Melanie spent most of her days suctioned to her laptop, obsessing over online games that didn’t have any sort of conclusive ending, blogging out her diary entries under an internet alias and stalking people on Facebook. The only remarkable thing about her was her imminent lack of responsibility, not that she cared. She rarely went to class and barely ever passed her tests unless they had something to do with social experiments or psychology. Her absences had recently gotten to the point where her principle knew both her face and name. He insisted on seeing her every day, or rather, every day she decided to show up on campus.

Sarah, Melanie’s mother, wasn’t happy with her daughter but hadn’t taken any initiative to fix the problem other than grounding Melanie or taking away her cell phone. Melanie’s father wasn’t around anymore but even when he was, he must not have cared one way or the other. Melanie couldn’t remember even one day when her father scolded her; he was too busy flirting with his secretary or some work associate or the waitress or the cardboard cut-out of a Hooter’s girl he kept plastered to the inside of his closet. Melanie would have said she resented him for it, but she really didn’t care. Her parents hadn’t ever gotten along anyway. Nonetheless, the divorce left Sarah devastated. But Melanie’s father had taken the opportunity to scamper off with some busty blonde chick with a fake tan and crimped hair that was way too young for him. He hadn’t contacted the rest of the family since, so nobody knew where he was. Melanie remembered her mother saying, “Good riddance,” and then slamming the bedroom door so she could cry over the holiday socks she had once purchased for him on vacation. He never even wore them outside of the house, but Sarah cried anyway.

From Melanie’s perspective, the divorce invoked Hell for the next three years. She was appalled that she was the only one to put two and two together. When her mother told her that theory was nonsense, Melanie stopped calling her “Mom” and instead opted for “Sarah.” Sarah wept again that night, moaning from under her pillow about abandonment and respect and asking why over and over. But Melanie, who was listening outside the door with her mouth a scowl, knew that all the tragedies had started about a month after her father ran off and she couldn’t bring herself to ignore that fact.

First the house burned down; later that incident would prove to be arson. Then the dog died. After that, Sarah’s goldfish turned belly up two days later like a curse was killing off the first-borns, except with pets instead of people. Melanie turned into an insufferable delinquent and Sarah desperately tried to keep hold on their new apartment while struggling with management problems at work and pay cuts that made it difficult to keep up with the rent. Their new landlord was an ass who never fixed anything and wouldn’t compromise on the rent checks. Sarah couldn’t find a loan and Melanie was missing so many days of high school that she may well not have gone at all.

Then, Sarah snapped. She decided wasn’t going to deal with this anymore. She wasn’t going to let her ex-husband and whoever burned down her house get away Scot-free. She’d force Melanie to get her ass in gear and she’d tell her manager at work to suck it and quit, just like that. She could do it. She had nothing left to lose except a daughter who hated her anyway and a shitty apartment that wasn’t fit for rats even with all the repairs. So Sarah took the day off work to buy a chainsaw.

She was all fired-up at the hardware store, holding it proud in her hands at the display where miscellaneous woodworking tools hung on hooks like dead fish.

Sarah missed her goldfish. The dog had been Melanie’s and an untrained brat but the goldfish had been hers. She had won them at a church fundraiser; they were a prize at that silly game where you have to pick out plastic ducks from a kiddy pool and whatever the number is on the bottom is your prize. Sarah had won the two goldfish, taken them home and put them in a nice little tank with a nice filter and even nicer decorations so the whole thing looked like it was fit for saltwater tropical fish instead of just dumpy prize goldfish. She had managed to keep those two goldfish alive for years despite their life expectancy being less than a week. The neighbors used to marvel at them as they swam around in circles, saying there’s no way they’d ever be able to keep a goldfish-in-a-bag alive for that long. Those comments had always made Sarah swell with pride. Despite all the wrongs in her life, despite the fact that her husband was so blatantly cheating, despite her daughter’s nasty attitude, she could, at the very least, expand the life expectancy of the only two prizes she had ever won. Sarah had even named them: Speckle and Freckle. Right then, seeing the tools as they hung down from each metal hook like prized pikes, Sarah realized how much she really missed Freckle and Speckle.

She wanted her house and her husband and the person her daughter used to be and her goddamn fish. She wanted everything back, but she knew that’s not how life works.

She looked down at the chainsaw in her hands and any rage or will she had to go find her ex-husband and landlord and murder them suddenly evaporated. It was a woodworking tool and she knew nothing about woodworking and it wasn’t exactly an inconspicuous weapon anyway. She told the shop attendant thanks for letting her look and walked out of the store without buying anything at all.

When Sarah got home, she discovered that Melanie hadn’t skipped school that day, so she decided not to yell over her daughter’s failing grades. Pick your battles, she reminded herself, twirling her overcooked spaghetti.

“How was school?” Sarah asked, sounding ashamed. Anything she’d ever been mad at her daughter for seemed so trivial compared to what she had almost gone and done.

“Fine.” Melanie slurped a rather large piece of spaghetti off her fork. The sucking sound echoed through the near-empty apartment.

“I almost bought a chainsaw today.”

Melanie nodded. Sarah didn’t know what that meant.

She blurted out, “I was going to kill your father with it. And the landlord.”

“Did you?”

“Well, no.”

“Too bad. I would’ve helped you hide the bodies,” said Melanie with another loud slurp of spaghetti. This time the sauce dotted onto her chin so she wiped her mouth with the crumpled napkin in her left hand.

Sarah was at a loss for words. Melanie sat at the table and finished her dinner without another word then went to her room, which was more like a closet than anything in its size, to flop on her bed. She didn’t clean up her dishes, probably didn’t touch her homework.

Over the running water, death metal came blaring from Melanie's room. Sarah was washing the leftover dishes and thinking of what to do next with herself. Go on with her life, she supposed. In spite of always telling Melanie to turn the music down, this time Sarah rather enjoyed it; the angry screaming that usually grated her eardrums and gave her a headache was surprisingly pleasant now that she'd narrowly avoided going through with murder. A little more of her daughter made sense. At least that was something, Sarah told herself.

The next day was a ditch day for Melanie. She got on the bus and when all the other students unloaded she crouched under the seat until the driver squeaked the doors closed and drove away. The driver would always stop a few minutes later at the school bus parking lot to switch shifts with a coworker. Melanie had it down to an art. She always took the same seat. When everyone else was getting off she'd duck below the range of the mirror (which was supposed to see every inch of the bus from the front but Melanie knew it had a blind spot or her plan never would have worked) and sit with her legs sticking out under the seat in front of her. To get away with it, Melanie always took the time to get to her bus stop early and made a point of sitting in the eighth row by the window.

After the bus driver exited, Melanie slipped out, stood up and dragged her ratty old backpack out from under the seat. She hopped off the bus and made her way down the gravel path near the bus parking lot that lead to a local pond called Pristine Waters. Sometimes Melanie would spot a bicyclist and hop off the path as they passed her but this time there wasn’t anyone around. She guessed people didn't go bike-riding on Thursdays. After Melanie was a good distance along the path, out of the range of eyesight from the school bus parking lot, she shrugged her backpack off her shoulder and stretched backward to crack her stiff joints. There was a squirrel nearby that watched her, its nose twitching back and forth. Melanie approached it but it dashed away and darted up a nearby tree, always keeping out of reach.

"Well at least I got out of that boring lecture in English," Melanie remarked. She walked around the tree a few times, watching the squirrel spiral around to avoid her. It was more to keep herself occupied than anything. "I wonder what Sarah would've done if she did murder dad. The landlord too.”

The squirrel stopped climbing round and round. Melanie felt it might be listening to her, even though she knew that were impossible.

"Well," she continued and sat on a large rock that wasn't quite big enough to be called a boulder but nonetheless supported her weight, "My mom Sarah, she said she was gonna buy a chainsaw and kill them. I don't think she'd really go through with it but you never know. Maybe she finally cracked."

The squirrel twitched its tail.

"And I'm talking to a squirrel."

The squirrel ran up to the higher branches and Melanie could no longer see it. She picked up herself and her backpack and continued along the path.

It was noon by the time she stopped. She had circled the pond at least ten times. That's all she really did when she wasn't at school. Otherwise she'd sit and watch the water or read whatever book she'd shoplifted from the local thrift store. (When she was done she was always sure to sell them back to that dinky little bookshop across the street. No one ever seemed to make the connection.) The sun twinkled on the waves and a frog croaked from the little island in the middle of the pond. Melanie took the time to appreciate the world around her. She closed her eyes.

Then she thought of her mother and the chainsaw and her father lying dead, and she couldn't bear to keep them closed any longer. With a huge sigh she dragged her backpack off the ground again and kept walking.

Since Melanie had gotten rather bored of the same old scenery, she decided to follow a path she had always noticed but never travelled. She had been meaning to hike it but whenever she passed by she found herself preoccupied with her thoughts and forgot to turn. It was like the path itself was purposefully eluding her.

This time, though, this time Melanie would concentrate. She stopped abruptly at the crossing. Usually she went left, but today she made a point to go right. She soon understood why she never went that way.

The path itself wasn't anything special or even noteworthy, just trees and leaves and rustling animals in the underbrush. It was what lived there that Melanie found disturbing.

There was a monster staring at her, in every sense of the word. It had too many heads and legs and arms like twigs and it stank worse than anything she'd ever smelled before. It lurched forward, dripping with ooze, and its single giant eyeball stared through Melanie as cold and placid as the road kill at its feet. Melanie had never been so scared of anything in her life. Her feet stuck in the ground and her knees locked and the rest of her trembled in tune with her rasping breaths. What was most likely the monster's neck retracted, the giant eye receding from Melanie's view as it shrunk to about the size of a football. Then the eye settled inside a deep flap of the monster's oozing, bendy flesh, somewhere between its torso and three of its misshapen faceless heads.

"Who dares enter my pathway?" The voice came from everywhere.

Melanie couldn't move. Her chest was too tight.

"Who dares enter my pathway?" The eye swam out from under the flap of skin and dripped onto one of the slimy legs that melted and bubbled towards Melanie's gym shoes. It reformed into what Melanie might later describe to be a sort of chalice to keep the eye in place, as if it would roll out of the monster's body otherwise.

"M-Melanie," said Melanie, "is my name."

The eyeball stared. It wanted her to continue. A mouth formed on one of the faceless heads to dip down and munch on a dead raccoon near the monster's feet. The monster was atop a huge pile, almost a nest, of dead animals, some of them decaying and others still squirming in their final moments of life. Melanie found herself wondering if she'd end up like them, if she had wandered into her death and now there was no chance of escape. She couldn't speak anymore.

The monster seemed to sense her locked voice box and said, "Well M'melanie, they call me Grivgas. As you can see, I'm busy and would like to finish eating my lunch. If you wouldn't mind stopping by later we can converse. How does tomorrow sound?”

Melanie found her legs had walked her home. She was still shaking like mad. When she tried to think of how she’d gotten there, she couldn’t. It was the same feeling she always had before when she passed that path by the pond, a sort of forced absentmindedness. It made her feel unstable. She leaned on the door. She didn’t want to face her mother.

God, there was a monster living by the pond. She walked there every time she ditched. How could she have never seen it before?

Melanie’s thoughts were interrupted by the annoyingly loud phone ringing from inside. They had no answering machine so it just kept ringing and ringing. Whoever it was must really want to talk; usually by the seventh ring whoever was calling figured out they didn’t have any way of leaving a message and resigned to call back later. Not whoever this was. They stayed on the line for twelve rings before Melanie grumbled, unlocked the door with the spare key hiding under a rock near the tiny square patio, and fumbled to pick up the phone without dropping it.

“Hello?”

“M’melanie,” A muffled, pained female voice came from behind the static on the other end.

“Who is this?”

More static and then once again, “M’melanie.”

“Who is this,” Melanie repeated sternly.

Click.

Today fucking sucked. Melanie dragged her laptop out from under the couch in the next room and unplugged it from the outlet behind the end table. She googled monsters. Every link lead to more questions.

She googled road kill. Sarah walked through the front door.

“Melanie.”

Melanie knew that tone. That was the “you’re in deep shit” tone her mother only used before grounding her for months on end or taking away her cell phone indefinitely. She let out an involuntary gulp. At times like these she would’ve preferred a monster.

Sarah strutted up to her like the Queen of the World and demanded she shut off her laptop and hand it over. Seeing as this woman had recently confessed to almost committing murder, Melanie begrudgingly did as she was told.

“The school called in the middle of a meeting at work.”

Melanie faced her mother with what she hoped looked like ashamed silence.

Sarah leaned on one knee, laptop somehow balanced in her crouched position. “You gotta work with me here. We can’t keep doing this, leaving things unsaid. Bad stuff happens.” A pause and then, “What were you doing while you were supposed to be in class?”

Melanie hated it when Sarah tried to turn her single semester of psychology classes into a counseling session. Communication never got Melanie anywhere and she was about to prove it.

“I walked the path by the pond and a met a road-kill-eating monster called Grivgas,” Melanie told her in a very calm, prompt voice.

Sarah sighed, stood up straight, removed the laptop charger from under the end table, sighed again as if trying to think of something to say, and then turned away from Melanie.

In a last ditch effort to make her daughter see the light, Sarah said, “You’re grounded until you can stop lying to me.”

Typical.

Melanie slipped into her room and shut the door as quietly as she could. She wouldn’t give Sarah the satisfaction of a storming exit and a slammed door. She would sit in her room and she would figure out what the hell Grivgas was and who had called her practically the moment she got home. There had to be a better explanation than monsters. She dug under her bed, tossing aside romance novels and video games and CDs (some out of their cases) until she found her spare laptop tucked away in the back under a box of old comic books.

Sarah was stupid for not seeing that coming, Melanie thought. She got in trouble often enough to have backup cell phones and gaming systems and whatever else she’d try to take away, all hidden cleverly so they were easy to get at but hard to notice. She almost gave herself a pat on the back for thinking ahead, but she had better things to do.

Melanie googled monsters. When sorting through the endless links got her absolutely nowhere, she googled Grivgas. No results. This might be harder than she thought. She overheard Sarah on the phone, heard her name and hushed, quickened responses. Melanie decided her search could wait a few minutes while she figured out what Sarah was doing. Melanie crawled over the strewn books and video game cases and CDs to sit with her ear to the door.

“I just can’t deal with this anymore,” Sarah was saying. “I know.” Melanie heard her mother’s footsteps going back and forth, back and forth. “Do you think maybe she has a mood disorder? What about bipolar? Doesn’t that make people lazy?” Sarah was whispering.

Melanie had heard enough. She shoved her bed across the floor, not caring that her precious books and games and music were being crushed, not caring that Sarah had suddenly stopped talking on the phone to ask what was going on in there, not caring about anything anymore, and she took her backpack and she left through the window. Being on the first floor had its perks.

It was night now. In the distance Melanie could hear her mother screaming and banging and yelling for her to open the damn door. She laughed under her breath and kept walking. She hated that woman anyway. She hated everything. She was glad to be rid of it. No longer would school and responsibility and routine rule her life. Melanie was going on an adventure. She would find Grivgas and she would enter a world of monsters and fantasy just like those of the role-playing games she loved so much. The air was crisp and cool and there wasn’t any traffic on the road for once. Melanie paused to look at the sky and take a long, fulfilling breath before she crossed the street.

She heard a door slam and looked back. Sarah was hollering for her to get back here, for her to behave for once in her life and stop being so selfish. Melanie had never been called so many names at once before. She turned her back and walked pointedly forward, good riddance.

There was a bang and a scraping noise and a horrible, sickening thud as Sarah’s ranting ended. Melanie twirled around to see. The driver was already speeding out of view. It was too dark to see the license plate, but that didn’t matter to Melanie.

Any and all hatred tumbled out of her as she ran out into the street to crouch by her dying mother.

Sarah was barefoot and bruised, her legs bent at a disgustingly wrong angle, sprawled like the long leaves of a wilting fern. Melanie cried by her side, trying to tell her everything would be okay, sobbing and gasping and holding her hand.

Her mother only said one thing, over and over. “M-melanie… M-melanie…”

Melanie paled. Her mother’s voice was muffled, pained. There was a rasp to her mother’s breathing that made her voice sound like static. Melanie didn’t mean to drop her mom’s hand, but the shock crashed hard and thick on her like a drumbeat. Her eyes were torn away by some unnatural force and she looked across the street to see Grivgas lumbering closer, oozing and shifting and swimming in its ever-changing self, that single giant eyeball fixed on Melanie’s mother.

Melanie didn’t know what to do. No, she simply couldn’t do anything. She could only sit there and stare and be frozen in utter terror. She could hear her blood pumping; feel her joints stiffen just as they had when she had first met this monster. Her chest constricted painfully, abruptly. Her body would not move no matter how hard she willed it to. She should be running; she should be calling an ambulance; she should be calling the police.

She should be calling her father.

Grivgas moved like a sloth, slow and deliberate, but he was upon Melanie and her mother in moments. Melanie watched in horror as his eyeball swung down from his chest and gleamed in the moonlight at Sarah’s twisted form.

“M’melanie,” Grivgas said, voice filling the starless night.

“M-melanie,” said her mother in that rasping static-filled whimper.

Melanie couldn’t talk or scream or even let out the tiniest whine as her mom died. She stared like a soulless doll while her mother’s body was absorbed halfway into Grivgas’ slimy body and dragged away into the bushes on the other side of the street.

Melanie sat there until sunrise, staring at the empty apartment and the bushes nearby, her backpack sagging from her slumped shoulders, filled with everything she had thought she might need when she ran away. Yet with all those preparations and desperate wishes, Melanie could not find the strength to move.