Monster

A man drags memory through ash, chasing meaning the void won’t return.

The rain didn’t fall on Prague; it seeped. A greasy mist clung to the ancient cobblestones, filling the fissures like the memory of sin. Thomas sat hunched in the cathedral silence of the National Archives, a speck adrift in a sea of bound centuries. Dust motes, caught in the weak beam of his desk lamp, danced like dying stars. Most of the universe is just death, nothing more. Johan Liebert’s cold pronouncement, transcribed years ago from a monograph found in Leipzig’s ashes, echoed in the hollows of his mind. His finger traced the faded ink of Ravensbrück procurement ledgers. Columns of numbers. Suppliers of soap, machinery, textiles. And there, listed beside sacks of turnips and rolls of barbed wire: Zyklon B, 500kg. The banality was the true poison, the meticulous lie. Do you think your sin will disappear if you lie? The clerk’s neat script seemed to squirm on the page. Did that man tuck his children into bed, whispering reassurances he didn't believe?

Thomas’s thumb brushed a cracked corner of the brittle paper. For a fleeting instant, he wasn’t in the archive’s chill. He was seven, kneeling beside Anna on sun-warmed tiles in their grandparents’ kitchen. A ceramic bowl painted with bluebirds lay shattered on the floor. Look, Tommy! Anna had whispered, not crying, pointing at the fracture lines catching the light. It’s like lightning in reverse. The memory dissolved, leaving only the ledger’s cold surface under his finger and the taste of ashes.

He closed the heavy tome. Its thud echoed like a coffin lid slamming shut in the vaulted silence. Rising stiffly, his joints protesting, he hesitated. His hand hovered over the worn leather cover. Was he leaving evidence or merely another epitaph? Shouldering his satchel – heavy with the ghosts of numbers – he stepped into the Prague night. The mist embraced him instantly, cold and intimate as a shroud, transforming the city into a watercolor blur of dissolving facades and streetlamps casting wet haloes. It felt less like walking and more like wading through the silt of time.

Passing the National Theatre, its gilded facade gleaming like a rotten tooth under the damp gloom, he saw students spilling onto the rain-slicked steps. One girl, draped in a faux-fur coat slick with moisture, gestured wildly. But Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy! Her friends groaned, one throwing a damp bread crust that landed with a soft splat near her boots. Their laughter rang out, bright and brittle as breaking glass. Oblivious. Nearby, a tourist angled his phone, snapping a grinning selfie in front of the plaque commemorating Velvet Revolution martyrs. Joy layered over bloodshed. Hatred is created when people gather. I just poured a little oil on it. Was this the legacy? Amnesia garnished with hashtags?

He turned down his narrow street, his fingers instinctively finding the smooth, cold key in his pocket, rubbing its worn edges – a nervous habit etched by years of confronting the unspeakable. His apartment building loomed, plaster stained by decades of damp like old tears. Inside, the familiar scents: damp plaster, stale coffee, the lingering ghost of boiled cabbage. He hung his sodden coat, then paused. Before the brandy, before the crushing silence, his fingers touched the cool silver frame on his desk. Always touch the light before facing the dark. Anna smiled eternally, holding baby Sophie swaddled in a soft yellow blanket. Sophie’s eyes, impossibly blue and wide with nascent wonder.

A sudden, visceral memory pierced him: Anna reading to Sophie, her voice a soft, firm current weaving worlds in the lamplight. And the very hungry caterpillar, she’d murmured, tapping Sophie’s tiny nose with a gentle finger, ate through one strawberry, but he was still hungry... Thomas could almost smell the warm scent of baby powder and Anna’s faint lavender hand cream. The memory was a shard of glass twisting in his chest. There’s nothing special about being born... Death is a natural thing. So why live? That potential – Anna’s fierce intelligence, Sophie’s uncharted path – reduced to silent atoms in indifferent earth. Equalized. Erased.

The cheap brandy burned a raw path down his throat, a brief, illusory fire. The silence pressed in, thick and suffocating – not an absence, but the presence of the void. He grabbed his fountain pen, the nib scratching furiously across the paper, ink bleeding slightly in the damp air:

We build monuments. We swear oaths. We weep. And the universe watches, silent as a vulture on a dead branch. Our symphonies, our children, our desperate cathedrals scraping heaven... the void swallows them all. Death is the only equality. Before it... we are sparks in an endless night, screaming that our tiny light matters.
But perhaps—
He stopped. The pen hovered. For a single, treacherous breath, he almost wrote it: But perhaps the scream is the defiance. The light, however brief, the answer.
His hand clenched. No. Lies were for the ledger clerks. For the grinning tourists. For the hopeful dead. He slashed two furious, black lines through the nascent hope. Ink bled like an open wound on the page. The void knows, he rasped to the photograph, his voice raw. It knows, and it waits.

Earlier that day, a young archivist with trendy glasses had brought him a box – files from a minor SS functionary. "Fascinating bureaucracy, isn't it?" the young man had chirped, oblivious. "Like studying termites." Thomas had stared, the casual banality of the comparison chilling him deeper than the files' contents ever could. Being born really isn't that uncommon... Johan’s voice slithered in his mind. Was this the softening? The reduction of monsters to mere insects? The archivist’s cheerful detachment felt like another facet of the yawning abyss.

The hard part comes after you conquer the world. Thomas hadn’t conquered. He’d catalogued, documented, borne witness. And now, staring into the abyss, it stared back. Not with malice, but with nothing. A beautiful, terrifying indifference. The ultimate fear wasn't the acts he’d meticulously recorded. It was the horrifying realization that the darkness wasn't a stain upon existence. It was existence. The light was the fleeting, inexplicable accident.
He sat rigid in the lamplight’s fragile pool.
Adrift.
The raft of his consciousness leaked, plank by splintered plank.
The sea stretched eternal.
Cold.
Relentless.
The rain whispered against the windowpane: Washing. Always washing away.

For one crystalline, terrifying second, staring at the violent slashes across his aborted hope, he understood Johan Liebert with perfect, appalling clarity. The urge to push – to see the tourist stumble into the street, to shatter the students' brittle laughter with the raw, ugly truth until their faces crumpled – surged through him like a dark, seductive current. He recoiled physically, his heart hammering against his ribs, a cold sweat breaking on his brow. The abyss hadn't just stared back; it had reached in, brushing his soul with its icy fingers.

He didn’t blow out the lamp. He sat. Listening. To the relentless seep of the rain. To the profound silence beneath it – the silence of the void. Bearing witness. Not to hope. Not to meaning. But to the terrible, exquisite absurdity of awareness adrift in an uncaring cosmos. The brandy was ash on his tongue. The photograph was merely paper and chemicals under glass. The rain seeped on.
He touched the silver frame once more, a final time. A single, defiant spark against the encompassing dark.
Meaningless.
Essential.
He breathed in the damp, heavy air.
He breathed out.