The Monster
“It’s all in your head,” everybody said because it’s so easy to dismiss the words of a six-year-old boy as nothing more than ramblings of an overactive imagination. However, young Jonathan knew better. He knew the monster was real and that it would come again.
It didn’t live under his bed but appeared next to it almost every night. Fear made it impossible for Jonathan to provide an accurate description, but he could conjure a few details at least. The monster had a soggy face, sulfuric breath and an undulating arm that cracked the air with nefarious intent. It spat and growled most of the time although, for brief moments, its cracked lips often tried to articulate some words. Jonathan didn’t know what he feared most: the fact that it existed or that it knew his name.
“It’s all in your head,” everybody said and the more they said it the more they expected him to play ball, to nod sheepishly and accept their lies as fundamental truths. Jonathan was a child, but he wasn’t stupid. He had the reddish marks on his body to prove the fiend’s existence, but no one saw they were there. The monster was probably controlling all the adults somehow. He had to do something.
On that night before Christmas, he did. Instead of going to sleep, he waited in bed for the monster to arrive. With pinpoint precision, it came, dragging its shambling corpse. In-between its yellowish teeth, a slithering tongue called out to him and its arm hissed before coming down to burn his skin once more. Jonathan reached underneath his pillow and leaped forward, imbued with something greater than self-preservation.
The monster shrieked with the first blow, whimpered with the second, and sighed with the third until it finally collapsed in a pool of blood and foul fluids. Jonathan cleaned the kitchen knife and went to bed. Mission accomplished.
The following day, his aunt Mildred came to visit and screamed from the top of her lungs the moment she entered the bedroom. Jonathan’s father lay by the bed, dead, a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a leather belt in the other.
