Monster
He remembers waiting for the monsters to find him with their opposite eyes—seeing in dark, blind in light— the cartoonish brain goop and winter-faded exoskeletons (bold in shadows) watching with eyeless malevolence from underneath the child's sweaters and glaring from under the bed skirts.
Twisted into the little spaces between the junk.
He would fling himself onto the mattress so the hands couldn't grab and cower beneath the sheets so the not-eyes couldn't see and try to forget about the shifting shadows and the shapeless masses of more-than-nothing-less-than-something fingers that would crunch and click and grab at little boy ankles.
Then he found out that real monsters are out there, and much scarier than anything his imagination could cook up for the sourceless noises of the dark.
Now when he sees the shadows creeping longer and darker and stronger, instead of his monsters of half-cooked gray matter and dead grasshopper carcass, he sees hulking masses of fur and wicked claws and eyes that catch light that doesn't even seem to exist. He sees misted breath turn silver in the light of the moon and clumped and spilled blood and teeth glinting like splintered glass.
He sees his face in a mirror, the wolf lurking behind his eyes, and he knows that real monsters don't hide under the bed. Real monsters don't go away when you bury yourself in sheets or shine a torch in their direction. Real monsters don't make the floors creek or go bump in the night.
They howl. And scream. And speak civilly 29 days a month.
Real monsters don't hide in the closet- they hide inside people, giving little boys real things to be afraid of.