René’s early adulthood was characterised by the appearance, all around him, of monsters. They were legion. Sitting in stations, walking around bookshops, queuing for cinema tickets, eating soup, laughing and conversing, driving buses, these monsters were everywhere. They didn’t even have the decency to look like people. Many were crazy mishmashes of familiar animals, with unblinking shark eyes and frisky feline tails, or bizarre arrangements of tusks and teeth emerging from rainbow plumage. Others were made of a cracked, brittle substance which made their movements small and jerky. Others still seeped about as thick liquids, black and stinking. All of these creatures got on very nicely with the human race; indeed, human beings had long ago lost the power to distinguish between man and monster, so society ticked over and all lived harmoniously.
 
René was not frightened of the monsters (how could he be, when his nightmares were far uglier?), but he found their preponderance disquieting, as if their constant presence was a sign of bad things to come.
 
On the morning of his thirtieth birthday René was swallowed whole by a monster which had fallen from the skies with a tremendous explosion and had then eaten its way through most of the burning city. The creature’s name was Renée. It was identical to René himself in every way, except that it was twenty times his size and had a gaping vagina for a mouth. It wasn’t a bad monster, just painfully hungry. All it could do was eat.
 
As René swam in the digestive juices of his monstrous double he ruminated that life in this stomach wasn’t so bad; after all, he was warm and safe, and wouldn’t have to worry about having to do anything ever again.  He could just stretch out and share his host’s gargantuan meals and sleep whenever he wanted.
 

His only fear now was being shat out of Renée’s fearsome anus. He didn’t want to experience the agony of birth into the cold, cold world for a second time.  You could say that this thought prevented him from becoming too complacent in his new luxury. Whenever he supped on the latest mangled morsels to come pumping down Renée’s gullet, he said a word of thanks to God for looking after him. Similarly, he learned to be grateful for the little death of sleep, which nowadays was dreamless and lovely. No more wrestling with images! Unable to see anything in the profound blackness of Renée during his waking hours, he found that his sleep too was undisturbed by pictures. He was free.