deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: My sister says raising monsters is going to get me killed. Still, my b
deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: My sister says raising monsters is going to get me killed. Still, my beastly children grow quickly, leave quietly, and after so many of them, I am still alive. The first time one of Hariya’s beastly children left quietly in the night, she had the porridge bubbling away before she realized she hadn’t heard the sound of claws clicking against the floor since she’d woken up. She walked from room to room calling out her child’s name, her house suddenly filled with an uneasy quiet. All her rooms seemed empty, foreboding, the gouges in the walls dull and faded scars. One of her windows had been jimmied open from the inside, and apart from that there was nothing. It had left while she was asleep. Hadn’t even made a sound. Hariya raised more monsters after that. They grew up quickly, and so there were many of them. They all left, if not exactly in the same way, with the same lack of notice. They were small and squirming in her hands, so helpless she needed to use an eyedropper to feed them, and then bigger and bigger every day, blood-eyed and slavering and looming over her darkly, and then gone. She supposed that they left her out of necessity, when they felt they had grown too large for them both to coexist. From the lack of monster attacks in the news, she grew to worry whether she had raised them well or responsibly at all, whether she had prepared them for the world ahead or only left them confused about their natures; and whether they were doing well still, and happy, ambushing strangers in the night, or if they had only continued shrinking silently away in the darkness further from any love of comfort, never once making a sound.Her sister had long warned that her beastly children would be the death of her, but having watched so many of them grow up to leave her, Hariya instead found that her life seemed to stretch out far too long entirely. She would begin to wonder if perhaps she had not made a mistake, if her children with their all too short lives would have not been happier growing up as monsters, deadly and fearsome, having at least known the thrill of piercing a wriggling body with their claws. watching it bleed out solely to feed them, savoring the last dying twitches of having taken another life. Hariya thought these things, then looked down at the new monster wriggling in her hands, its mouth still toothless and grasping, helpless, waiting to be taught. And then she would think that no, all lives had their pitfalls, and this one after all could not be so much worse than the alternative. She would settle down into her armchair cradling her beastly child, looking down on its bright beastly face and reminiscing on all the babes that had come before it, generations of monsters, growing, growing, grown. -- source link
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