Some people know where to go, but not many know the correct time to pay a visit to the monster. It isn’t dawn and it isn’t midnight. It’s noon, on the shortest day of the year. There is no need to bring a gift. You’re not begging for a favor, but claiming what is due you. But be careful with the words you use. You need to say, Give me something to love. Not someone to love, not something to love me. Wait at the cave for the space of one hundred breaths, then come home, without looking back. The first thing that arrives in your hand, you must wrap all your fingers around, and that will be it. But what if it is a dry twig, a stone, a laggard insect, a blade of white grass? Then that is what it is. You will love it with your whole heart, and if it is something that can die, when it does, you will mourn it with your whole heart as well.

I think that is why they call it the monster of the cave.

Now I’m going to tell you something almost nobody knows. You can go back to the cave. It is not a journey you can make only once. You can travel there again and again, until you receive something that you will love so overwhelmingly that you will not want any other, ever again. And this I know to be true, because that is how I got you.

Patricia Russo has had poems in One Art, Acropolis Journal, The Turning Leaf Journal, and The Twin Bird Review.