Free Résumé With Monsters by William Browning Spencer

a race, they actually are."
     
    Lily ate a brownie, sipping tea to wash it down. She raised one eyebrow and offered a wry smile. "I meant these monsters have been around a long time in your personal history."
     
    "Ah. Well, yes, I suppose so."
     
    Lily said, "You can't live with a child's guilt forever. You didn't kill your father, he killed himself."
     
    "I wanted him to die," Philip said. "That's where the awfulness is. I wanted him to leave my mother and me alone. If he had to die to do that, that was okay."
     
    "Oh," Lily said, "we all think a lot of dark thoughts. And from what you've told me, it's not even clear you knew what he was doing."
     
    "I knew," Philip said. "Maybe I didn't know about carbon monoxide poisoning, maybe it wasn't clear what he was doing, but I knew he was dying. I went upstairs and went to sleep. I didn't try to get help."
     

     
    #
     

     
    It was a payday at work, and the motivational pamphlet that came with the check was entitled "You Matter!" and Philip effectively resisted reading it at work, but when he returned home and was emptying out his pockets, he saw it and read it while standing up, and it was every bit as bad as he suspected.
     
    It began, "Successful people are people who always give one hundred percent, who understand that a company's success depends on an individual's determination to excel. You may say to yourself, 'I am an insignificant person in this big company. I could be laid off tomorrow along with five hundred of my fellow workers, and no one would care.' The truth is, what you do is important to people who are important. While you may, indeed, be one of many, your labor can benefit someone who is, in fact, genuinely important. You can..."
     
    Philip put the motivational pamphlet down. The writer had gone too far this time, Philip thought.
     

     
    #
     

     
    On the weekend, Philip did his Christmas shopping. The stores were crowded, and Philip found his spirit buckling as he moved through scenes of gaudiness and decay. Bikini-clad elves touted a lingerie store. Coming out of a bookstore on Sixth Street, Philip saw two Santa-suited men brawling, rolling on the sidewalk.
     
    " Mutherfucker , mutherfucker , mutherfucker ," they yelled, as a crowd gathered.
     
    Philip hurried along as fast as his crutches would permit, refusing to look back. He bought his mother a knick-knack to add to the vast collection of knick-knacks that he had been giving her—dutifully—since childhood. He thought perhaps he had given her this piece before, but he knew she wouldn't mind. He bought Amelia a Cowboy Junkies album. That group's female vocalist had eyebrows similar to Amelia's, which made the purchase somehow inevitable, although it did not ensure Amelia's delight.
     
    Philip bought books for his few friends in Virginia. The books he bought as gifts were novels he loved, and he was fairly certain they would go unread. He thought of all the unread novels sitting on shelves or packed in cardboard boxes, and he was assaulted by something like grief. He was certainly wobbly these days, both emotionally and mentally.
     
    Of course, it could be that all this was simply a sign of advancing age. Brain cells, like time bombs arriving at their appointed hour, were being sprung; various creatures of remorse and despair were crawling from their blown cells.
     
    Philip spent all of Sunday lying in bed and thinking about old friends and acquaintances, wrong turns taken and opportunities missed and words uttered in the heat of anger. He missed Amelia, missed her with fierce longing. He closed his eyes and conjured her image. He saw her black, clipped hair, her smooth, intelligent forehead, her mouth, orange or red or purple, her dark eyes outlined boldly. She loved make-up, indeed, she would occasionally get so carried away with the application of face powder and eyeliner that strangers would be startled when she spoke, mistaking her for a mime. Amelia had been a graphic artist at