Jimmy knew about the monsters that were in his closet. He knew about the ones that lives under his bed. The entire room was full of them, hidden in one place or another. He might never have known if they weren’t so clumsy.
They walked in and out and all around the room every night. Jimmy thought that when they left, they went to other kids’ closets and he felt a little guilty for letting his monsters out to scare other people. Still, he couldn’t do anything to stop them. He just laid in bed, huddled underneath the covers, waiting for them to go away. He always knew when they were gone because the bumping noises would stop.
They bumped into everything in the room at one time or another. Jimmy knew when it happened because he had outlined all of the furniture with chalk one night. When he woke up the next morning, everything… every single thing didn’t quite fit its outline anymore. There were a lot of monsters in his room.
Jimmy tried to tell his parents a few times, showed them the outlines, but they just peeked into his closet and said there were no such things as monsters. Then they would ask him to stop moving furniture, clean up the chalk, and then punish him for wetting the bed. They wouldn’t accept that he couldn’t get up because of the monsters. Sometimes parents can be really dumb.
They never even considered that the furniture weighed twice as much as Jimmy did. Nor did they know that he was too short to reach the light up on the ceiling. Of course, the monsters never bumped anything hard enough to break it, they just moved stuff. One night, Jimmy heard a kind of clanging bump. He peeked his head out of the covers and saw a narrow slit of light coming from the door.
Suddenly, a big round thing up by the ceiling moved across it. As it swung back and forth across the light, he realized that it was the florbestent… flournes… forles… that big globe of light that was attached to the ceiling by a thin pole. He kept watching it swing back and forth and it reminded him of a big blade attached to a chain he had seen in a movie… what was it called? A guillotine.
He had asked his parents about it and memorized the word so he could use it to taunt kids at school. “Oh yeah? Well, I hope you get a guillotine stuck up your butt!” That globe just kept swinging and swinging and Jimmy expected it to break off and fall at any second, shattering all over the floor, but of course, it never would. Then his parents might figure it out. But he doubted it.
The monsters were there for a long time. They never stopped to eat Jimmy like he thought they would. After all, monsters eat people. You’d think they would get hungry after a while, but they never jumped on the bed and started gnashing their teeth or anything like that. They bumped into the bed once in a while, but that was it.
Eventually, Jimmy stopped being afraid. Some nights, he would watch the monsters roam around for hours. There were all different kinds: big ones, small ones, thin ones, fat ones, bald ones, hairy ones. Some looked like people, some looked like the mess after you drop a glob of food out of the cafeteria window. Some even looked like his teachers, but Jimmy had suspected that for a long time. He wasn’t too surprised.
Yep, things were looking up. He didn’t bother with the chalk marks, he didn’t hide under the covers, he didn’t mind the bumping so much anymore, and he stopped telling his parents. He even made sure to mention once in a while that he wasn’t upset about monsters anymore. His parents would smile at their well-adjusted boy and tell him to go out and play with his friends.
As good as this looked, things were changing. When Jimmy first started watching the monsters, they simply went about their business, bumping into things, walking in and out of the room. These days, they looked at him. A lot. It wasn’t a hungry look, but kind of upset. They wanted something, but Jimmy wasn’t sure what it was.
Some nights, he would hide some of his food from dinner in his pockets and put it on his desk, seeing if the monsters would eat the food. They didn’t seem to like his mother’s cooking, either—they never touched it. When his mother started complaining about all the food stains on his clothes, Jimmy stopped. He never could quite figure out what it was that they wanted, but he watched them closely, hoping they would give him a sign. And one day, one of them did.
It was a Friday night and Jimmy was looking forward to watching cartoons in the morning. He would flip back and forth between two or three, trying to absorb as much as he could while avoiding commercials like the plague. Some of them were okay, but most of them were just awful. He couldn’t imagine wanting to buy special candy that makes your teeth glow in the dark, but it seemed like every third channel change, there was a glowing smile in front of his face. And it glowed in different colors, too. There was blue, green, yellow, and red. Pretty gross. He thought it might be fun to get some just to smile at all the girls in his class, but he didn’t think it would taste very good. Maybe on a very special occasion. And suddenly his thoughts were interrupted by a very low, rumbling voice:
“Jimmy.”
He jumped and looked to the side of the bed to see a tall, hairy monster outlined by the light from the door. He could feel it looking at him.
“Jimmy.”
It moved closer and he could see its crazy eyes staring through the darkness. It was not a friendly look. Jimmy wanted to say something, but his throat closed up and he could only squeak a little bit. The monster walked right up to his bed and knelt down next to him, bending forward so their faces were almost touching. When it was so close, Jimmy could see it had a fat, wide nose, pointy ears, and scruffy hair all over its face. And it looked very serious. He tried to swallow.
“Jimmy, it’s about your parents.”
Suddenly, the monster flashed him a big, sharp, toothy grin. That was glowing red.
Jimmy hid under the covers and shivered for the rest of the night as the monsters resumed their usual bumping activity.
