Making Up Monsters writing prompt — Monster whom parents threaten their children with if they don’t eat their broccoli
“If you don’t eat your vegetables,” Natalie playfully scolds, “a shadow monster will come in the night and eat you,” and all around the table, cutlery and conversation pause in a tense sort of way.
“Natalie—” Mrs Culpeper from down the block starts, scowling, and a dim hand emerges from the shady corner she has her back to, to rest on her shoulder.
“Personally,” Jirrdon the Shadowbeast says pleasantly, not looking up from its painstaking attention to the plate in front of it, “I think I’ll be far too full of this excellent meatloaf.”
“Aha,” Natalie laughs, short and too-bright. “That’s a. Thing my mother always used to say, when I was a kid, you know?”
“Mothers,” Jirrdon says sagely. The hand on Mrs Culpeper’s shoulder pats lightly and dissipates into nothingness.
“Hmph,” the elderly woman says, lips thin and scowl pointed in Natalie’s direction, and only stays long enough to finish dinner and accept a slice of pie, instead of staying to talk anyone’s ear off.
Natalie tucks little Bobby into bed, and comes back downstairs after storytime and snores to find that Jirrdon has politely loaded the dishwasher and wiped down the kitchen table. She leans her hip on the doorframe and watches the shadowbeast rinse its hands under the kitchen tap.
“You know,” she says, “I believe that was a microaggression.”
Jirrdon hums a little. “Was it?”
Natalie worries at her lip a little, fiddling with the strap of her sundress. “Mhm,” she says.
“Lucky I don’t eat people’s children, I guess,” Jirrdon says, shutting off the tap and reaching for the hand towel.
“I bet you could do something real nasty to a mouthy milf,” Natalie says, and Jirrdon half-laughs under its breath, dries its hands, grips the edge of the counter and stares out of the window over the sink, at the evening outside.
“Well, everyone’s safe from shadowbeasts in their nice brightly-lit houses,” it says.
The rustle of Natalie’s palm sliding over the wallpaper seems incredibly loud. Steadily watching the back of Jirrdon’s head, she fumbles around without looking, then snaps the lightswitch downward.
Jirrdon is silhouetted against the window, unmoving for long seconds.
“Is that how it is,” it says, and Natalie’s attempted uh-huh is cut off by the dark at her back being suddenly made of fingers; carding roughly through her hair to grip and drag her head inexorably back, encircling her wrists, stroking her flanks, ghosting the hem of her dress upward to bare prickling goosebumps to the night. What comes out of her instead is a whimper.
Hot breath ghosts over her skin. Teeth scrape simultaneously at her ear and throat, nipping along her biceps and menacing her thighs; she tries to snap her knees together, arching and whimpering anew at the unseen, prohibitive bulk that’s muscled between them.
“You know, Nat, you’re right,” Jirrdon says, smoky-hot and low, somewhere about the height of Natalie’s navel — “I do believe I could eat a mouthy milf right up.”
