The monster who ate my name, introduction

Nameless
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When the sun sets, you’ll find no one outside, one traveling under the orange sky, no children coming in for dinner, no travelers, no one. The streets are empty, the fields abandoned, the lights in every house already on. Its not that people fear the dark, they fear the monster. Well… I suppose its easy to fear something you’ve never seen, after all that is what people fear isn’t it? What they haven’t seen up close enough times but this monster has never been seen at all. That’s why I chuckle when I see a sign in town to be aware, I laugh in part because the drawing of it could never be really accurate, and I also laugh because even if one was aware, they’d never be able to do anything against it, no one ever has. It is something that has always been around, something that everyone seems to know, no mater where you go it’s the same. No one from out of town seems to need to be told, no one forgets to get inside at night, it suggests there’s more than one monster, but somehow everyone seems to doubt that. You’d think Id be lonely at sunset, alone in the streets and fields but it seems like a rough welcome, like the distractions of the day have been cleared away and the real day can begin.

Before I go on, before I tell you what has happened, I need to go back but before I can go back I need to explain the situation it all unfolded in. The monster has existed for quite a while, over forty years and it was all that time ago that the victims began to be found. This monster is unique however, it doesn’t eat it’s victims bodies, or drink their blood, rather it leaves them totally in tact, alive and unhurt. What this monster eats is your memories, your name, your feelings and your sense of right and wrong. It eats the ‘you’ that fills your body, it leaves your heart and your soul, it leaves everything you need to survive but, you are no longer that ‘you’ once you’re eaten, you are what they’d call a blank slate. From then on the blank slates wander aimlessly, across forests and fields with out a sense of purpose with out anything to define yourself, stripped of your identity, inhibitions and vulnerabilities, your power and your flaws until you find another person, and it is with this person that you form a bond deeper than any in family, the first person you have ever seen.

It is customary for the first person a blank slate comes in contact with to give them a name, and it is this act which forever bonds them to their name giver. This new person, who has given them an identity becomes all that they have lost, the name giver is right and wrong, the name giver is and has always been their only loved one, some times even their god. From the moment they are named these rewritten people become servants to their name givers. Virtually everyone has one, a rewritten servant from the monster to carry their things, do their chores and fetch them things, they have no concept of money as they do not remember it, all they know then is their name giver and that they must, by any means make the name giver happy. Surprisingly most people are very nice to the monsters victims, taking care of them in their homes as a way of repaying them for all the things they are so eager to do for their name givers, it is rare but not unheard of for someone to even fall in love with their servants, who already love their name givers with all that they have. I think it’s because they know that they to could fall to the monster just as easily.

Not everyone however seems to share such sympathy, in some parts of the world they are abused
and used as second class citizens, having lost what made them themselves they have become something lower than human, some people even pretend to have known the rewritten person before the monster got them and use lies about their former selves to motivate them to commit crimes which, as they have no morals the rewritten have no problem doing. In all the give and take between those with names and memories and those with out the only one who seems to gain anything is the monster, leaving humans to pick up the pieces after it and bring them in to their complex, class based society. Its victims bearing the mark of a scar on each cheekbone just under the eyes.

Then I suppose threes people like me, I’m what you would call “Half-eaten” though I’m sure most people can guess that by the scar on my left cheekbone and none on the other side. For what ever reason when the monster was eating the ‘me’ that existed then it stopped half way though, I like to think it was because even the monster has something that it fears but the truth is I don’t have a single memory about that day, or most of what came before. I to do not have a name, but what makes me so special is that I’m not about to fall head over heals and devote myself to the first person to give me one, I know I had a name once, and I want my own name and only that but I know that there are many people who would lie about that as well, so for the time being I’m happier with no name and my freedom. I now understand that the monster left my free will, and the knowledge that I did exist before it came to me, though like other blank slates I lack the subtle things that would make me human, people should know that food is either delicious or discussing, people should know to relax on vacation, people should feel happiness when someone tells them they love them, people should feel sadness when someone dies, all things that I’ve been told but can never bring myself to understand, only that I do not belong for not understanding them. What sets me apart the most from all this, I think is fear. Fear is something vital to humanity, it is what motivates us to strive for survival, what keeps us out of danger but when something dangerous is about I never seem to realize from that fear, I never get out of those situations when I can and it is perhaps my greatest challenge. The lack of fear is also why I stay out at night, it is why I don’t shake and run inside when the sun sets like the rest of the people and their rewritten servants, my lack of fear is how I am able to look for the monster, and how I will one day kill it once and for all, how I will get my life back.

I travel when the sun has set, I walk across the dense, unknown darkness with only the stars and the moon to accompany me. I’m always moving, looking and searching the deepest forests, the darkest alleyways, always looking in those places people are suppose to fear for the monster, though I don’t know what Ill find their since no one remembers seeing it, and I don’t know how I’ll fight it as no one has ever seen it with out losing their memories, but my knife and my revolver are ready for it when I do, I’m going to hunt the monster and once I’ve killed it everyone else will know it too, the only trouble is finding it, I’ve walked in the night for six years now and never found it.

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