Summary

Told by a third-person limited narrator in the present tense, “Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster” is focalized through a 14-year-old boy, Patrick. The story opens with Patrick (who is “white” and “straight,” 51) watching Godzilla. Patrick watches the Smog Monster destroy a Japanese city, which he imagines as a “holocaust landscape” (52). The narrator then reveals that Patrick found this video in his father’s dresser, hoping it would be pornography.

The narrator then flashes forward to a point in Patrick’s future, when he and his girlfriend break into an abandoned grocery store. The story then skips to the morning after Patrick watches Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster, when his mother makes eggs for breakfast, “yolks off-center in each” (54). Patrick goes to school, where he and his friend Arbuckle learn a fire has burned down Los Angeles. In homeroom, Patrick’s...