Monsters of Loving Grace is a fragment by Jack Rusher, published here Wednesday, July 06, 2005. It is part of Stories.
Love is a strange beast.
All apologies to Richard Brautigan.
In the gleaming gloaming ’neath the northern lights, Yeti slipped over Highway 281 toward the long, black, snaky waters of Richmond Lake. Years of following tracks, sniffing tufts of hair, spying on madmen with cameras — all her research and hunting led her to this place on this night. She paused beside the road, losing the scent for a moment, crossed, picked it up on the other side, continued the hunt.
Crouching at the water’s edge, intently watching slow ripples spread from dropped stones, Sasquatch waited for the arrival of his aquatic oracle.
Yeti’s heart quickened when she saw Sasquatch. Having secured a position in the trees, she leapt down from her perch onto Sasquatch’s back, biting his neck and burying her face in his fur, which was musky and redolent of the boulangeries of his native Quebec.
The two beasts wrestled for hours, thinking into each other’s minds. Their sentences, at first discrete units, became the broken halves of shared ideas, and, finally, a rhythmic silent singing in unison, harmony, unison, harmony.
“Hunting...”
“...searching...”
“How long...?”
“...hundreds of years.”
“I’d started to believe...”
“...you didn’t exist.”
Nessie rose from Richmond Lake, trailing verdant algae and nodding serpentine approval. A distant werewolf howled syncopated blue notes while a murder of vampires flew overhead, bat wings gently flapping. The re-united halves of a fractured myth flowed back into one, all watched over by monsters of loving grace.