Scary Monsters
As a child I was addicted to scary stories. My nights were haunted by severed hands skittering around the floor on their fingers, foot long spiders on the ceiling, something called the “Bloody Bones of Hades” and, courtesy of a horror comic I once read, a semi-liquid, man-eating thing called “Mr. Green” that lived in the pattern of the throw-rug between the two beds. (Which was why dangling any of our limbs from our beds after the lights were out was ill-advised. I naturally kept my younger sister apprised of these things.)

One evening, when I was about eight, I called my mother into the bedroom to tell her that there was something in our bedroom closet. While the lights were out, and I couldn’t see it very clearly I could tell, I said in a trembling, almost tearful voice, that the closet door was swaying very slightly from side to side.

“Oh,” Mother said, “That’s just the monster that lives in your closet.”

In the stunned silence that followed, she explained that the closet door was swaying because the monster had a single eye on a large stalk, and it kept pushing against the door – she held up one hand and crooked and uncrooked her index finger to demonstrate – while he watched my sister and me.

Then she cheerfully tucked us in, kissed us goodnight, and left.

I slept soundly that night. Poisonous spiders might still lurk over our heads, Mr. Green might still blub and slurp inside his rug, and the Beast with Five Fingers might be poised to strangle me if I didn’t sleep with the covers pulled right up under my chin. But the question of what was in the closet had been answered. Mom was on top of it, and if it was okay with her, it was okay with me.