Monsters under my bed (short story)

When I was growing up, I was always afraid of the monsters under my bed.

Sometimes I could see them, in the middle of the night, standing on my bedroom’s threshold, with wolfish faces, red eyes and full-teeth venomous smiles. Sometimes I could only listen to them, whispering threats to my ears.

After some time, they were gone.

One day at school, I got in the middle of a spiritual joke. It involved a board, a pen and a group of cool teens, that wanted to mess with spirits.

We played, we saw the pen moving, but I was soon chosen to hold the pen. They said I was “special and sensitive”. The worst thing that happened was that I actually felt the bloody pen moving under my hand, pulling my arm and moving in lots of directions. When we finished, one guy said he saw the spirit had “stayed” with one of the girls. I really saw she was different, kind of sad and paler.

So the monsters came back. Not like monsters, but like shades and shadows, human-shaped, almost transparent and silent. They walked silently in the streets; no one seemed to see them as I saw. They tried to hang out with me, but my mom had a thing called “prayer”. They didn’t like it.

One day, they started to bother me. They showed me nightmares, far visions, awful stories of dying and evil people. Even in the middle of classes at school! There was this masked one that kept annoying me at my Chemistry class and went to my home later. I started praying with my mom and my sight opened.

Months passed and I started to see bright lights and sparks, glowing people and good smelling souls. Some people had bad smelling souls and did not glow at all.The black shades hated me and tried to scary me again. But when I prayed and sang, a curtain of gilded rain would be formed between me and the shades. I saw brilliant ones singing and fighting. It was beautifully fearsome.

This became my life. Day after day I could see heavenly fights and the way angels and spiritual beings moved. It was awesome, scary, lovely and hard to live with: responsibility and power. But it also brought me the most valuable gift I ever had: the power to look at someone’s face and feel when they need a hug, a kiss or a new perspective of life.

Why do I have the sight of a non-material world?

The smells no one else could notice, from roses to rotten burnt flesh…

The low whispers and high songs…

People are afraid of what they cannot understand. Worse: they call you a liar.

I could never ever talk about this to anyone but the people who were like me. They also saw and felt this invisible world. We could share our experiences among ourselves and give support to one another. We, who have the sight, have to manage it among ourselves and hope people won’t notice what we do, because what we do is considered madness among the rational ones.

What we do is our secret, to be well kept, safe and never abandoned. I’m happy with it.

The monsters never came back.

Thinking about Assassins Creed... I came up with this

One, two, I walk faster than I should
Three, no one seems to see
Four, five, I still have time to hide
Six, seven, breathe! I hear the first scream
Eight, nine, ten, there are some people around them
Eleven, twelve, thirteen, I take my knives and clean
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, the blood is sticky on my skin
Seventeen, eighteen, they deserved it, they were despicable human beings
Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, I turn the corner and they don’t have a clue
Twenty-three, twenty-four, that’s why I’m paid for
Twenty-five, six, seven, eight, nine
Thirty targets out of crime.