Cute fiction short! A boy talks to the monster that keeps coming out from under his bed.
1.2k, rated G. Sweet fantasy piece. Adapted from a TweetFic.
It’s 09:12PM according to the little clock that Luca insisted his mother get for him instead of any of the kid’s ones – it’s just plain and black with red text, like people have in old movies. Luca is lying in bed because he woke up at the noise, and he’s not moving because he doesn’t want it to know he’s awake.
His parents won’t believe him.
Mum even said, “Oh, Luca, we’ve got you a big boy clock – don’t you want to act like a big boy and stop believing in things that aren’t real?”
And she said sorry, after, and that she didn’t mean it, that she could call for them if he needed, except that if he calls for them or tries to get out of bed, it will know.
Luca hears the floorboards creaking and sees its shadows, always wraps himself up as tightly as he can in his blankets and closes his eyes as much as he can, waits desperately for it to go away whenever it shows up. He gets glimpses of it sometimes, its white scaly body, the thick spines running down its back, its leathery wings.
It made a noise once, a horrible chittering sound that went right through him, like if Mrs Rickson’s cat, Mustard, did its bird-chatter noise except if it was super loud and really high-pitched and horrible.
Steeling himself, Luca opens one eye.
The monster is sitting on the floor looking up at his fish tank, kind of cross-legged on top of his whale-shaped rug, and it’s softly lit by the glow of his night light. It doesn’t look exactly like they do at school when they sit cross-legged, because there are horns on its knees, but it’s close enough. When it turns its head, following one of the fish’s movements.
Luca sees that its eyes are wide as dinner plates, the pupils all stretched out just like Mustard looking at birds, and he might be scared of the monster but he loves his fish, he takes good care of them and it took ages for his parents to let him have them, especially in his room.
“You’d better not eat them!” he hisses. “You get away from them right now!”
The monster jolts, turning around and looking at him with its hackles raised and his wings spread a bit, like it’s trying to look scary and big – but really, the monster isn’t much bigger than him, even with the wings on, and without them, he’s probably even smaller.
“Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?” asks the monster sort of haughtily, his voice chittering like a bug’s.
“How am I meant to sleep when there’s a monster in my bedroom?”
“You normally seem to manage it,” mutters the monster, and peers back at the fish. “You keep these to eat them?”
“No! You mustn’t eat them! They’re my friends!”
“Oh,” says the monster. “Funny friends you have. Do you like to watch them swim about?”
Luca stares at the monster warily. “Yes,” he says. “They’re nice. They look nice.”
“Yes,” agrees the monster, examining the tank. “What are they?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Should I?”
“They’re fish.”
“Oh, right,” says the monster. “And, uh… What’s a fish?”
“How can you not know what a fish is?”
“Well, I’ve only ever seen them here. I suppose that’s how.”
“They’re… They’re animals that live in the water. They breathe in it.”
“Breathe in water?”
“Yes.”
“How do they do that?”
“They’ve got gills.”
“What’s gills?”
“You’ve really never seen a fish before?”
“Should I have?”
Luca does something he’s never done before while the monster was in his room: he gets out of bed. Wrapped in his blanket, he comes slowly over and sits beside the monster on the floor, looking cautiously back at the monster the same way he’s looking back at him.
“These are freshwater fish,” says Luca. “I wanted tropical fish but my parents were worried I wouldn’t take care of them properly.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Colours, behaviours. But the water is salty and you have to have particular temperatures and stuff to keep them healthy.” He points and says, “This is Charlie, he’s a betta fish, that’s a kind of Siamese fighting fish. But they’re quite territorial, so I had to be really careful about picking the other fish, like this is Buddy, and he’s a Kuhli loach.”
“And which one is the gills?”
“They all have gills. You see the way there’s like, a flap, here? It’s going out and then going in, kind of like when we breathe and our chests move, and that’s our lungs, except they do everything with their gills instead so they like… Filter the air out of the water with them.”
The monster doesn’t, like his parents do, interrupt and change the subject as Luca keeps talking about the fish. He doesn’t see to get bored, like his friends do at school – he listens very raptly as Luca points and explains all their behaviours and where they come from and what they’re called and why, even the ghost shrimp.
And he asks questions about the way he looks after the tank, and how he cleans it, and asks about other fish he’d like, and what tropical fish he wants and why, and says it all looks very complicated, but worthwhile.
“Don’t monsters have pets?” asks Luca.
“I don’t really know,” says the monster. “We don’t, but I haven’t met everyone in the world. Maybe it’s just us.”
This strikes Luca as being either an extremely sensible answer or the opposite, and he can’t decide which.
“Well,” he says graciously, “you can share mine, if you like. But only to look at.”
“I like looking at them,” says the monster quietly. “They’re very nice.”
“Is that why you come in my room at night?”
“I don’t really decide where I go. I like it here, though.”
“Well,” says Luca as he crawls back into bed, because his clock says it’s nearly midnight now and he’s very, very tired. “You can ask me about things, if you like, another night. About fish or— or about other things.”
The monster pauses a moment, and then asks, sort of cautiously, “Like friends?”
Luca hesitates. There’s a lot of people who don’t actually want to be his friend, even before he starts talking about fish.
“I don’t have any friends,” says the monster. “My father says it’s because I’m too insular.”
“What’s insular mean?”
“I’m not really sure. He doesn’t seem to think it’s a good thing.”
Luca says very quickly, with a kind of fake confidence to make sure the monster feels better, “Of course we’re friends.”
The monster smiles, and it’s really quite a horrible twisting of its white leathery face, but it’s not as frightening as it was before.
“Alright,” it says, turning back to look at the fish, rocking gently in place and making the shadows move on the walls, but this time it seems to Luca that it’s quite nice, actually, kind of like the reflections of the water moving. “Friends.”
It’s easier to sleep that night, curled up in the blanket with a slight smile on his lips.
Easier than it ever has been.
FIN.
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