When you grow up so do your monsters. Who didn't invent their own scary monsters and things that go bump in the dark? There's the one you had nightmares about, that used to creep into your dreams and flap after you and come swooping down on your skull, splitting it like a nut or a watermelon. That now seeps serpentine and invisible up up and between your legs to lick and bite where you expect it least and want it most. You still have those nightmares.

Do you remember the infant terror that hid behind the curtain at night knocking against your window? You screamed out, Mommy, Mommy and she'd come rushing in and whip back the curtain with a great rush of air and there'd be nothing there. Now you feel the same way about your grown-up life, life after death, life after college with loans to pay off and starting out at the bottom of the corporate food chain. You used to want to be a novelist at sixteen, lead singer in a girl band at eighteen, black-clad intellectual at twenty, editor of a swanky magazine by twenty-five, millionaire investment banker by thirty, basically anything you could ever dream of being; or at least have two point five kids a house a stable job a dog and a car - how much is that to ask for? But you know, because you're a mom yourself, something even more terrifying than the thing that knocks on the window in the middle of the night. You know that when you rush in guns a-blazing and whip back the false facade of your life, there'll be nothing there. And nothing bites like reality.