Oh dear, she's doing it again.
I have started two new stories this month rather than finishing the story which I said that I would be finishing. And of course the one I'm most fond of at this point is the one that makes me headtilt at the most dramatic angle. *facepalm*
Charlie Fayton had never understood the insistence of terrified children that there was a monster living under their bed. Or in their closet or peeking through the gaps in the basement stairs, for that matter. At the age of twelve, he could spot the obvious flaws in those theories without much difficulty. His father had always insisted on Charlie exercising critical thought.
For one thing, there simply wouldn’t be enough space. Assuming that the hypothetical monster was larger than the average housecat as the majority of tales would generally indicate, it would be irrational to believe that their first preference would be to cram themselves into the narrow dust-fuzzy space beneath a single bed. There would hardly be enough room to breathe or stretch their limbs, never mind executing any more complicated child-snatching maneuvers.
The issue of a food source was similarly problematic. The monsters were invariably man-eaters with a preference for the more tender flesh of children. Even with an astronomically slow metabolic rate, it just wasn’t a realistically sustainable diet. He had briefly entertained the possibility that such creatures (genus: monstrum, species: under-the-bed) were uniformly cold-blooded and could survive off a biannual feed, but even that was too much. Two children per year disappearing from the safety of their own bedrooms within the same geological region wouldn’t go unquestioned for very long.
The most damning evidence, of course, was that for as long as Charlie could remember, he and his father had kept their monster in the garden shed behind the house. And aside from the occasional grumble and request for fine-tuning, that set-up had worked out just fine...
Charlie Fayton had never understood the insistence of terrified children that there was a monster living under their bed. Or in their closet or peeking through the gaps in the basement stairs, for that matter. At the age of twelve, he could spot the obvious flaws in those theories without much difficulty. His father had always insisted on Charlie exercising critical thought.
For one thing, there simply wouldn’t be enough space. Assuming that the hypothetical monster was larger than the average housecat as the majority of tales would generally indicate, it would be irrational to believe that their first preference would be to cram themselves into the narrow dust-fuzzy space beneath a single bed. There would hardly be enough room to breathe or stretch their limbs, never mind executing any more complicated child-snatching maneuvers.
The issue of a food source was similarly problematic. The monsters were invariably man-eaters with a preference for the more tender flesh of children. Even with an astronomically slow metabolic rate, it just wasn’t a realistically sustainable diet. He had briefly entertained the possibility that such creatures (genus: monstrum, species: under-the-bed) were uniformly cold-blooded and could survive off a biannual feed, but even that was too much. Two children per year disappearing from the safety of their own bedrooms within the same geological region wouldn’t go unquestioned for very long.
The most damning evidence, of course, was that for as long as Charlie could remember, he and his father had kept their monster in the garden shed behind the house. And aside from the occasional grumble and request for fine-tuning, that set-up had worked out just fine...