Only a Monster by Vanessa Len

down. She added waterproof tape and went to have a shower.
    The bathroom was tiny. In the mirror, Joan’s reflection looked glassy-eyed. There was blood on her chin and all over her arms and hands. Under her fingernails. In her hair. She started to shake again as she stripped.
    Just a few days ago, they’d all had dinner together at Gran’s little kitchen table. Uncle Gus had made lentils with fresh tomatoes. And Ruth had said to Joan: How’s your crush from work? And Aunt Ada had said: What crush? What’s this? And Bertie had said: Ooh, what’s he like? Show us a photo! Is he nice?
    Joan had another flash of memory. Of pleading with Nick. Don’t do this, Nick. Don’t hurt my family.
    She turned on the water as hot as it went. Then she scrubbed and scrubbed. She kept scrubbing until the water ran clear and her skin hurt, and even after that.
    When all the blood was gone, she turned the tap off and slid to the tiled floor. She pulled her knees to her chest. The position tugged painfully at her cut side, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Here, in the quiet, she could hear Gran’s last harsh breaths again. When she closed her eyes, she could see all those people lying dead among the flowers.
    Once upon a time , Gran had said, there was a boy who was born to kill monsters. A hero.
    Joan had been so angry with her family earlier today. For their silence. For the secrets they’d hidden from her. And now they were gone. Nick had killed them.
    Joan pictured Nick’s face, square-jawed and honest. She drew her knees tighter against her body. In movies, heroes killed monsters all the time. When the camera moved from the monsters’ bodies, you never had to think about them again.
    But when you were the monster, when the monsters killed were the people you loved . . .
    Joan kept her eyes open. She watched water crawl toward the drain, making long lines on the tiles.
    When she got back to the bedroom, Aaron was lying on top of his bedcovers, shoes off but still clothed. “I tried to call emergency services,” he said. He was holding his phone. His throatbobbed up and down as he swallowed. “The dispatcher kept asking who I was. Where I was. Whether anyone else had survived and where they were. I hung up.”
    â€œDo you think they traced the call?” Joan asked. What was the extent of Nick’s reach? How many people did he have ?
    â€œI don’t know.” Aaron sounded exhausted. “I’ve been trying to call the other families. No one’s answering.” He dropped the phone onto the bed and put both hands over his face. “Who attacked us?” he said. “How can this be happening?”
    Joan remembered again that sweltering night when she and Ruth had been sleepless, sick with a fever. Ruth had been eight, and Joan seven. Gran had sat up with them, cooling their faces with damp cloths. The air had been heavy with the smell of impending rain.
    Tell us a story , Ruth had said. Tell us a story about the human hero.
    You have a morbid sensibility , Gran had said, but she’d been smiling.
    Aaron was shaking his head. “This night is all wrong,” he said now. “It’s all wrong.”
    â€œI can’t bear it either,” Joan whispered. Her family must have been in pain when they’d died. They must have been so scared.
    â€œYou don’t understand,” Aaron said. “I’m saying this night is wrong . The Oliver records say nothing of an attack. The people I saw dead . . . those deaths are wrong. It’s all wrong. They weren’t supposed to die tonight.”
    The Oliver records. Joan felt as though a crack were openingup in the world, giving her a glimpse of something beyond—something vast and strange. A new world where the future was recorded as if it were past.
    But . . . “It doesn’t matter what the records say,” Joan told him. “It