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“Goodnight my little Sunbeam. Goodnight, sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.” My mother’s voice was calm and soothing, gentle and warm. She drifted towards the door, a hand reaching for the lightswitch. Despite the darkness, I could see the soft smile on her face, the light shining in her eyes, the pride and love for me glowing bright. I smiled to myself, I love my mother.
“Goodnight Momma,” I chirped, a sleepy smile of my own creeping onto my face. Unlike my mother’s coffee stained yellow, my teeth were a flawless white. My hair was black, a stark contrast to my mother's silvery blonde, but similar enough to my late father’s deep brown that no one asked questions. My mother’s eyes were the same sparkling blue as my father, mine were a deep red-brown, the only detail of my mask I could never get right. They should have seen through it, I was supposed to have blue eyes, it was simple genetics, but mine were the color of dried blood. The very same color of the blood that stained the once pristine carpet beneath my bed.
I drank as much as I could, but some escaped, and it is very hard to clean blood out of carpet. The boy’s blood tasted like wine, clean and innocent, exactly the way I liked it. It was hard not to make a mess, but luckily I didn’t need to leave his body intact. I was cleaner the second time, but my father tasted like alcohol and hatred. He had been hurting my mother, I couldn’t let him get away, she is my mother and I love her. It hurt me to see her cry at his funeral, but the bruises he left on her wrists made me angry. I had to protect her.
My smile grew as I thought of my mother’s first child, of the bones now nestled under the covers at the foot of my bed. Most children suck their thumbs, I gnaw on bones. His left collarbone is my favorite, thick enough to not snap, but thin enough to get my teeth around in this form. I could shift back, but I like this skin, I like the look of love my mother gives me when she sees me. It’s far better than the look of horror she gave me the one time she saw my true skin. The scream she let out was the worst noise I’d ever heard, worse than the sobs when she found her husband slaughtered by a wild animal in the backyard. A wild animal, that’s all she thought I was. I suppose that’s okay, as long as she’s safe from that monster.
I guess she would probably think of me as a monster if she saw through the mask, but she never did. She always saw what she wanted to. My mother always braided my straight black hair and ignored that my scalp was the same color as my hair. She never noticed that all my teeth were delicately pointed when she helped me brush them.
I dropped the facade for a heartbeat, staring at my reflection in the sliding mirrored door that led to my closet. My red-brown eyes turned to a pure, deep red that glowed like the dying embers of a forge. My hair twirled, twisting into towering horns and ridges that dominated my face. My nose flattened, becoming more of two slits carved into my face than a true nose. My lips shrank, disappearing to the point of nonexistence, putting my pearly white teeth on permanent display. My limbs lengthened, fingers and toes becoming razor sharp talons, my skin a shade darker than the space between stars. A scaled tail ripped free from behind me, snapping through the room like an old leather whip, the spines began to catch on my bed sheets. I shifted back before they would rip.
I am happier pretending to be a good child, to be my mother’s precious little boy. The only problem is I am not a good child, I am the monster your parents tell you isn’t there. There are no monsters beneath your bed. They lie to you, we are there, lurking in the darkness. You better hope that your monster doesn’t like your parents more than taunting you, because you might end up just like my mother’s son, a forgotten pile of bones.