Beneath my Bed

I told them there was a monster beneath my bed, but they never believed me. I told them every night, after they shut my door, I could hear it growling maliciously beneath the bowing mattress. And every time I screamed, ineffectively, for help, one of my parents would appear in the doorway with an exhausted, frustrated look on their face. “It’s just your imagination,” they would assure me, every single time. They refused to actually check beneath my bed, because I “was being silly,” or I was “just being a kid.” I’m “too young to know the difference between real life and nightmares.” And yet at the same time I was “too old to be afraid of nothing. Now be quiet, or you’ll wake your little sister.”

Bite marks and bruises started appearing on my body. They thought I was doing this to myself. They told me I was going overboard. They threatened to ground me, to take away my video games. They told me if I didn’t stop I would go to the doctor and they would stick me with something to make me sleep, because bad kids who don’t listen to their parents get needles for punishment.

Of course the injuries didn’t stop. I wasn’t doing them to myself, to their disbelief. It was the monster. And the needles did come, as promised. The doctor gave my parents sedatives that forced me to sleep through the attacks. I tried to fight them at first, flailing my limbs while my dad held me down. The needle came anyway, and the numbness flooded through my bloodstream. I fought sleep for as long as I could. It was a losing battle. By the time my bed began to shake, I was already unconscious.

At least my parents didn’t have to hear me screaming anymore. At least they could have a decent night’s sleep.

I begged my mom to sleep with me. She refused. I was too old for that, remember? Too old, yet too young to understand there was no monster…an unending, frustrating conundrum.

So I begged my father. He woke up at five for work every morning. It would be unhealthy for me to get that little sleep. He also refused.

So I started pushing my sister’s crib into my room. She was just a baby, but it comforted me to have another human being in the room, even if she didn’t understand what was going on.

She cried a lot. I tried to keep her quiet and calm her down from afar, but I couldn’t get out of bed. If I did, it would grab me by my ankles, and take me under the bed. And it would eat me. Thankfully, I didn’t even have to tune her out for long. The sedative did that for me.

And then one morning, when I awoke, there was no crying. There was no babbling, no noise of any kind coming from the crib. There was no one in the room besides me. And I realized what happened.

They would have to believe me now. Now that it ate my sister.