She met the monster under her bed before she could form words. She was, however, at that age, rather adept at crawling. Evading the gaze of her parents, she reached her bedroom within seconds, past her crib, and headed straight for the eyes hovering in the darkness under what would eventually become her bed. 

The eyes that met hers were a deep blue, with rusty streaks like forks of lightning. At first, the large eyes recoiled from her approach. The baby stopped and tilted her head slightly. She took one shuffle closer and reached out a small hand with short, chubby fingers. The monster slowly extended its neck and sniffed at the outstretched hand. It opened its mouth, revealing rows of yellowed, pointed teeth before unfurling its tongue to take a tentative lick at the substance stuck to the open palm.

The baby giggled, the way that only babies can – with pure delight. The monster flinched in momentary surprise. Upon realizing that the creature before him was no threat, he proceeded to repeatedly lick the baby’s hand until she was half coughing with laughter. At this point, the baby’s mother rushed in and pulled her daughter by the feet, blind to the third presence in the room.

It was hard, under the intent observation of parents, for the baby to visit her newly acquired friend. On the few occasions that she managed to escape, her parents quickly learned that they would find her under the bed every time without fail. Though they checked and double checked and tripled checked, they couldn’t find anything that was drawing her there. The first reasonable conclusion that they came to was that perhaps tight spaces made her feel secure.

Once she began to develop the ability to speak, she would point to her favorite hideout and say, in her slurred baby voice, “eyes!”

“Eyes?” her dad repeated, kneeling on the fluffy wall-to-wall carpet. Then he looked toward his wife. “Is she saying ‘eyes’?” he asked. 

“Maybe she’s saying ‘ice’. Because it’s cooler under there? That’s where the AC vent is.”

Her dad leaned over to peer under the bed. “Does she even know that word?”

The woman shrugged. “They say she’s probably learning more than one new word a day.” She was folding laundry and placing it on the bed, which was currently being used as an extra storage surface.

The man straightened. “Well, it seems like we have a poetic prodigy on our hands. She must get that from her father,” he said with a mischievous smirk.

The mother chuckled and shook her head, which made the curls around her face bounce and sway slightly.

The monster, from then on named “Eyes,” watched the baby grow. He was there to witness her first steps. This additional mobility granted the girl new freedom. She began hoarding her favorite toys under the bed so that Eyes could play with them when she was elsewhere. He was grateful. In the hundreds of different homes he’d inhabited, he had never met a child quite like Janelle. For centuries, he’d been more or less alone, after most of his family had been killed in the War of Rights, fighting for freedom from their cruel demon suppressors. While still looked down upon and considered “primitive”, his kind was now allowed to live more freely than his ancestors. He had chosen his current dwelling for no other reason than the cool air that blew through the vent on hot summer days.

Janelle brought him snacks, his favorite of which were pretzels; the thinner, the better in his opinion. She quickly learned his other preferences. He couldn’t tolerate anything sour, and he didn’t have much of a sweet tooth, which worked out well as Janelle had sugar-craving taste buds. He knew that she shared her snacks with him out of pure kindness, asking for nothing in return, even after he explained his typical diet, which generally consisted of lone socks or ribbons or anything else that fell between the mattress and the wall. He didn’t tell Janelle what he ate when those items weren’t available, and she never asked.

On the first playdate when she and her friend were allowed to entertain themselves in her room without direct supervision, Janelle tried introducing Eyes so they could all play together. She had been looking forward to this all week. But within seconds of Eyes revealing himself, the human friend began to cry and scream until her mom had no choice but to pick her up early. That night, Janelle felt so guilty that she brought Eyes a whole bag of pretzels and Eyes explained that it might be better for their friendship to be kept secret. Reluctantly, Janelle made a pinky promise to Eyes, though he had to wrap his long-haired paw around her hand instead, since he was without such a dexterous digit.

While Janelle agreed, she couldn’t help but feel a little down every time she excluded Eyes from her playdates. She worried he got lonely. On those days, she tried to spend more time with him beforehand and afterwards. Even then, the feeling weighed heavily on her. 

Eventually, when Janelle reached middle school and had a human best friend that she trusted whole-heartedly, she shared the secret one day in homeroom. The human friend thought it was just a joke, but consented to going over her house that weekend for a sleepover. Janelle didn’t share the details with Eyes, but instead told him that she had a surprise for him, since she couldn’t hold in her excitement.

When the night arrived, Eyes heard that Janelle was not alone when she entered her room.

“And you promise you won’t freak out, right?” Janelle asked her friend sincerely.

The friend sounded exasperated. “How can I freak out when there won’t be anything there?”

“Just promise!” Janelle said, frustrated.

“Alright, alright,” the friend conceded.

Eyes saw the girls’ knees first, and knew what was happening. He hid himself entirely.

Janelle tried to usher him out. “Eyes, it’s ok! She’s a friend! This was the surprise I was telling you about!”

The response was silence.

“I knew it,” the friend said, shaking her head. “You were pulling my leg the whole time.”

“I wasn’t lying!” Janelle was defiant.

The friend shrugged. “Whatever. Can we play downstairs?”

But Janelle began to cry. The friend stared at her, incredulous. “If you wanted to practice your audition for the play, you could have just said so. No need for this whole elaborate performance.”

While Janelle was still wounded, she was able to manage a smile. She wiped her tears and they left the room. As the night progressed, she grew more and more and distracted. What if Eyes never forgave her? What if he was gone forever because she went back on their promise? She didn’t snap out of it until her friend yelled at her for pressing her Barbie’s face into the soft playdough that the friend has diligently made into spaghetti strands. “It’s not time to eat yet,” the girl scolded Janelle.

The next day, Janelle and Eyes had their first argument. She was apologetic, but also hurt. Did he not trust her? He was understanding but also hesitant. After much debate, he finally relented. He trusted Janelle, and, if he were being honest, he was even a bit excited at the prospect of gaining a new friend.

A few weeks later, Janelle brought her friend over again. Eyes had been anxiously waiting, and Janelle was thrilled when he revealed himself, with the biggest smile she’d ever seen on him. The friend screamed in the highest octave possible, and hit her head on the bed frame as she scrambled to escape. She ran right out of the room and down the hall to the living room, where Janelle’s parents were watching television. They tried to ask her what was wrong, but she was unable to form coherent sentences. She went straight to the front door and pulled but it did not open. As she fumbled with the lock, Janelle’s mother noticed the blood running down the girl’s neck from the gash in her head.

They tried to get her to calm down so they could inspect her cut, but she was inconsolable. By that time, Janelle had made it to the living room and was watching from a distance, a blank look of shock on her face. When her parents asked for an explanation, she was unable to speak.

After a few tense moments, Janelle’s mother dressed the wound in the girl’s head, which turned out to be superficial, while Janelle’s father called the friend’s parents. Janelle didn’t stick around to meet them when they arrived and she sat on the bed in her parents’ room. Though the girl’s parents demanded that Janelle provide an account of the evening’ events, the friend insisted vehemently against that and they left, with many apologies from Janelle’s parents.

In the days that followed, Janelle avoided Eyes. She slept in her parents’ bed. When she needed clothes from her room, she sprinted in and out as quickly as possible.

Janelle tried to talk to her human friend at school. She wanted to apologize and explain that Eyes was a good friend, and that she had just wanted them all to be friends, too. But whenever the girls saw each other, the friend’s eyes would widen and she’d turn away. Within days, all the students seemed to be staring at Janelle and whispering to each other.

By the end of the week, she was called into the dean’s office. The man asked vague questions like “is everything ok at home?” and “are you having any trouble at school?” Janelle made sure to answer sweetly and keep a smile on her face, despite the guilt and loneliness she truly felt.

That night, she overheard her mother on the phone with who Janelle quickly determined was someone from school. She heard her mom respond in whispered disbelief and usher her father over to the phone. Janelle made sure to leave the room before the call had ended.

Presumably spurred by the rumors spreading amongst her classmates, her parents tried to talk to her, but she was close-mouthed about anything other than school or what she wanted in her packed lunch: never pretzels. Less than two weeks after the incident, a man came to talk to Janelle. He asked pointed questions about imaginary friends and children’s tales that were nothing more than just that: tales. He even took a peek under her bed, as if that proved his point.

She spent the first session with the man in silence, and the second in defiance. By the third session, she began to agree with him, only to get him to stop talking. She didn’t want to think about that night anymore. She just wanted the man to go away. 

It took months for Janelle to consent to sleeping in her bed again. The first night, after lying awake for at least an hour, she whispered “Eyes?” into the darkness. But there was no response.

She continued to see the man weekly. His constant insistence began to work into her head, as if her brain were playdough and he was repeatedly folding in new dough, changing the color each time. Even she was beginning to convince herself that she had been foolish to believe in such childish fantasies. 

A couple of months into talking with the man, another permanent, unexplainable change took place. Janelle became obsessive with cleaning her room. She never left anything on her floor. She made sure all of her socks had a pair when she did laundry. Her parents were hesitant to ask her about it; they didn’t want to risk her reverting back to her messy self. When they did work up the courage to broach the topic, Janelle simply shrugged.

As diligent as she was with her cleaning, Janelle wasn’t perfect. She had a habit of leaving her pencils in her bed after working on homework, which would inevitably roll off into Eye’s domain. If he didn’t think about it too much, he could almost pretend that the crunchy sticks were pretzel rods.

Janelle got older, and all the while the memories of Eyes were fading from her consciousness. She reached high school, and the stories told about that one evening were fading from her classmates’ minds as well. She made new friends, found new hobbies.

Under her bed, Eyes was getting hungry. He couldn’t survive on the occasional writing implement forever. As time wore on, his stomach grew emptier. He had thought about trying to talk to Janelle, but he was traumatized as much as her and her friend were and could never bring himself to do it. Now it was too late. He felt like he had put himself in this situation. As the isolated weeks passed by slowly, he became faced with a problem that he believed had never plagued anyone else in his species: let himself waste away, or consume the soul of the friend who had treated him to the best years of his life.

– Hil Schmidt