There is a monster that eats hope.

This is no metaphorical beast. This is no clever analogy for our modern day society where people drift past one another in the anonymous arteries of large cities without ever pausing to admire the commonest of miracles, the simple existence of another human being. This is happening right now. This is not a work of fiction. This is the news. This is pain and terror and death, packaged into a thirty second remote for the six o’ clock broadcast. It can’t be stopped because we don’t have heroes. It can’t be stopped because we are not protected by men and women in capes. It can’t be stopped because all we have is each other and – quite frankly – that’s just not bloody good enough, now is it?

It didn’t come from space, this monster. It didn’t travel to our present from some far-flung future or primordial past. It was born to a woman and a man, a mother and father, two people who were expecting something else in their bassinet, something other than the end of the world. Something without quite so many teeth.

They wanted to love their child and so they clothed it and bathed it and rocked it back and forth in their arms. The mother gave it her breast but the thing wanted more. Soon, there was nothing left of the poor woman. The husband wept for his wife and tried to club the beast to death. It laughed at him and urinated her blood, defecated her hair. He vomited the last meal she made for him, lemon chicken, and it ate that, too. It licked its lips and said it wanted more, said it was hungry for other children. It told him what would happen if it wasn’t fed and the man fell to his knees and cried so much he feared he would never be able to cry again.

You have to understand, I didn’t have a choice. Because, God help me, it was still my baby and I still loved it.

And so I did what you would have done, what any father would have done.

I fed my child.