Just because he was nine feet tall, covered with blue hair, had a large spiral horn placed squarely above his third eye and occasionally rampaged through the countryside gnawing on things when he was teething, they called him a monster.
When left to himself he enjoyed nothing more than extruding playdoh hair from his playdoh factory and assembling elaborate hairdos onto hollowed out gourd bird houses. To date he had four titmice couples and a wren family living in his little avian condo coiffure community.
But narrative causality being what it is, he was sometimes interrupted in his peaceful pursuits by the directional whimsy of social human intercourse in the form of conversation. Being a monster, even a reluctant one, came with certain responsibilities. The human mind had constructed Jason to fit into a particular fictional niche, and he was bound by Monster Law [paragraph 4, subsection 1a] to fulfill the monster fueled fancies of any human imagination within a twenty mile radius. Gremlyre the Ghoulish had the next twenty miles and he was welcome to it. There were two twenty four hour coffee shops and an experimental theatre group in Gremlyre’s territory --and between the writers, the actors and the insomniacs he hardly had a moment’s peace.
Jason had constructed his own home near a university of science, after carefully testing his little patch of earth with a whimsy dowsing rod. Even with such forethought he was still occasionally the victim of the capricious nature of the human psyche as students wrestled with their baser instincts during the nocturnal hours of free wheeling dream filled slumber. Jason was periodically pressed into service in the wee hours of the night to dangle a scantily clad screaming co-ed over his gaping jagged toothed maw, only to be kicked in the kneecap by some pimply faced lothario coming to her rescue just in the nick of time.
But those random incidents, though irritating, somewhat paled in comparison to the raucous party that had been taking place in Jason’s left armpit for the last two days and nights. He had braced himself for the transformation from his normal nine feet to a gigantic sixty feet as his keen and directionally adjustable ears overheard the pot induced conversation that had caused the outbreak of human teenagers now partying in the exceedingly enlarged smelly hollow of his normally peacefully quiet, yet incredibly furry appendage. As Jason listened open mouthed, the first voice had said that he wished that there was someplace that the over eighteen, but under twenty one crowd could go to legally drink instead of sneaking off into weird places to party. The second voice, after a long drawn out inhale had asked if he meant someplace like a monster’s armpit. Then there had been a lot of giggling.
Jason sighed. He hoped the inebriated partiers passed out soon, since Rule 6, provision 12 stated that he was then allowed to evict them from their purloined perch. He thought he’d be able to skim them out with a rake. Once they hit the ground they would evaporate back into the ether from which they’d been created. Too bad the smell wouldn’t go as easily. Judging from the retching sounds, it looked like Jason was going to have to go over to visit Gremlyre in the morning to borrow his neighbor’s power washer. Then he would probably come home and treat himself to a long soothing soak in a hot bath. Going from nine feet to sixty in under a minute hurt, no matter how well you braced for it. At least he’d been outside this time.
Jason sighed and shook his head again as he wedged a couple of shrubs into his ear canals in an attempt to get some shut eye. If this was how the human under twenty one set behaved while consuming alcohol, Jason didn’t know how the university put up with all the noise. Birds were ever so much easier to house, and when they regurgitated their meals they had the decency to do it into the mouth of their babies. As far as Jason could tell adding alcohol to human teenagers was just a damn noisy waste of underchewed pizza.
