Monster Dot Com | Michael F. Donahue

Michael was a junior majoring in Economics at UMass Boston in 2019; he graduated Magnum Cum Laude in the spring of 2020 with a degree in Economics and Philosophy. He enjoys walk in the woods, otters, and talking to the moon. He wants to explain why he chose to use the word “retard” in his story: “I feel I should explain a choice I made in the story to use the word “retard”. I have a brother who is mentally handicapped and have always found the use of that language disgusting. Despite this personal opinion, I chose to use the word in this story in order to represent both, one of the characters and the type of things that tend to stand out most sharply in our memories. Whether to include this word was something I wrestled with and so I wanted to make sure my personal beliefs are not misconstrued with those of a character in this story.”

 

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**First Place Award Creative**

 

“Wat are we having for dinner?” I ask Mom. She sits at the dining room table with a sea of papers spread out in front of her, trying to figure out how to pay the rent, insurance, and credit card bills without the money for any of them.

“Nuggets and fries.” She says without looking up, “Is that alright?”

“Yeah, ‘course.” I mumble, mildly dissatisfied with the answer. I don’t know why. I don’t know what else I should have expected. We’ve been eating chicken nuggets and french fries two or three times a week for as long as I can remember. If we aren’t having hot dogs on white bread, or mac & cheese or Chef Boyardee or something like that, there’s a pretty good shot we’re eating nuggets and fries. Every now and then we’ll have ‘breakfast for dinner’, but really that’s just a nice way of saying we were out of ‘dinner for dinner’ options and cereal with toast would have to do.

“Turn the oven to 350 for me.” Mom asks, still staring intently at the figures in front of her, as if glaring at the unpaid sums would reduce them.

“Yup.” I say, walking to the kitchen and twisting the small piece of metal that once held the knob of the oven. The oven was in rough shape, the knob had gone missing years ago and there was still no trace of it, two of the burners on top needed to be lit with a match, and if you tried to put it above 400 degrees the whole apartment began to smell dangerously of gasoline. I’m certainly not complaining though. I remember when it was completely broken for like a year and a half. There was something wrong with the way the gas hooked up or something like that. The oven had just kinda sat there in the kitchen, more useful as a cabinet than anything else, while we cooked every meal in the toaster oven set up on top of it. When Mom had finally saved enough money to fix it, we ate a full Thanksgiving meal in the middle of April to make up for the rotisserie chicken we had eaten in November.

***

We weren’t supposed to still be in this apartment. I remember when we sold our house. That’s what my parents told me anyway, “we sold the house”. In reality the bank had foreclosed and booted us out. But my dad told me that we’d only be in this apartment temporarily. A month, three at the most, until he found a new job and hunted down a new house. He said the next house would be even better than the last. He said that this one would have a big backyard and I’d get my own room, instead of having to share one with my baby brother like I did back in the old house. That had been when my baby brother was still a baby. He started first grade a few months ago. And here we are, still in this apartment. We don’t have a bedroom to share here, instead we share the living room. I get the couch; he gets the love seat.

I remember I was so excited for our new house. I left all my toys in the brown boxes we had packed them in, saying I didn’t want to play with them until I was in the new backyard. Mom told me I should go ahead and unpack. She had a better grasp on the gravity of our situation than anyone. I didn’t listen. Hope of a return to my normality was far preferable to accepting our bleak new reality.

After two years I finally cracked the seal on those boxes. I pulled out the cars and action figures that once seemed so alive. I played around with some of my old favorites for a bit, but they had lost their luster, cooped up in cardboard so long. When I tried to spur my imagination into action and bring my old friends back, I only succeeded in dwelling on the past. It had been a long two years. Far too long for hope to continue dissuading reality.

After two years I finally cracked the seal on those boxes. I pulled out the cars and action figures that once seemed so alive. I played around with some of my old favorites for a bit, but they had lost their luster, cooped up in cardboard so long. When I tried to spur my imagination into action and bring my old friends back, I only succeeded in dwelling on the past. It had been a long two years. Far too long for hope to continue dissuading reality.

***

Mom clears the table of our family’s obligations and takes over the supervision of dinner while my sister and I set the table. When dinner is served, my brother is called away from his YouTube video and we all huddle around the table. Me and my brother munch on our balls of breaded chicken, I hardly taste them anymore. My little sister slurps her soup; she swore off solid foods and now only eats shakes and soups. Whenever a pack of storebrand Oreos makes its way into the apartment, she seems to find an exception to her new dietary restrictions though. My mom, for her part, sips at a cup of coffee. She rarely eats, she seems to sustain herself on a diet of stress and caffeine.

We eat quickly and quietly, keeping our heads down until our plates are cleared. All our small talk has already been exhausted. We’ve heard each other’s stories from the day, we’ve relayed any important information, the only thing for us to do is eat.

My mom stands up and goes back to her stack of papers, indicating to everyone that dinner is over. My sister puts the leftovers in a tupperware while my brother helps me do the dishes at the sink; scrubbing by hand with a previously yellow sponge. A big bubble, tinged blue, forms on one of the plates. My brother smacks it with one of his fat little fists. We both laugh.

***

My dad tried to get us that new house though. He seemed to spend all day on job sites, looking for anything that met his specifications. He was so determined to nail something down that he made Monster.com the homepage of our Internet Explorer. We probably couldn’t afford internet at that point. My mom had already sold our only remaining car and was taking the bus to work by then. But he said we needed internet if we had any chance of getting out of, what he called, “this shit hole”. But while my mom went to work, and my siblings and I went to school, the hours my dad spent in front of the computer did nothing to get us out of “this shit hole” or, what we had taken to calling it, “home”.

I suppose my dad would eventually get bored of browsing his job sites. His attention span had been short even before his temper got that way. But there are few times I’ve seen Mom angrier than when we had to get rid of the computer. It had gotten a virus. My dad threw it away while we were all out, saying it wasn’t even worth trying to fix. He blamed it on “those fucking spam emails” that everyone sent him. By that point I had learned the value of his words.

***

Mom goes to bed shortly after dinner. It’s still pretty early, but she has to get up for work the next morning.

I sit in the living room and watch TV with my sister. American Idol is on tonight and she loves one of the judges. My brother colors a picture of Peppa Pig and her perfect family on the floor. He pretends to hate American Idol. He says he doesn’t understand why we want to watch people just sing. But within a few minutes when he sees us laughing, the masculine aversion he had fabricated crumbles away. He asks my sister about the different contestants, wondering if anyone on the show is famous or rich. She answers him eagerly, pointing out what she likes about some people, what she hates about others. She’s excited to have someone to share her wisdom with.

***

My dad left. Like forever. I don’t blame him though. He had nothing here except for his family, and honestly, I think the importance of family gets overexaggerated. He wasn’t happy here. Him and Mom were always fighting. At first, they fought about money, then they fought about everything. The way my sister chewed her food (“If she doesn’t learn how to chew like a fucking human being, people are gonna think she’s a retard”), the way my mom’s boss treated her (“You know why he talks to you like you’re a slut? Cause you don’t have any fucking respect for yourself.”), even the cleanliness of the apartment (“How the fuck do you think it’s acceptable to let your family live in a shit hole like this?”), it seemed like they never stopped fighting. I felt like I was living in London during the bombings of World War Two. Every time they began fighting, my sister, brother, and I would take shelter in my sister’s room and pretend to not hear the vulgarity and hate that were raining down on the rest of the apartment. The difference between that and war was that the only carnage we saw in the aftermath were the tear stains on Mom’s cheeks after my dad stormed out to “get some air”.

He never hurt my mom (physically anyway), but it always felt like he was a hair away from it. I would sit in the room, listening for any indication of violence, waiting for it really. I prayed to everything I knew how to pray to, begging for peace on my mother’s behalf. I was scared and sorry, I just didn’t know what for. I had made up my mind long ago that if he were to ever hurt her, I’d make him pay. The sick part of me almost wanted it to happen. It’s like I wanted an opportunity to take vengeance on my family’s plague.

Even when they weren’t fighting my dad was miserable. He had been an extremely ambitious man before we lost the house. He was always talking about starting his own company or designing a million-dollar app. But after a few months of listening to the stomping of our upstairs neighbor in the middle of the night, his ambition seemed to whither. He stopped trying to create, instead contenting himself with criticizing everyone else. I could tell he resented us for the situation our family was in.

The day he walked out the door of “this shit hole” with a duffle bag of clothes and the promise that he would come back, I felt relieved. Not relieved that he was gone, he’s still my dad and sometimes I even miss him. But more relieved that all the anger and bitterness that he harbored were gone.

That wasn’t entirely true though, for months it felt like his ghost still lingered in the apartment. Mom was still on edge, quick to snap at anyone for little things. She had gotten so used to having a foil to argue with, that she had trouble abandoning the hostility that he had ingrained in her.

***

I send my sister to bed after her show ends. It’s already well after her bedtime, but I won’t tell Mom if she doesn’t.

My brother is sleepy, but refuses to succumb to the urge. He asks if I’ll read him a story. I reach behind the couch and pull out the book we’ve been reading at night. It’s a Magic Tree House book. I remember when my dad used to read the same stories to me before bed when I was younger. My brother enjoys looking at the pictures, I savor the nostalgia. When we read, he does the voice of Jack and I do the voice of Jack’s younger sister Annie, a high-pitched falsetto squeak that cracks him up every time.

Just as Jack and Annie are about to use their magical tree house to travel through time, my brother stops me and asks, “If you had a tree house, where would you go?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Ancient Greece or something, see what all the fuss is about.” I say, knowing he’s just waiting for me to ask the question back, “What about you? What time would you take your tree house to?”

“I’d take it to Bill Gate’s house.” He says wisely.

“Not exactly the point of a time machine.” I mumble to myself, then ask, “What would you do there?”

“I’d steal all his money.” he answers, “I’d put it in bags like bank robbers and bring it home with me.”

“I don’t think Mr. Gates would like that very much.” I tell him.

“I don’t care. He’s like the richest guy in the world and we’re the poorest.” He says.

“We’re not the poorest, bud. Think about all the stuff we have. You’ve got a nice warm place to sleep, and food to eat, and toys to play with. A lot of people aren’t that lucky.” I try to reason with him.

“But it’s not fair that Bill Gates can have whatever he wants and we can’t and other people can’t.” His voice is whiney as he says this, his head heavy with sleep.

“Yeah, it’s not fair.”

***

I don’t appreciate Mom enough. I never have, I never could. Every day she seems to tackle a list of labors that not even Hercules could rival.

She’s worked in the same office for almost ten years now. She gets there ungodly early every morning to accept shipments from suppliers, she stays late when they need her to, she takes work home with her on the weekend, and has been going in on Saturdays to clean the office for extra cash ever since they got rid of their cleaning company. Around Christmas she picks up hours at a diner she worked at when she was a teenager so that she can fill our tree. Every year it feels like a miracle to wake up and see the brightly wrapped presents shining under the tree’s twinkling lights. A miracle procured through sheer will power and a mother’s love.

Her determination to provide for her children is intimidating and humbling. She resolves herself to rise above the world’s expectations for her, an impoverished single mother of three, and provides us with a lifestyle beyond what we have any right to expect. She sends us on field trips when we beg her to save the money, she hunts down fun things for us to do as a family that won’t jeopardize that month’s cluster of bills, and more than anything, she’s there for us at the drop of a hat. Are you sick? She’s there with the remedy. Are you having trouble in school? She’s there with an explanation that makes more sense than anything your teacher taught you. Was someone mean to you? She’s there, like a cloud of doom, determined to defend your right to happiness. Or, do you just need someone to talk with? She’ll prove that despite her innumerable responsibilities, you’re her only priority.

How could I ever appreciate her to the extent she deserves?

***

My brother breaths quietly from his bed. I lay awake, looking in front of me, deep in the thoughts that endlessly churn through my head.

I go to the kitchen and look for something to eat. The cabinets offer few solutions to my grumbling stomach. I return to my couch with a granola bar in hand. I peel the shiny foil wrapper from the perfect rectangle. I break a corner off the bar and pop it into my mouth. I savor the syrupy sweet granola as my mouth waters with delicate overexcitement. My stomach gives a hollow laugh at my insulting attempt to quell it, but this will have to do.

I take another bite and get the delightful surprise of a chocolate chip. In the dark I hadn’t been able to read the label on the packaging, but this makes the thrill even greater as my blind indulgence is rewarded by the sweetness of this chocolate morsel.

I once read that chocolate was a food for kings. As I sit here, enjoying the chocolate my taste buds harvest from amidst the mass of granola, I understand why. In this moment, I feel like royalty. I am king. King of the couch. And over there is my brother, prince of the living room and lord of the loveseat. By royal decree I have determined that all the kingdom’s chocolate shall be rounded up and distributed amongst all my loyal subjects. Let us all enjoy the comforts of royalty and the splendor of life’s riches!

My tongue fishes the last of the granola from my teeth as I settle down to sleep on my throne.