Ainsley's Monsters

Ainsley sets her coloring book and crayons on the seat of the chair, then uses the rungs to clamber up onto the seat. Once she completes her climb, she plops the items on the kitchen table. With a satisfied sigh, she opens to a page with a cartoon unicorn and selects a cotton candy pink crayon.

              Bree watches her fairy-sized daughter with fascination as she does all this. No fuss. No complaining at how tiny she is. Just, she wants to color at the kitchen table, so come hell or high water, Ainsley will color at the kitchen table.

              Ainsley finishes her coloring and then asks, “Mommy, can I have some scissors to cut out the unicorn?” She holds up the page that she has just torn out from the book. Proof that this unicorn definitely needs to be freed from its blank background prison.

              “Why don’t you go get your scissors from your craft bin, Ainsley?” Bree asks. She’s making dinner and has chicken hands right now. Not exactly the best time to find a pair of scissors.

              “Because one of the monsters took my scissors,” Ainsley says, her voice getting small as she looks down at the table. The end of her statement is barely louder than a whisper.

              Bree looks up in surprise. “One of the what?” Bree asks.

              “The monsters,” Ainsley says with full voice this time, looking at her mom directly, her eyes the size of cookies.

              Bree opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens. Says “Wh…” Then closes again. She doesn’t know what to say.

              Ainsley helps her. “But don’t worry, Mommy! They are nice monsters… As far as monsters go… I guess.”

              “Well, that’s… nice,” Bree says. My daughter has a halfwit for a mother, Bree thinks to herself.

              The next day, Ainsley’s dad, Matt comes into the house from the garage. Ainsley is watching Tangled from the best seat in the house, snuggled underneath Bree’s arm on the couch.    

              “Hey, Bree, have you seen the hammer?” he asks.

              “The hammer?” Bree asks, “I haven’t touched the hammer lately.”

              Bree and Matt begin discussing when their last respective uses of said hammer were.

              Then Bree startles. Ainsley has drawn herself tighter into the crook of her arm.

              “Ainsley?” Bree asks in surprise. “Do you know where the hammer is?”

              “One of the monsters took the hammer too,” Ainsley murmurs, as if apologizing.

              “One of the monsters?” Matt asks, puzzled.

              “There are monsters living under my bed,” Ainsley says. “But they only come out at night.”

              “Oh, honey,” Matt sweeps in to try and soothe Ainsley. “There is no such thing as monsters.”

              “Yes, there is,” Ainsley says, looking into her dad’s eyes, her face serious.

              That night as Bree and Matt are getting ready for bed, Matt asks, “So… Monsters are living under Ainsley’s bed now?”

              “Apparently,” Bree replies, “But they are ‘nice’ monsters.” Bree uses her fingers to make air quotes for the “nice.”

              “Are you concerned?” Matt asks.

              “Honestly, no,” Bree says. “She talks about them like they are a secret, not like she’s scared of them… and she does say they’re nice.”

              “That’s good,” Matt says, nodding his head.

              “Although…” Bree trails off thinking, then adds, “Maybe we should be concerned that a pair of scissors and a hammer have gone missing…”

              Over the next week, disconcerting items continued to disappear in the Tyler household. Their bag of zip ties, some ½” thick rope, and a sheet. Whenever something vanished, Bree and Matt would go to Ainsley in despair. “Ainsley, Baby… Did the monsters take the zip ties?”

              The answer was always chilling. The answer was always “Yes.”

              One day, Matt and Bree even take the day off from work.

              “Are we losing our minds?” Matt asks as they stand on the threshold of their daughter’s bedroom, her white door is covered in gold butterflies.

              “We are preparing to toss our kindergartener’s bedroom while she is at school to see if she is hoarding a young serial killer’s starter kit…” Bree answers. “Yes, we are losing our minds.”

              Matt pushes the door open slowly, its hinge-creaking worthy of a horror movie.

              “Hah hah,” Bree lets out a tortured, uncomfortable laugh.

              They turn Ainsley’s entire room upside down.

              When they have checked every nook and cranny, actually looked under the bed (incidentally, not a monster is to be found), and have put things back in their proper places, they go downstairs and sit at their butcher block table.

              “I don’t know if I’m relieved or even more terrified than before that we didn’t find any of the items,” Bree says, her eyes unfocused, looking off into the distance.

              The next day their wood tent stakes go missing. Then, the following day a six-foot-long 2 x 4 and the saw.

              Bree and Matt resolve that enough is enough. It is time for them to take action. They are going to camp outside of Ainsley’s room that night and see what monsters emerge.

              They commit so far as to set up their sleeping bags and pillows on the landing. They should at least be comfortable, they reason. Being human, they succumb to their sleepiness at some point.

              At 3AM, Bree awakes with a start. Is that sawing?, she thinks. What a ridiculous thought to have. She closes her eyes. Her lids snap open again. That was definitely sawing!

              Matt’s eyelids have opened as well. They are facing each other, expressions full of confusion. Matt puts his index finger to his lips, telling her to be quiet. They stand without making a sound and start to open Ainsley’s door, short of its creaking point. Matt sneaks his hand in, flicks the light switch, and then pushes the door open the rest of the way.

              Ainsley’s bedroom is full of no fewer than a dozen monsters. A slimy magenta one is sawing the 2 x 4. A blue, furry, bear-sized one is nailing the stakes together into T-shapes. An orange lizardy one is using its webbed fingers to cut some paper out with the scissors. Are they called fingers on a lizard? Bree wonders.

              Bree and Matt look around in bewilderment. Their adult brains don’t know what to do with this information.

              “We…” Matt stammers, “We shouldn’t have turned on the lights.”

              “My monsters are putting on a puppet show for me,” Ainsley says cheerfully from her bed, “Do you want to watch?”