The woman who was not their mother, who flinched when they tried to call her that, raised them as much on stories as stew and warm blankets and household chores. While they scrubbed or planted or folded, she told them tales of monsters – a word she used without flinching, and used differently, the child realized in time, from how most people did.

In her stories, monster and hero weren’t always different people. In her stories, monsters had choices, and some of those choices were good. Monsters could do right, they could be brave and selfless and kind, and the word monster became like the word deer or bird or human. Something that described the shape of someone, but not what they used that shape, their claws or teeth or hungers, to do.

Could it be true? Slowly, secretly, in time, it became the most important question to the child. As their stomach started to ache with strange hungers, as their dreams became things that they were afraid of when they woke, afraid because, while they had run wild in the dream’s blood and hunger, they hadn’t been afraid at all.

What if it wasn’t just a story anymore? What if child was the wrong word for them? Would the woman still love them, would she believe that monster could be just a word, one word in the whole story of a person, or would she become a hero the way most people said the word and raise her knife the way they said was right, and slay the monster that had tried to call her mother?