Knots

• Antigone Stanley, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2022

You pull yourself from a deep beautiful slumber early Tuesday morning with a knot in your stomach.
It’s to remind you of something, that knot. You know it.
Like when people put knots in their handkerchiefs… only with it in your stomach, you’ll be easily reminded, as it constantly pulls at your guts and heartstrings. And anyway, you don’t have a handkerchief to tie reminders in.
Only you’re not quite sure what you put it there for.
It might be to tell you you’ve got a dentist appointment, and you need to start plotting your escape. Or that you need to buy your mum a gift for Mother’s Day. Or that your homework is to be handed in today, but you haven’t actually finished it, because you were too busy last night constructing a life size statue of a peacock with nothing but papier-mâché.
This time is a bit different though. This time you know something freakier than having no gift for your mother on Mother’s Day is at stake.
You shift your weight on the sun-bleached mattress. Your body feels light, like a floating cloud, but your arm is heavy against your cheek and your eyelids are tired and sticky from sleep. You don’t want to wake up, but the fear of missing the something you reminded yourself to do is too strong, and you heave your eyes wide, and your head up and force your brain into activity.
As the gears in your head begin to turn, you realise that your bedroom is not empty. Your eyebrows drown themselves in your messy hair, your eyelids expand to capacity, because a figure is looming above the morning like a zombie with a gun. Only worse.
The knot in your gut expands, punching holes in the roof of your mouth and bulging against the twisted elastic around your waist.
For surely this is what it was warning.
A creature is breathing your oxygen. Slobbering on your bedsheets. Cleaning its discoloured fangs on a piece of gold-painted Lego from your goldrush history diorama.
A monster is in your bedroom, and not tidily packed away under your bed or in the closet like good bedroom monsters have the manners to do.
The beast slurps a string of spittle back into its slime filled gob, flicks a piece of its last meal from the gold Lego in its claws onto your quilt, and slowly turns all three of its gooey yellow eyes until its silted pupils meet your fear dilated ones.
It's third eyelid blinks, separately to the rest, leaving a fresh film of milky mucus on its amber ball, and returning into its flesh with a wet pop.
Then the creature speaks.
“I think,” It states, with a mildly posh British accent, “That you are due to be consumed today.”