On the Monster Hour, there was this monster that used to come out and try to kill everyone in the audience. No one would expect it, not even the producers who were told by the monster he would play a few blues tunes on the piano. The monster would apologize after each show and ask for another chance. I’m planning on telling a few jokes this time he would say, but time after time he’d break his word and try to kill everyone. They finally replaced him with a gorilla dressed up in people clothes that would come out and play the marimba, but they never changed the name of the show. It was always the Monster Hour. I don’t think anybody understood then what a monster really was.

I have this place I go at night where I become a huge expanding and contracting shapelessness, like a group of wild children at the zoo. Only I am silent and I hover over things. Mostly parked cars in the rain and the fruit sections of lonely late-night supermarkets at first, but now almost always it’s sleeping Japanese diplomats or the corpses of the Japanese working class. Except for last night: I hovered over an after-work get together thrown by May. Apparently, she has a small crush on Lin. And, who knows, because Lin’s marriage to Xi is rapidly falling apart.

Everyone started wearing small log cabins on their heads. They would open the windows so they could see each other and they would open the front doors so they could speak to each other.

Abe was about to put the finishing touches on the roof of his log cabin when he noticed a band of tiny owls living there. He couldn’t dare shoot at the owls, because they were so tiny, and the chances of putting a bullet into his own head were too great.

So he began to grow a small tree on his shoulder in hopes they would choose to live in the tree instead. It took days, but it worked.

Eventually, other types of tiny birds nested in Abe’s tree. Even tiny squirrels came to Abe’s shoulders, and tiny bears. To accommodate, Abe grew more small trees, even dug a small lake at his shoulders and down his arms.