The Monster Variations by Daniel Kraus

chooses one of the wise men. He reaches below his brother’s shirt and removes his heart. In his hand the padlock is so icy cold that it feels ten times heavier, and before this powerful sensation of heaviness leaves him, Mel punches and punches, losing the padlock in the madness, and there is new destruction, plenty of it, if only he can remember all of it for later: tiny white facial features, golden bits ofcostuming, two hands still locked in prayer formation. That night he paints, but the dismembered wise man looks too much like his brother. Mel feels stupid and lonely and, after a while, agitated. He finds he misses that familiar weight against his chest, so he rummages through his brother’s room until he finds a new object, this one even larger and more dangerous. He puts it beneath the black shirt next to his heart.
    Now it’s summer—the bloody summer of Greg Johnson and Willie Van Allen—and Mel Herman walks, and looks, and listens. He still leaves home each day at sunrise, and tiptoes out so as not to wake his father—he can hardly bear the thought of seeing the old man in the full light of day—and returns shortly before dark, when his father’s phlegmy voice shouts for him to come closer. Until then Mel will not think of it; he shuts it away in the back of his mind. Though he no longer lugs a sack of newspapers, Mel still keeps to his old route, every day. It is a hot summer and his nose is sweaty; he pushes his taped glasses upward and walks faster.
    He is glad it is summer. Teachers sicken him, especially the new art teacher, Mr. Camper, with his beard, long hair, and rolled-up flannel shirt sleeves, and his insistence that his students call him by his first name—“Bud”—not to mention the way he has of praising Mel’s work and then looking at him as if waiting on Mel’s response, a response that Mel goes out of his way to withhold. Teachers, including Mr. Camper—”Bud”—have always claimed to like Mel’s stuff, but they never reallylook at it for more than a few brief moments.
It’s all in there
, Mel wants to scream at them, as they blabber about his talent and hang his oversize paintings in the school hallway along with all the other worthless junk.
If you would just look, you’ll see everything-you, me, this town, my missing brother, my furious father, and all the terrible things that happen that no one ever wants to see
. These thoughts shoot through his brain. But when he opens his mouth, only foul words come out, and then even Mr. “Bud” Camper looks at him in exasperation and disappointment.
    Kids are even worse. Mel detests them. Often he overlooks his hatred and plays junkball with them and has fun, even convincing them to try big-league plays like the sacrifice fly and the hit-and-run, until he recognizes that animal fear in their eyes. In a way, Mel is glad the other kids are afraid. As long as they are afraid they will not come close enough to learn his secrets, like the new weapon hanging hard across his chest, or how his brother shriveled to a living corpse before vanishing into the city, or the greatest secret of all: the truth about his father.
    If Mel needs to frighten them, or punch them, all right, fine, good.
    So he spends most of his time with grown-ups. Each summer Mel works odd jobs for some of the same people who used to be on his paper route; this is partly why Mel always seems to be everywhere, roving, absorbing, recording everything for translation into paint. At first herefused to spend all of his time laboring, but his father does not work and starves for money like animals starve for food, and so Mel takes on the jobs, scraping scum from an above-ground pool, knocking dried mud from trucks, pushing a lawn mower around some guy’s colossal backyard. Initially Mel is concerned about what these people say—about him (“You’re far too big for sixth grade”), about his brother (“He seemed to me like a decent kid before he got mixed up in a bad