Work Text:
It’s the middle of the night. You wake with a start from a dream that’s already fading from memory. Your bed, which was the perfect temperature before you fell into a restless sleep maybe a few hours ago, is too hot, suffocating your body.
You brave the common fear of sticking your feet outside the covers to cool off and a demon coming and grabbing your feet. It is way too hot.
Laying there, diagonally in your bed, cooling off and trying to shake the unease that came with what was surely a nightmare, you stare at the ceiling. The clock on your wall tick ticks, it and your breathing the only sounds in the room.
Until there was a sound like coins clattering together.
You lay frozen for a few minutes, waiting to see if there’s another similar sound. You know that the coins in the jar on your desk can’t move on their own, and that’s what makes it scarier.
Craning your head to the side, you see movement on your desk. Instantly, you suck your legs back underneath the covers. There’s something on my desk, you think. It definitely can’t be a person because the thing was on top of the desk, sifting through the coins on the now-toppled over glass jar.
You can hardly see it in the light, but the creature—you only now acknowledge that it’s a creature—seems to be searching for a specific type of coin. When it finds one that it liked, it throws the coin up and catches it on its back, where the coin seems to disappear.
Eyes adjusting now, you can see the outline of the creature. It was about the height of a baseball with spikes all over its body that look like fangs or teeth, and didn’t look like it had a head.
You stay paralyzed when the creature stands on its hind legs, revealing a set of eyes nestled between its front arms. The thing turns, and you can make out what looks like the mouth of a starfish on its back.
You must make a noise, a gasp maybe, without realizing because the creature snaps its body around to look at you, staring back at you with eyes that seem too big for that small body.
The clock on your nightstand starts to speed up its tick ticking as the creature approaches, which only serves to increase the anxiety that had you paralyzed.
The thing hops from the desk to the ground to the night stand. When it stops next to the clock, you see the minute hand whizzing by, the hour hand moving too, as you and the creature stare each other down.
Eventually, the creature makes some sort of sound like a growl and hops off your nightstand and out of your line of sight. If you have to guess, you want to say that it went under your bed, but that is not something you want to think about.
Golden light peeks in through the blinds on your window. Where did the time go? You think. Getting up now that you are protected by the light of day, you go to your desk to see what the creature took.
It takes you a long moment to realize that, while you are cleaning up the coins and placing them back into the jar, there isn’t a penny in sight.