Monster
Is it always found under the bed?
I start apologizing to the silverware — the spoons I don’t choose to bring out of the drawer and eat with. I think about grabbing every last one, lining them up from big to small and letting them bask in the light feathering through the kitchen window as if that could make their time caged inside the drawer any better. I know this isn’t how this type of thing works, that the spoons in the drawer don’t care about being contained, won’t bang their metallic frame on the wood, won’t suffocate, won’t beg me to let them out. Still, I can’t help but worry, thinking about each spoon piled on top of the other, laying inside the drawer’s cutlery tray like makeshift coffins — what else was I supposed to do?
My mother tells me to stop whenever she hears me whispering under my breath, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I stop eating ice cream, frozen meals, popsicles — anything that needs to be chilled. My mother doesn’t get it, why I would act like this, or maybe just doesn’t want me to live with guilt forever. She forces me to eat frozen foods at least once a week, tells me to stop apologizing. So, I just let the silverware sit and wait until the day I dig one out, plunging its head, I’m sorry, into a pillow of goopy white cream, still iced around the edges.
“Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Ready or not, here I come.”
The rules of the game were simple. It was called Monster, named after the Frankenstein movie we watched against our parents’ wishes. Sprawled under a homemade fort, a tent of sheets with pillow beds, all five of us neighbor kids gathered in Tom’s garage — hiding our eyes behind finger blinds, screaming sounds so obscure, not even the raccoons could compete. When one of the mothers finally found us watching under the tent, caught red-handed with puckered faces and watery eyes and popsicle-stained mouths, we were already prepared for a week of nightmares — and wetting the bed if you were Louie.
We thought about blaming Tom, as it was his idea, after all, to watch the movie, snatching it from his older brother’s room, but we made a pinky-promise to never tell on each other. Instead, we quit watching and switched to solely slurping down popsicles from the freezer, racing to see who could finish first. It got much harder to sneak the treats when the freezer went out a day or so later, and the broken chest was moved from Tom’s garage to his family’s shed. We then had to venture into the kitchen fridge, where there was always a mother, or father, telling us not to spoil our dinners.
The person in the game who was the designated monster counted to thirty, often running around making bird-like noises or animal howls, although crawling on four legs was completely optional. Essentially, it was hide-and-seek with a monstrous twist, but we thought it was much cooler to invent a game all our own: to all become a collective Dr. Frankenstein birthing a creation. If we couldn’t have the monster movies, at least we could have a game dedicated to them. From it, Monster was born.
I found Sally in the tree thirty minutes after starting, only hidden in the lowest layer of branches. She feared falling from the next layer up as if she might become an acorn or pinecone that could clumsily drop if she crawled too far. I knew she was agile enough to go further, but agreed that the first layer was a much safer place to stay than the second or third and that she was still braver than any of the neighborhood cats, who preferred scrounging among frozen pizza boxes and ice cream tubs overflowing the trash. Her tennis shoe peeked through the crisscrossing branches, a white orb among a sea of shades of green — finding her was just too easy for me. I shimmied up to the first branch and tagged her shoe. As the game of Monster goes, each civilian found by the monster joins the team, almost like a zombie infecting a human (which we also weren’t supposed to watch on tv), but not quite — we could talk, and zombies could only mutter indistinguishable calls.
It was Sally, my younger sister, who decided the second rule of Monster (the first being no peeking while counting) — no hiding inside the houses. We lived out in the countryside and thought hiding among cows or hay or rusting bikes was much more realistic, that monsters certainly weren’t allowed to take cheese, crackers, and lemonade breaks. So, Sally and I made our way to the hayfield across our house, weaving through golden limbs that crumpled beneath our chattering feet.
“Ca caw, ca caw,” Sally called out, met with silence. Out of breath from running, I resorted to scanning from the spot I stood, searching for movement, like some sort of Monster birdwatcher. It was Sally who saw a flash of green by the nearby river, almost out of eyesight. That’s the third rule of Monster — you had to actually tag the person or it didn’t count. So, Sally and I set off, buzzing bees in our yellow rain jackets that our parents made us wear — it was supposed to rain today, after all, though we weren’t afraid of water pellets or rising rivers.
“I think I saw him over there,” she said. We’d run around for almost an hour now. There sat our favorite old car — abandoned, a molten orange that burnt even darker in the sun. On most summer days, all of us neighbor kids loved to jump on it and pretend it was our castle. But, underneath the rusting pipes of the car’s belly, I saw a green that was much too crisp for the endless brown of the dying grass. Sally and I whispered, plotting to approach each side of the car to trap Louie under, then changing our minds.
“Well, I guess no one is here. Let’s head toward the field of cows,” I said to Sally, pretending to turn until we heard Louie’s uneven breathing snake through the air. We listened for the quiet crawling of elbows on the scratchy, brown blades to make our move. Just before Louie made it all the way out from under the car, Sally tagged him from the backside, pushing his head down so hard that his face and glasses hit the dirt.
“Hey, watch it. My mom will kill me if I break these.” Sally didn’t apologize — especially not to bedwetters. Lucky for all of us, the monsters were now the majority: two civilians left to find.
We knew Jan would be hard, and Tom even harder to find, so we had to set more parameters than just “no hiding inside the houses:” we couldn’t go farther than any of our houses, period. That was the rule. The countryside went on for miles upon miles, so who knows where Jan and Tom could have gone without the invisible gate we built. Besides, even the house parameter gave us a couple miles to work with, give or take our collective bad math.
Since Sally and I already checked our neck of the countryside earlier, Louie suggested we search for Jan on his side. Thirty minutes later, we still had no luck. Exhausted from running, chilled from the sun quickly turning from orange to white, stomachs puttering with desire for mashed potatoes and corn, I suggested a surrender (in which no true monster would do, but hungry monsters might consider). Besides, the rule at Sally and I’s home, as well as Louie’s, was always, “if you could see the lights of the city below the hill, it was time to return.” I could just barely make out flickering streetlights, stuttering like moths caught in bulbs, so I knew we were all close to getting in trouble.
“Olly olly monsters let you free. Olly olly monsters let you free,” we yelled collectively, pit pattering around from street to dirt road to field and back as fast as our monster legs could carry us, waiting for Tom and Jan to pop their little heads out from wherever they’d chosen to wedge themselves.
We finally found Jan, who stationed herself near the barn, hiding behind the door with the loosened hinge and constant squealing.
“You wimps. Can’t even last to suppertime,” she retorted. A monster might get angry and tackle her, but the growling of my stomach begged for home, not a fight.
“Of course Tom is last, that sneaky boy,” Jan said, picking her teeth with her pinky nail. For being the youngest and smallest of the group, six among a group of mostly eight-year-olds, Tom knew how to get us into trouble, but more so himself. One time, when we played freeze tag, we’d neglected to set boundaries. Tom, being the smartie he was, hitched a ride into town with one of our neighbors who went to town to run errands. He came back a couple hours later with a shake and fries while we were still busy searching for him. Although we called him a cheater for a week, we were collectively jealous that none of us had been so clever.
“I don’t want to get in trouble, so I’m going home. Plus it’s getting chilly — my mom tells me I’ll get sick if I stay in the cold too long,” Louie said. He had a sweater on, so we all rolled our eyes, sighing. Typical Louie.
“Yeah, my mom said if I’m late again I’m getting sent to bed without dinner, and tonight’s lasagna night,” Jan added.
Sally and I called them wimps, but their hungry tummies didn’t care. They said their goodbyes, speeding off — all you could see was the reflection of their dirty white sneakers diminishing into the night.
“Okay Sally, guess it’s you and I left to find the rascal,” I said. But Sally, too, worried about getting in trouble.
“You know, the Lil’ devil is probably already home, laughing that we hadn’t figured it out yet. Remember last time we played kick the can? We found him watching television with his dog.”
Sally had a point — Tom was so cunning that he was the reason we needed rules. Only six, but bossier and braver than us all. So, we too left for home, just in time for the smell of mashed potatoes and baked bread freshly removed from the oven to envelop us both.
The call came when Sally and I were shoveling spoonful upon spoonful of potatoes and peas into our mouths, racing to see who could finish dinner first.
“That was Mrs. Kenmore, she’s looking for Tom, was he out playing with you all today?” Sally and I looked at each other, pausing our spoons midair, still cradling peas.
“Well, uh, he was out with us today when we were playing Monst — I mean hide-and-seek. We thought he went home,” I said, voice quivering slightly, not wanting to get in trouble.
“He’s probably still hiding,” Sally added, both of us believing it to be true. Mother instructed us to grab flashlights, that they would search and see if he got stuck in a cabinet, or ran too far and got lost, or climbed too high up a tree and couldn’t climb back down (which would not be the first time). So all of us, the neighbor kids, and the parents took to the night with our lights, yellow circles that danced and smothered all that came in their path.
It was his mother who found him, had decided to scour their property one last time as everyone dispersed throughout the countryside. She shrieked so loud that I swore every nighttime creature fled, a yell that bulleted through thick, summer air and lingered long after. Sally and I came running to the shed next to their house to find her choking on sobs, kneeling next to the abandoned freezer chest, broken and moved there only days ago.
A stack of books removed from the shelf sat on the dirt next to the freezer box, a makeshift step she must have missed at first, or wasn’t looking for at all. Tom’s father followed, tears welling, called an ambulance — it’d been five or six hours, we knew it was too late. We could see it in their faces. Sally and I turned away, let each other’s cries meld into one as the rest of the search party filed in behind, all turning their heads. Louie’s parents covered his eyes, Jan tried to stare, but her parents dragged her away. I looked behind, my mother too worried about Sally, and saw his mother now holding and shaking his body limp in her arms, howling, “wake up, wake up, wake up,” eventually softening to a rocking. A last lullaby. I couldn’t help but imagine little Tom, banging his sweaty fists on the lid, trying to get out, only to be met with silence.
Sally doesn’t talk about it anymore, even months after. Every morning we share breakfast in stillness — fill our stomachs with stacks of pancakes and endless orange juice and jelly toast without muttering a word. The neighborhood kids and us still hang out every day — even at the funeral we sat in a row, stuck together like an oil spill, filling the pews with sullen psalms. The other kids don’t talk about it either, although I can feel it suspended in the silence when we climb trees and run down the same streets in our dirty white sneakers. Louie asks us to never play Monster again. Jan doesn’t go by the barn door anymore. Sally won’t say Tom’s name. We all avoid freezers.
Then, one day, months after, we’re all gathered playing marbles, and Jan interrupts the clinking of the glass balls on the dirt,
“It’s your fault, Louie, I never would have left if you hadn’t said it first.”
“It’s not my fault, Sally was the one who made most of the rules. She practically invented the game on her own. Tom wouldn’t have been hiding if it wasn’t for her.”
Sally pinched her face, “My fault? I only made one rule. Jan was the one who was too busy craving lasagna to want to stick around. I just followed.”
The bickering grew louder and louder, muddling into the humidity. At some point, I think marbles were thrown.
“Enough, enough,” I shouted. “It’s all our faults, and none of our faults, and the parents’ faults, and the freezer’s fault for locking him inside in the first place, and even Tom’s fault. It could have been any of us.”
Louie started crying. “But it wasn’t any of us. It wasn’t some bad guy or some bully, it was Tom. And he was my best friend.”
Jan called him a crybaby, but I saw her eyes glaze as well. We all hugged each other, saying we should have made the rule “no sheds,” too. The grey of the sky grew heavier. And still, I imagined a world where Tom was the monster, not the civilian, or Mother Nature decided on rain instead, or that the freezer never stopped working. In that world, I don’t need to uncoffin the silverware, there is no four-foot casket under a blanket of dirt, sneakers are never exchanged for dress shoes, and we all enjoy popsicles in swelling heat, carefree, the rest of summer.
