Monster

[queeniegalore]

I have fallen in love with the monster under my bed.

Sunlight splashes through the branches of the boxwood tree outside my window, spilling messy splatters of light over my desk as I sit and drink my coffee. This only lasts for a few minutes, this precious, precise angle, turning the sun into a disco ball and my room into a sleepy 8:30 am dancefloor, and it makes getting any work done impossible. So instead I sip the coffee and wave my hands in the fluttering dapples of light and I contemplate the monster.

He – for he is definitively, gloriously he – lounges on my bed now, coaxed out of the dust and darkness and lost socks of his former home. He enjoys the smell of coffee, but has left the hesitantly made cup to cool on the little Ikea bedside table untouched, and is busy flicking through the stack of books I optimistically keep piled there. Discards the memoirs of some Scottish actor, spends a little bit of time on the pop-science astrophysics, more on the celebrity poetry collection.

His monstrousness is also glorious.

The dapple-dance sunlight will reach the foot of the bed soon, and I half wonder if he’ll melt at the touch, or sear, or smoke away into nothing. He is so solid as to almost round the corner back into the ephemeral, as if a creature from another universe entirely has been plonked unceremoniously onto my bed, a universe more real than this one. I can smell him, over the comforting aroma of coffee, something like iron and something like musk and something that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my breath quicken. His horns have scratched the paint of my headboard and this little detail sends shivers down my spine. He’s going to shed fur on my bedspread like the cats do. Tiny shreds of evidence

 “Come back over here.”

Ahh, but that voice is a trap.

He came to me at night, in the beginning, night after night he came, and spoke to me in his voice like worn, threadbare velvet. First I thought I was dreaming (incorrect), then that he was an intruder (correct), and then that I was going insane (who knows). I convinced myself he was going to eat me, and then decided that that decision was entirely out of my hands. I was alone, and then I wasn’t. We talked. He listened as I cried, and didn’t eat me or the cats, laughed a rough laugh of crushed diamonds when I brought up the possibility. “Not to my taste,” he promised. “And anyway, tears make a very bitter marinade.”

“I don’t cry on the cats,” I sobbed, and laughed, and wiped my face off on the wet pillow.

“Maybe you can cry on me.”

But at that point he was just a voice from under the bed who vanished with the morning sun. During the day I changed the sheets and considered the dust that had sunk into the carpet. Every time I sent the little robot vacuum under there it got tangled in the cords of my lamp and phone and had to be rescued, tugged out like a panicky kitten and nursed back to its dock.

“You could tidy up under here.”

‘You could pay rent.”

Laughter, laughter, always that laughter. “I’m providing valuable emotional support,” he said, amused. “You don’t keep me up at all hours with nightmares anymore. That’s worth something.”

“You’re probably a nightmare,” I muttered. And thought about how likely it was that I was hallucinating him, slowly giving in to the concept of insanity, even as I went to work every day and fed the cats and stayed up too late playing Xbox. It was remarkable how quickly I’d accepted him – the apathy of depression, I supposed, or the shock of the supernatural. Nothing had ever happened in my life for me to compare it to, so I wasn’t certain what the correct reaction should have been.

At any rate, now: he lounges.

“Are you a demon?” I ask, as the sunlight inches its way back to something more normal, less spectacular. I have asked him this before, in those disembodied nights, but the question seems rather more pertinent now that I can see him in all his physicality, steaming away on my pink floral quilt cover.

“That would be boring,” he says, a claw delicately marking his page. “Although you were fairly easy to tempt, which is probably bad news for you, spiritually, if that’s a concern.”

He grins down at his book. My book. I rest my chin in my hands and go on contemplating him.

“Not as boring as if you were a manifestation of my inner psyche given physical form to teach me a lesson about some overlooked aspect of my subconscious,” I muse, and he laughs out loud and finally sets the book aside. He’s so big, naked and insolent with it, his fur a rough reddish brown and his horns a polished, keratinous charcoal. He couldn’t possibly exist, except that I wasn’t nearly clever enough to have invented him myself.

“That does sound boring,” he agrees. “Come over here, please.”

“Such manners.”

I want to know: what he is, where he comes from, how he manifests, why he has appeared under my bed, where he goes when he is not there, why me, why me. I want to know: can one really fall in love with a figment of one’s own imagination.

The dregs of my coffee have grown cold and the sunbeams have completely fallen off the edge of my desk and onto the carpet in front of the bed. I wiggle my toes in the small patch of warmth and think about how warm he looks. The bed, like the coffee, has grown cold in recent years. If he’s a manifestation of my loneliness, I suppose I could have done worse.

I stand, my dressing gown falling off one shoulder in a manner that’s not entirely uncalculated. He’s not human, but his face…there’s something human in his face, something handsome, and he watches me with his grin softened to a smile, sharp fangs not quite hidden behind his lips.

“Are you sure you’re not going to eat me?’

“No promises,” he says gently, and I cross the gap between us, trusting and stupid, and let the monster under my bed enfold me in his arms, as the sun dances its way through my room and lights up the shadows, dust mites swirling and sparkling in the air around us.

.