Looking to the night sky, at the fog and the neon lights, the stench of rubber and petrol. It remembered another time. It had occupied this same spot at some point almost every year for centuries.

Once it had been nearly mostly untouched. A place people had lived with, then it had been a place they lived in.

And now it was simply their place.

Almost nothing of what once was remained. Not even the shape of the river had survived humanity’s grasp, its incessant need to make the world theirs. It wasn’t even a wholly bad instinct, not really. It had no special connection to the planet, as a whole. It was not one of the dryad’s or nymphs, who had died choking to the human mores.

Its death would not come, nothing truly changed for it. This was just another strange mood, borne of feeding from one of the few still-living humans old enough to remember the old times. And poor enough to miss them too.

Looking was probably something of a misnomer, it didn’t have anything even approximating eyes. It saw things as its food remembered it. The memories and impressions and emotions.

Wispy tendrils of potential solidified into an approximation of being, flesh and clothes coming together. Memories of past people melding into someone unique. Somebody was nearby.

It felt emotions not of its own crystalising as a demented figure crunched gravel underfoot. The person was so distorted to its sight that their gender could not even be ascertained, moulded by perceptions and experiences. Their face was inhuman, nearly pig-like. With a violent snarl of a mouth and flinty eyes filled with hatred.

That was not how the person really looked, it was not one of the monsters living in the cracks of human society. This monster had been made.

“You need to leave.” It drew a formless baton, crackling with the disdainful hatred of the haves, their sneering contempt for the unlucky. Though in reality it was probably mostly just electricity. “This is private property.”

Everything was private property now; the public space had been dead for many years. It was pay or fuck off these days.

“I was just leaving thanks.” It took some of the edges of the unearned self-righteous anger. The next few days would not be pleasant with that metabolising. The face of the person morphed as some of their own impressions of the world entered its sight, becoming something a little less monstrous. People’s self-image was strong, and even with just this little morsel her own image would run dominant to its view.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Quickly.” She snarled, but without the bite from earlier, motes of guilt entering now that she was forced to see the vagrant without her red-tinted goggles. That would fade in time as her normal emotions reasserted themselves. And even if it did not it wouldn’t make a difference. It didn’t matter how nice of a person you were or became in that profession. You were a dog of the state, and the state would see to it that you stayed that way.

It shuffled away to a less-policed corner of the world, where it could stew in piece and anger over the state of the world.

Ironic that the anger at society had been taken from one of the very people that upheld it in the first place.

It turned to an alley and the legs gave way once more to a roiling mass of potential that moved along the alley seeking an area that was almost sightless to it. Somewhere most humans had forgotten about.

Things had never been fully good, they ebbed and flowed. There had been times where things had been worse, the first decades after white men had arrived stuck out in particular. It had enjoyed taking everything it could of the invaders and leaving them depressive wrecks then. And there had been times where things had almost been good, when there was that right sort of growth and the streets overflowed with hope and wonder.

But that wonder had turned to horror after a time. And that horror had brewed and distilled into the heady spirit of resigned acceptance.

How was it not angry all the time? It should climb the dark towers of pain and suffering and crushed dreams and take everything away from the real leeches and vampires at the top. The ones who orchestrated it all, ground their fellow man to dust for an extra zero on a profit sheet that had lost all actionable worth three or four zeroes ago.

It stopped itself, this was not its own feelings.

It had been around for thousands of years and would be for thousands more – provided the humans didn’t end themselves – and thus had experience in divorcing emotion from action. Most especially when they were not emotions of its own.

So rather than take action, it found its dark quiet corner and let the thoughts and feelings of two people across the divide fight their own private battle.

Above, the world kept moving. Spinning its wheels, its factories made what the line on the graph told them to. Its workers never even considered asking for the ownership of the fruits of their labour because they didn’t even have ownership over their own bodies anymore.

Those who had eschewed that lot drowned under the weight the world that wanted them dead, they lived in the cracks. Their own society of a sorts, with ramshackle parts and funny names. A comradery that can only come by the knowledge that it was near impossible to drag each other even further down than you already were.

And somewhere in this mess was the world beyond that of the human: The monster. The fantastical. But they were not in a world of fantasy. They were quite firmly in the future. Humans had not only become monstrous on their own but had made the whole enterprise boring.

It left them feeling like they were just some loosely hanging thing. Ill-fitting. Out of place in the world of tomorrow.

But what was new?

They had never fit into the world because they had never been from this world in the first place. So, what was a monster to do but ride out the wave and hope the next stage of humanity was not quite so full of horrible food.

All this despair was going to give it indigestion.