1st 5 Pages August Workshop - Leun

Name: Garrett Vander Leun
Genre: YA - Urban Fantasy
Title: MONSTER TOWN

Henry had thought about killing his dad before. Hell, he'd wished it on candles.

He picked out a fistful of foam from the hole in his seat and watched his dad through the windshield. Fidgeting and adjusting all the goofy shit he wore on their drive to school.

A pink gardening hat with a brim big enough to blot out twenty suns.

Yellow plastic kitchen gloves, cinched around his wrists with hair ties.

Orange snowboarding goggles, wrenched down so tight that his pasty face screamed pink mercy all around the edges. And then there was the fucking shirt. A vintage, loosey-goosey Hawaiian shirt just because. Because he liked the way the breeze tickled his pits, just like he liked the way his leather sandals let his toes sing, just like every little thing he did seemed calculated to piss Henry off.

Henry's eyes shifted over to a green, wooden gardening stake on the work table in the garage. He smiled. What would it take, two seconds to climb out and grab it? Five more to plunge it through his dad's vegetarian, vampire heart? Blood would spurt all over the grease-stained carpet strips, his dad would drop and the wonders of his weakness would do the rest. Henry would straddle him while he gurgled, too, watch his bloodshot eyes bug out with confusion.

It's my sixteenth birthday, Henry would scream. Remember?!

It was also Henry's release day.

Henry's dad would convulse, reaching out with his skinny little arms to apologize as he died. And Henry would take a step back. Fuck you, Anton, he'd say. You're just a shitty monster dad and I've never been anything but your disappointing human son.

Henry made eye contact with his dad through the windshield of their car and saluted him with a turn of his middle finger.

Anton yanked the door open. "You know what?"

Henry never would. His dad always let the empty threat dangle; the Administration's biggest rule applied to him the same way it did to all the monsters allowed to live inside the town's four giant walls: don't fuck with humans.

Naturally the kids at school had found a loophole - if Henry got himself caught up in an accident, nobody from outside gave it a second look. Assholes, every last one of them.

The car screamed when his dad turned the engine over, belts and things he'd promised to repair for years. You could hear it coming from blocks away, a sound like someone playing basketball with a typewriter. But his dad was going to fix it eventually. He just needed to get out from under his work at the library, and his secret meetings at the hardware store and the sunrise, rooftop yoga. His dad would fix their van just as soon as he was done obsessing over himself.

Anton held his breath when he backed out, waiting to see what bit of skin he'd forgot to cover when the sunlight rolled over the car.

"Your forearms, Anton."

"Ah-ya-ya!" The exposed flesh crackled like bacon as soon as the sun hit.

"Jesus!" Henry grabbed the cuffs of his dad's long-sleeve t-shirt and pulled them out from under the short-sleeved Hawaiian one. The whole car smelled like rotten lunch meat.

"We're good - I'm good - everything's good." The car pummeled the neighbor's bushes and laid waist to most of their lawn before everything was finally good. He steered the van out on the open road and choo-choo'ed his pain through the back of his teeth. "You realize it makes me nauseous when you say his name, right?"

"Who? Jesus Christ?"

His dad moaned.

"You realize Arbo tries to kick my ass every time you destroy their yard, right?" Their neighbors were plant elementals; they felt every green, growing thing in town like it was their own skin.

"So tell him it was an accident, Henry - they'll understand!"

Henry shook his head. Not even the monsters understood his dad.

He'd disbanded his gang of vampires before Henry was born and gone vegetarian shortly after that. Henry came along right about the time the war between monsters and humans broke and his dad was the only supermonster to sit it out. Henry had never even seen him sprout a single fang or batwing. And he'd begged him, too. Anton said it made his jaw sore and cramped up his arms. Between that and all the Cat Stevens music, Anton was basically a human, too.

Anton pushed the cassette tape in. True to form, Peace Train came blaring down the tracks. Henry gave it about two seconds before he popped it back out.

"Don't start - it's my week, Henry."

"And it's my birthday, Asshole."

His dad's face went paler than pale. Henry could see the veins running up along his temples.

"You're leaving today."

Henry nodded. Bullseye, you bastard.

Anton's rubber gloves squeaked along the wheel. He couldn't get a grip on what he needed to say; it was just as well for Henry - he wasn't done rubbing his dad's face in it.

The whole shitty town was made out of hand-me-down human relics and anything Henry owned was well-used or mostly-broken. In all his time poking through Jukebox, he'd only found four records that did anything for him.

BLACK FLAG's Damaged.

DAMNED's Damned, Damned, Damned.

MINOR THREAT's Out of Step.

He'd found the fourth one hidden inside of the MINOR THREAT record. An anti-monster band. WOODY STEAKS' The Last Drop. Henry's dad still didn't know he had it; he played it during the day with headphones on while his dad slept.

Glenn flipped the cassette over - he'd recorded all the best songs on the backside - and shoved it in. And turned it up.

The speakers shook with the sound of BLACK FLAG. The guitars sounded like they were thrown down a staircase and recorded in someone's butt. Henry loved it. He looked out the window, strumming the zipper pull on his backpack like a guitar pick.

His dad slumped beside him.

That's right, Man. This is I-don't-have-to-listen-to-you-anymore music. Henry's neighborhood rolled past like a sad and tattered rainbow. Yellow is the color of the weeds in the ghouls' yards, because they're too dead to care. Black is the color of the oil stains splattered in the driveways of the ghosts, because they're too immaterial to scrub it. Brown is the color of the burnt and brittle dirt in the centaur paddocks, because those proud little ponies would never be made to run behind a fence.

Henry whispered the words. "Thirsty and miserable, always wanting more…"

There had been times in recent years where Henry had thought about turning his neck to the side and begging his dad to bleed him dry. Do them both a favor.

Sure some monsters took until sixteen to turn, but everyone knew Henry was human. It was all over but the shouting; one last, formal monster-test after school would prove it. He'd be free to see the world beyond the walls by the time the sun went down.

He kept a notebook under his mattress that he'd filled with all the things he wanted to see and do when he got out: eat something with gluten in it, go to Disneyland, watch a hockey games, get weird in the snow, lay on the beach, see a movie in a movie theater, get sick on candy, make out with girls - find his mother.