text: People keep telling me there are monsters here now. We can’t see them without help and they never stop coming. Dozens of blue-hued faces prowl through parks and skip down streets. We want to catch them all but they never stop coming. We aren’t scared of them because we’re real brave and we aren’t afraid of things we cannot see. There are monsters all over Edmonton and Toronto and Vancouver. There are monsters all over Ankara and Istanbul, and they hide inside tanks and dance on the barrels of guns as they shoot metal fire into the sky like shooting stars trying to escape our cities to the cold dark of space. They killed 294 of us, and their blood sticks to the bottom of our shoes as we stalk a Zubat hovering above a flaming car, flapping its thin leather wings against the tide of our indifference before turning from us into a darkening alley. There are monsters all over London and Lisbon and Prague. There are monsters all over St. Anthony and Baltimore, and they hide inside minds and dance on the hood of a police cruiser struck by a vehicle turned metal missile driven by a young man trying to capture a Pidgey. The police officers have a good chuckle while cameras are rolling and decide not to shoot the man because he isn’t black like the other young men whose names we can’t remember because there are just too many names to remember. Our heads are filled with the names of invisible monsters now. There are monsters all over Canada and Europe and Africa. There is a monster in America and it hides behind the orange teeth of a future leader and dances across our borders like a whirling, shapeless shadow coiling around the grinning incisors of a Gengar. And a man who wears darkness and leaks shadow tells us he has no time to hunt monsters. He is building a wall to keep monsters out. We believe him because sometimes we’re not real brave and we don’t want to be afraid and we won’t be with a wall between us and them. The man smiles and the Gengar smiles and we remember that monsters can smile too. People keep telling me there are monsters here now. We can’t see them without help and they never stop coming. We aren’t scared of them because we aren’t afraid of things we choose not to see. People keep telling me there are monsters here now, but there were always monsters here.