Don't Panic

A Story by H

snippet 1o

There is an ugly man pacing the front walk of the bakery. He has a definite limp and he teeters from side to side like a pendulum. His knee crackles and snaps with each step. The ligaments in his left leg are unhinging. He looks as though he’s been built with borrowed parts and none of them quite fit together, like the wrong ends of a puzzle.

The man stops hobbling and he makes terrible faces at the people passing by. He opens his mouth wide. Snakes push their way through, too many of them at once, and they fall wriggling onto the sidewalk. He grows a snout and a pair of pointed ears, and he clamps his teeth together until his jaw drops off. He bends over and picks it up. Then he refastens it.

Scurrying business executives, wound up and marching like tin soldiers, do not see anything but a man with a plain face and a lame leg. Their heels pierce into the soft bellies of his snakes. They are treading on his very existence. He needs to be believed in to be seen for what he truly is, and to subsist, he has to assure that they do. He thrives off of fear. That of the child’s fragile, eggshell mind is especially potent, but children are getting more difficult to scare.

It used to be easy. He crawled beneath their beds and into their closets. He seeped into their floorboards. He would pay close attention to their breathing and their fluttering heartbeats. He brushed against their cheeks. He nuzzled into their subconscious. He would listen for their fear. Fear has many faces. He can take whatever form he chooses. Sometimes he was a lurking shadow, or a ghostie, or a clown. Sometimes he was a body of pulsing maggots.

Before he was a monster, he was a jack in the box. He belonged to a child he can no longer remember the name of. When night leaked into his room like black ink and the wind howled outside his window, that little boy believed his jack in the box was all kinds of horrible things. That knot of fear within the boy’s chest gave birth to a monster. The monster was a little speck of an abstruse ideal, screaming to be set free, and the boy nursed him for years, and the monster grew until he had an awareness and a perception.

They don’t need to eat children. Monsters have no organs or bodily fluids. And there is only one way to rid yourself a monster: stop believing in them. At a time there were others like him but they have been forgotten. They’ve all crumbled into sand, they’ve turned back into soot and children’s knickknacks, they’ve turned back into coats, dead tree branches. One day, this monster will be nothing but an old, brittle jack in the box. It is happening already.

The snakes slither on without being noticed and he stumbles into the bakery. The warm atmosphere and the scent of coffee and pastries do nothing for him. He drags his gimp leg behind him and cups his loose jaw with his hand. There are only adults with adult fears. They are coddling their coffees, afraid that they might miss their train, or that the stock market will crash, or that their children will drop out of school and join the circus. This is out of the monster’s area of expertise. He will cease to exist by the end of the day. He is sure of it.