The perfect monster for me was The Minotaur.

I would draw mazes on A4 refill pads in the cafe with my father with the smooth scratching of HB pencil.

I would hand my father the maze and he would solve it and then I would draw another with a new sheet and hand it to him again. He would trace my labyrinth with a thin, soft pencil line and I would say, “Ha! You took the wrong the path! You stepped over the tripwire I drew and now you are crushed and smushed flat under limestone blocks!”

I would draw the boulders heaped in their pile in thick 2B and if I was lucky enough that Dad had a red biro to borrow, then I would also draw his mangled body bloodied beneath the rocks.

Sometimes I would draw the open trapdoor above his head, also, so as there was no confusion where the limestone blocks had been hidden.

“That’s not really fair,” he would say, and then he would take the refill pad and draw a maze with wide passages and perfect straight corners and I would solve it.

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I drew a Minotaur often, when I was small, copying the sausage outline arms and circle knees and elbows from the ‘How to Draw: Monsters’ book someone had bought me from the art shop in Lahinch. I drew him like the Greeks did; heavy set with dumb, staring eyes and a small penis hanging free between his legs.

It was a part of the minotaur. It didn’t embarrass me then.

When I was a little older, I found my old drawing in a box under one of Dad’s desks and I scribbled over his penis with heavy smears of thick 2B.

“B stands for bad.” I am older by multiples of myself, the teacher explaining Technical Drawing. “Nothing with B touches the page, it smears. H pencil only, lightly pressed.”

I am still drawing mazes, sometimes. I solve them by myself. I think of Daedalus these days, watching children plummet into waves.

Later again I make the map of a maze with T-square and set squares and softly pressed H pencil lines.

The DnD party have fun and talk about it still, but they never get to all the rooms. They have time to see everything.

The minotaur is never found.

I have that blueprint still, I think.

Somewhere.

Liam Carton is in his third year studying Creative Writing in Galway. He represses his gradually growing panic that he needs to escape his hometown by writing fiction, poetry, and songs. His work has been published in All World’s Wayfarer, The Antihumanist and Crannog Magazine. If you like his writing, say hi on instagram @liamcartonwrites