Teenage Mutant Mental Hurdles
by George Evans
6/15/2022
This is not a horror story.
This is not a horror story because Dread Creature Veith is NOT A HORROR.
He is my son.
He is NOT a horror, whatever the fishermen might say. The fishermen… with their stupid bearded faces and their stupid toothless grins.
6/17/2022
Dread Creature Veith is not a horror.
I know this, and I say it on the internet to remind others. The other people on the internet respond that Dread Creature Veith is a horror. Some also cite archaic bits of text about hybridity and monstrous births, quote from news articles with death statistics from mysterious raids, and upload grainy pictures of his torso in the dark where a spotlight caught his name plate, making the words clearly visible: DREAD CREATURE “VEITH.”
I say that the people on the internet are bigots.
They say that I’m getting worked up.
But I KNOW that Dread Creature Veith is not a horror.
I know this and I mutter it through clenched teeth twelve thousand times a day to remind myself.
HE. IS. NOT. A. HORROR.
… that being said…
… he is horrible sometimes.
He is horrible at a good number of things.
SO. MANY. THINGS.
6/19/2022
Here are ten things at which Dread Creature Veith is horrible:
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Grooming himself.
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Cleaning his sleep capsule.
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Completing his homework.
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Asking questions about other peoples’ days.
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Controlling his moods.
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Cooking food.
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Listening to anything other than a cartoon character.
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Getting appropriate exercise.
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Eating food that isn’t Doritos or MRE pizzas.
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Emptying the abyssal chutes without being asked.
Just look at him! Slouched like that on my brown sofa, bathed in the dull green light of the great sea vault porthole that I built with my own two hands, monching my MRE pizzas and rationed Doritos, chortling through rerun after rerun of SpongeBob SquarePants — a show that only trickles down the pipe because I worked night and day in a tight, sweaty, stinky submarine pod laying twelve miles of deep sea cable.
The dorsal fin I sutured onto his body needs scrubbing, and are those barnacles on his side?
He’s taking a massive bite from that pizza now and… yep… yep there’s a great big splotch of pizza sauce on the chrome surface of his mainframe.
I can’t watch.
6/22/2022
Dr. Carraway told me to write this. Said it might help the sudden urges to zap my son with a cattle prod. Dr. Carraway also told us about the Pandemic — “A lot of people are getting sick out there,” said Dr. Carraway, “Make sure you and the boy don’t go outside more than you need to. His aquatic parts may respond worse than usual to popular viruses.”
I nodded solemnly when he said it, but inside I was laughing.
The boy? Go outside?
Ha.
Right.
The boy…
I remember when he was smaller. Not small mind you — I built his machine parts with room to grow but he was always larger than the largest great white shark. Always built big enough to crush a human skull in his tentacle grip or metal clamp hand.
Not that he would.
I sent him on his first mission last year.
Thought it would be good for him.
Remembered my own dad, Dr. Lord Darkness III, who sent me on plenty of missions before I was sixteen, had me collecting samples, undermining large structures with a laser drill, hell, even assassinating a senator! Granted, he was old and fat and on life support. But the point is, I had to go and do things! And so I thought it would be good for my own son to grow up a bit, employ some elbow grease, earn his keep.
In the end, I had to retrieve him myself. Donned the Cavern Armor, blasted through a field of angry, xenophobic fishermen armed with shotguns and pitchforks.
He was hunched in the fetal position underneath a dock, weeping.
He kept trying to catch his breath. He’d calm down a bit then gasp and shiver and shake and cough, take a puff from his inbuilt inhaler and start the whole sad display over at the beginning. It reminded me of when he was young — not little — but young, in the fetal sack. He was so… simple.
I always thought it would be different raising a son without a mother, a son with disabilities, a son who was a hybrid Shark-Squid-Robot killing machine I built in my undersea fortress and raised from mental infancy for the express purpose of absolute and total world domination, a son with an attitude.
But it has been different in ways that are different from how I thought it would be different. Does that make sense?
For instance, Dread Creature Veith did not ask to be made.
I know this because I made him. And no one asked me to make him — definitely not Dread Creature Veith himself as he had yet to be made when I made him. And if I didn’t already know this, I would know it now from being told so a hundred times by Dread Creature Veith.
But I can’t quite get it through my thick, stupid skull that he doesn’t owe me anything.
A father should love his child unconditionally, but when I look the gnarly stubble on those unshaven gills I want to take a quick, short walk into the crushing weight of the sea bottom.
6/29/2022
Today we had a fight…
I said something like “Are you going to watch SpongeBob all day again? I didn’t make you for this purpose.” And I think he must have heard something like “Are you going to watch SpongeBob all day again? I didn’t make you for this purpose.”
It’s a subtle difference, but the tone conveyed a lot, I think.
“Dad,” he mumbled, “I didn’t ask to be made.”
“I know that.” I said, “I made you. Do you think I waited to make you until you asked me?”
His attention had already drifted back to the sound of Squidward schlep-schlepping angrily on Patrick’s door, and I sympathized with that poor squidman much more than I wanted to and I glanced at the scruff again on Dread Creature Veith’s face, and I thought about how stupid and dumb and small I’d been to make something so imperfect and how it was all my fault and if I hadn’t… you know… you get the idea.
And I said all of this out loud. And I shouldn’t have. And the damndest thing happened.
He listened.
And he said something like “Dad it’s OK. I’m OK. I like living with you. You’re OK. We’re OK. And we’ll figure out how to do this together, even if I’m not like you.”
And I… um… cried.
And we hugged.
And then we didn’t talk about it again, but not in a bad shamey kind of way, just in like a “all is OK and at peace — very zen” kind of way.
And it was nice.
7/1/2022
About that scruff…
Do I realize that he is scruffy because his gill tissue is heavily vascularized and if cut, will bleed for hours?
Yes! Of course I do!
Does this make me see his scruffy stubble as any less disgusting?
No. No it does not.
I made Groom Bot 5000 expressly for the purpose of handling the stubble. Showed Dread Creature Veith how to use it. Put the remote directly in his hand.
Last week, I found it stuffed under a couch cushion.
Sometimes, I think I’m living with an animal.
And I’m horrified.
But only in the “disgusted” kind of way, not in the “scared for my life or the future or the existential state of my relationship with my son” kind of ways.
Because I am not a horror either.
And this is not a horror story.
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George Evans is a querulous nuisance from Birmingham, Alabama. When he isn’t teaching English (and sometimes when he is) he writes. You can find him on Substack at Fourth Castle on the Left.
Charming!