We Are Monsters Read Free

his shoulder. Her lip curled in and her face crumpled; she buried it against his neck, convulsing as she unleashed a flood of fresh tears. Alex began to console her, hugging her tight and stroking her back. Then she pushed him away so suddenly he nearly fell.
    â€œLook,” she said, her eyes narrowing into hateful slits, motioning behind him with her head.
    Alex turned. Popeye’s hind leg was twitching, just like it did whenever Rachel scratched his secret spot.
    â€œHoney, please. Go inside.”
    Rachel reached out towards the dog as if she could summon him back to life. “No. He’s in pain. Help him.”
    Popeye’s midsection was flattened, his jaw unhinged, several teeth speckled the concrete like tiny flecks of quartz. Yet, still, the leg twitched. Twitched. Twitched.
    â€œHoney, there’s nothing I can do for him. He’s gone.”
    â€œHe’s not gone. He’s hurting. Oh, Alex, he’s in pain. Please.”
    It was a quiet night. Thin clouds drifted past a bloated moon shining with a silvery glow. Elsewhere lovers stole kisses under hanging willow limbs, but here a dog lay dying on a piece of pressure-washed pavement while Alex wondered if the day would ever end. “Okay. Let me see.”
    He walked over to Popeye and placed his foot upon the dog’s head. Rachel closed her eyes and spun around; she dropped to a knee. Alex looked down, preparing himself to apply the necessary pressure, trying to avoid the fading spark of recognition in the dog’s beady eye. Popeye’s leg gave one final spasm. His jaw opened and a gout of blood drooled out. Then he lay still. Alex sighed and moved his foot away.
    â€œOkay, it’s all over,” he said. He approached Rachel in order to help her to her feet. She heard him coming and stood and began walking towards the house.
    â€œHey,” Alex said. “Honey, I didn’t—”
    â€œNo. Not right now.” She walked through the open door and slammed it shut.
    Alex’s head sagged. He went to the garage and retrieved a garbage bag, then turned and sulked back towards Popeye’s body lying behind his car. Rachel’s mischievous terrier that he had effectively adopted when they got married, Popeye having come attached to her lap. And he had often felt like Bluto in its company—the brutish rival incapable of providing the same selfless affection as his wife’s adoring pet. But their rivalry, imaginary or otherwise, was now over.
    So is my sex life, Alex thought and sighed. Trying to shed the feeling that vague forces were conspiring against him. Much like his patients felt when they went off their meds.
    He flapped the garbage sack open and used his foot to sweep Popeye’s limp body into the bag, not wanting to get blood on his hands.

Chapter Three
    Dr. Eli Alpert meditated to quiet the chattering in his mind that he feared would one day drive him mad. The mantra he used, which he would recite until each word relinquished its meaning, was one he had learned from a Hindu monk.
    As everything is destined to die, I shall cherish my time with it today.
    The monk, who most certainly would have been committed to a psychiatric ward if he’d lived in the United States, had saved the doctor’s sanity. Continued to save it still. Yet in times like this, the pesky voice of insecurity would overwhelm the safeguards that had been erected in his mind, skirting past the sentrymen of his subconscious, crumbling the confidence that he’d worked so hard to cultivate. This voice, which was his own, spoke to him in the clinical tone of a physician, telling him that resistance was futile. That life, as he knew it, was over. That the center could not hold.
    You are the harbinger of death, it would insist, only pretending to make man sane.
    And whenever this voice of self-doubt surfaced, the serenity that meditation supplied would be obliterated like the ramshackle hut that it had become. And the