, the sorts of things the legends would call trolls or goblins or elves. It was one of these who met the girl, a being with sharp claws and long teeth and gleaming red eyes. She said “Eat me, Creature, for I do not wish to live,” and she told it how she did not wish to live since she could never know the joy of motherhood.

But the thing with the big red eyes said that it could solve her problem, at a cost of less than she’d been willing to pay the moment before. It told her to return home and lie with her husband and before the harvest moon she would bring forth a beautiful daughter that would be hers to raise and enjoy. However, in one year at the next harvest moon she would bring forth a strong and handsome son. The price the creature asked was that it be given the second child.

The woman was desperate and agreed to the deal. She returned to her husband, who’d become almost sick with worry over where she’d been, and they reveled in their love for one another. And sure enough, in time she grew full and heavy with child and by the light of the harvest moon she gave her husband a beautiful baby girl.

She realized that the red-eyed monster had lived up to its end of the bargain, and saddened at the idea of bringing another child into the world only to give it to a ferocious creature who would devour it painfully. She was a cunning woman who realized that she could make sure that this never happened. From the moment her daughter was born, she refused to share her husband’s bed so that there would be no more children.

The daughter grew up to be strong and beautiful, graceful and kind, the envy of all in the village. When she came of age she had a wide choice of suitors and chose not the wealthiest or the strongest or the most handsome, but the wisest and most hardworking man, a gifted woodcarver. The couple had a lovely wedding, and within a year the new bride herself was full and heavy of child. On a warm spring morning, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He was her delight and joy.

One day when he was only a handful of months old, she was putting the baby down for a nap and from a shadow in the corner of the room a terrible clawed hand reached out and grabbed the child. She looked up just in time to see a pair of gleaming red eyes and to hear a gravelly voice say, “The boy is mine. Ask your mother.” And then the creature vanished.

She went to see the old woman her mother had become, who explained the bargain she’d foolishly made with the creature. It was tragic that the boy was gone, but at least the deal was finished. And when the next year the parents who’d lost their son were given a daughter, their hearts smiled anew. The girl was followed by two others, both as sweet and lovely as their mother.

The family was delighted to have a second son, handsome and strong, sure to follow his father. They’d put the arrangement with the magical creature in the past and thought all would be well. But before the boy’s first birthday, he was taken by the thing with the red eyes who said, “One was denied me, so I shall take all.”

Mom said her grandmother finished the story by saying that to that day, only daughters are born to the family, and should a son ever appear, he never lives long; Red Eyes comes for him. She said that the aunts tried to tell her not to frighten the girls with fairy tales, but her grandmother had said that all the old fairy tales were based on true stories. They needed to pay attention to the warnings in stories like Rumplestiltskin, Hansel & Gretel, or Red Riding Hood. There were monsters out there that want to eat you, so you’d better be careful.

My mother told me she’d never really believed her grandmother; when she got older she just thought the story was some kind of metaphor warning about infant mortality. Until the day my father opened the door to a Jehovah’s Witness and right in front of her this stranger’s form shifted to a deadly collection of claws and teeth and Red Eyes, and said it had come for the boy. She then told me that my dad had given his life to slow the monster down enough for her to get me and escape.

All that was a lot to lay on a ten-year-old boy on the cusp of womanhood, but I guess I had enough drugs in me to make her tone seem convincing. I accepted her description of our situation and became compliant for a while. We did end up moving to California, but it was in Fresno, nowhere near the beach. I started middle school there, and I was the fourth girl in my class to need a real bra instead of just a trainer.

At thirteen, my mother told me I needed to start dating boys. She said that if I said no to too many of the ones who asked me out I’d get a reputation of being stuck-up, but if I said yes to too many they’d think I was easy, so I had to aim for a happy medium and convince them I was a perfectly normal regular girl.

I wasn’t that thrilled about having to kiss boys, but it wasn’t like I was more interested in kissing girls; I didn’t have much of a libido at all. But I did my best to pay attention to what they seemed to like, and keep their wandering hands from discovering my secret.

We finally got that place by the beach when we moved to Miami in my sophomore year of high school. I was Morgan Conrad, with my hair dyed red and my eyes tinted green with colored contacts, and a seriously hot bikini bod, if I do say so myself.

In my junior year, I started going out with Jared Pierce. He was like the thirteenth boy I’d kissed, and my fifth serious boyfriend. I’d just broken up with Simon Tanner, an annoyingly persistent jerkface who just would not accept that no means no, and wasn’t satisfied with just my amazing oral technique. He was also one of those guys who gets really excited by naked boobs but doesn’t quite know what to do with them. I can’t tell you how many times I had to tell him that twisting is not a turn-on. At least he was better than my second boyfriend, Bobby Lake, who apparently was never properly weaned.

Anyway, I was telling you about Jared. I’d just broken up with Simon, so I wasn’t really looking to start something serious, and Jared was a big jock so I figured he was into casually dating a bunch of girls all at once. But I misread him totally. He was the starting varsity pitcher despite only being a junior, and he’d noticed that I went to all the games. So he asked me out and we talked baseball for a couple hours on our first date and only kissed a little at the end.

I think I’ve always been into baseball. I kind of remember going to a Yankee game once with my dad. I think he might have been a big fan. It’s tough remembering him sometimes. So in part I think I liked hanging out with Jared because he reminded me of my father.

As things stepped up between us, I felt more and more comfortable with him. He was the first one of my boyfriends that I wanted to truly intimate with. I told him that I had a medical condition, where my vagina was sealed up and incapable of being penetrated; there was an operation I could get to fix it but they wouldn’t’ do it until I was eighteen. In the meantime, I could have sex, just not vaginally. When he figured out what I meant, he was more than willing.

I’d like to say I was a natural and was the best he’d ever had from the get go, but truth be told it took us a while to figure out what worked for both of us. I’m not sure because I don’t have anything to compare it to, but I think he gave me my first orgasm.

I felt safe in his arms, and I enjoyed his company, and I just plain felt good having him around. So when he held me close one night and kissed me and said “I love you, Morgan” I kissed him back and said “I love you, too.” I don’t know if what I felt is the same thing that real girls feel when they’re in love, but it felt like the right word to me.

I didn’t like lying to him. One Saturday afternoon when we were cuddling in my bed while my mother was at work, my contacts were bothering me and I took them out. He was surprised and said my eyes were prettier in their natural blue, and that since we both had blue eyes there was a good chance we’d have blue-eyed children.

I held back a tear and said that related to my vagina problem, my uterus was messed up and there was a very little chance I could ever get pregnant even after I got that fixed. So he’d have to go find some other girl to give him blue-eyed babies.

He kissed me and said he didn’t want some other girl. When the time came for us to start a family, we’d just have to adopt. I was a little scared that he was thinking like that, and also really happy that he wanted me. I rolled over on top of him and asked him if he really was already planning our future. He surprised me by very casually stating that when college scouts had come to see him pitch, he’d always told them that he wanted to find a school that was also a good fit for me; if he had to he’d do the long-distance thing when we went away to college, but ideally he wanted us to go to the same school. He figured we’d get married just before graduation so that when we were figuring out where we’d look for jobs we’d make sure they were in the same place. And then when we were ready we’d start a family.

I was used to my mother making life plans for me, so it didn’t bother me so much that he hadn’t brought it up before. Plus, I really liked that he wanted my opinion on all the important decisions rather than just making them for me. It was sweet and beautiful and I didn’t deserve him. I knew I had to be honest with him.

I let him slip inside me and made passionate love to him for what I figured would be the last time. While snuggling after cleaning up, I said, “I need to tell you something that will make you want to break up with me.”
He pushed me away and asked if I cheated on him. I said that I could never do that, and he said there was nothing else I could say that would make him leave.

I couldn’t look at him, so I closed my eyes and said, “My mother is a psychopath. We’ve been on the run from a fairy tale monster since I was four. She mutilated me and drugged me, and gives me a new identity without warning every couple years, whenever she feels particularly threatened by what she interprets as clues that the monster is close.”

I opened my eyes and saw that his jaw had dropped and he was just staring at me. I dropped the punchline. “My name isn’t really Morgan Conrad; it’s Joey Bennett. I’m a boy.”

He blinked a couple times. “You’re telling me your mom is a nutjob and she forced you to get a sex change?” I nodded. “So when you get away from her are you planning to change back?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

He kissed me. “Well then I don’t see any reason to break up with you.” He gently caressed my breast. “And I hate to break this to you, but you are not a boy, even if you were once. You are the prettiest girl in school, and way hotter than any of the trannies down on South Beach.” He slid down my body and kissed my scar. “Ok, so now I know what kind of operation you need, and I’ll help you save up for it. But I want to call dibs right now. Whatever goes here I don’t want to share with any other guys.”

He was more amazing than I’d ever realized. He even didn’t push it when he said I ought to get my mother locked up and I said I wanted to wait until I was eighteen; I didn’t want to go to foster care.

A couple weeks after telling him everything, Jared said he had a surprise for me. He invited me over to dinner and after some tame kissing in his room (his parents made him leave the door open) he showed me his computer. He’d found a web site dedicated to finding missing children, and showed me the page where someone was looking for Joey Bennett. He said that seeing the picture of me as a four-year-old boy was weird, but he still loved me anyway. He laughed at how wrong they got the computer-aged picture of what I was supposed to look like at seventeen, but it just made me feel regret that I would never know what it would have been like to be that guy.

There was an email address to contact with any information, and I wrote it down and spent about four days carrying it around in my purse before I decided to send a message. I used some of the tricks my mother taught me for being untraceable on the internet and created an email account just for this. And so “MiaGirl17925” sent an email that said “I know what happened to Joey Bennett. His mother’s been keeping him hidden.”

A couple days later, I got a reply from someone saying he was a private investigator hired by the Bennett family, who was delighted to know that Joey was alive. I was surprised to know there was a Bennett family, and he told me about a grandmother and an uncle I didn’t remember having, but he sent a photo and told me to show it to Joey. It showed a couple of vaguely familiar grownups sitting on a big couch with a younger me and my mom and dad. I could see some resemblance between my dad and his relatives, and it just made me really miss him. I did some googling based on the names he’d given me, and found pages for my Grandmother Dolores and Uncle Fred.

My web search also turned up an old newspaper article that chilled me to the bone. It was a report of my father’s death. It said how he’d been brutally stabbed and all the evidence pointed to my mother as the murderer. Police were searching for her and the child assumed to be with her. I knew my mother was insane, but I’d always thought she really loved my dad. Was it possible her delusion made her see him as the red-eyed monster she believed was stalking her? I didn’t know what to believe. Could she ever think I was the monster? Was I safe?

After a couple back-and-forths, the PI asked where I was, and we arranged for him to come down to meet me and get my story about Joey in person. Following the principle of always meeting internet strangers in public places full of people, we made a date to meet at my favorite open air café.
But a couple days before the arranged meeting, he told me that there was a slight change of plans and Dolores wanted to come herself. She thought I might be more willing to reveal Joey’s location to a concerned relative than an employee.

I was going to meet my grandmother! I went into a panic and was pretty useless at school. Jared had to calm me down, and helped me pick out the perfect outfit to wear for the occasion, a sundress that he said looked beautiful on me without being too sexy for grandma, and my favorite pair of sandals.

I was too nervous to drive, so he took me in his car and held back to watch me from a distance while he pretended to shop for fresh lemons. I recognized her from her photo and my first impulse was to just run over there and give her a hug and say “Grandma, it’s me!” But Jared and I had rehearsed this and realized that finding out your missing grandson was now a pretty girl was the sort of news you want to spring slowly.

So instead, I went over and shook her hand and introduced myself as Morgan. I took a seat and told her that Joey was a very good friend of mine, and asked her about his family. We had a ni8ce chat and I said that Joey’s main concern was that revealing himself wouldn’t mean sending his mother to prison. He knew she was sick and would rather see her getting psychological help than punished for what she may have done. Dolores said she wasn’t looking to avenge her son just to rescue her grandson. She told me which hotel she was staying in, and I said I’d take her information to Joey and if see if he agreed to come see her later in the evening.

My heart was racing and Jared had to use all his skills to calm me down, and talk me into making sense. I wasn’t sure if I needed to change to a better outfit, so part of that discussion was held while I stood in my closet in my underwear. He waggled his eyebrows at me and said he had an idea about how I could burn off some of that nervous energy, but I just stuck out my tongue and threw a shoe at him.

When the time came, he volunteered to come with for moral support, and I was very grateful to have him along to help explain if I got stuck. We drove to the hotel and I smoothed my skirt three times in the parking lot alone. I clung to Jared’s arm like a life preserver and we walked to the room.

I knocked on the door and there was a moment where I guess she checked the peephole before opening. Grandma Dolores led us to the sitting area at the far end of the room. I introduced Jared as my boyfriend and she took a long look at him. She inhaled deeply through her nose, and then smiled widely, really widely, like more widely than a person ought to be able to smile. She sort of shrugged and her body seemed like it was somehow unfolding like a person getting up out of a chair, becoming taller than she ought to.

She flexed her hands and her nails were suddenly longer. She opened her mouth and revealed row upon row of needle-like teeth. Her eyes rolled back into her head, revealing blood-red orbs facing forward. The thing that I had thought was my grandmother cackled and said, “You’ve been hard to track down, Boy!”

Jared gave me a shove that snapped me out of my stupor. “Morgan, run!”

I didn’t know how I was going to outrun this thing, but I headed for the door. It took me a moment to realize that neither Jared nor the monster was running with me. He’d realized what I had not, that the creature thought Jared was me, and he was ready to sacrifice himself so that I could get away. Just like my dad.

I caught Jared’s eye just before the monster pounced. He mouthed “I love you” at me. My eyes were full of tears as I tore out of there. I was halfway to the parking lot before I realized that Jared had pressed his keys into my hand when he told me to run. I made it to his car and drove away.

I called my mom and gave her the short version of what had happened and the most sincere apology I could. She took it all in and then gave me directions to where she’d parked the emergency getaway car she’d stashed with supplies and the necessary documents for our next identities. I met her there and we’ve been running ever since. I never doubt or question her plans anymore.