Nina believed in monsters. She was obsessed with them. She believed that there were monsters in the closet, under the bed, beneath the cellar doors, even in her father’s study. She believed they were in every nook and cranny in the house. She believed them so much that she studied everything there is to know about battling monsters and was always on her toes, even during the day.
Nina’s single father was worried for her. Although worried was not exactly the word to cut it. He was frustrated and anxious for his daughter’s sanity. He had tried everything: from trying to be an understanding and good father, explaining to her that monsters didn’t exist, to taking her to child psychiatrists, who all said that it was just a phase, that it was common for a child like her to have active imagination as long as she was not hurting anyone and that it would grow out in time. Still, as Nina stepped into her 10th birthday, she still made a fool out of herself, and her father was running all out of options.
Until one day, when her father was working late, Nina armed herself as usual with the essential “weapons” to keep herself out of the “monsters’” wrath. She was so occupied with keeping the monsters at bay in her little dark closet and under the bed that she did not hear a robber breaking into the house that stormy night. She did not hear him rummaging through the house looking for valuables, and she did not hear him coming up the stairs to see if he could find anything else in the other rooms.
So needless to say, she didn’t expect the robber coming into her room and started attacking upon seeing her to silence her. But lucky for her, due to her monster-mania, she had the necessary weapons to arm herself. Thinking that he was a monster, she defended herself with all her might, throwing blow after blow and luring him all the way to a trap she had made beforehand in an abandoned tool shed near her home. As soon as the robber caught up with her and was about to strike, she sprung the trap and caught the robber, locking him inside the tool shed.
When her father came home, she tried desperately to convince him that she had caught the “monster”, that she had him locked in the tool shed. She begged her father to come with her so that she could show him the “monster” and that he would believe her, but her father was too frustrated by his ransacked home and tired from work that he lost his cool and shouted at her to shut up and help him clean up the house.
The next few days she tried to make her father listen to her, to get him to see what she had caught. She even tried to persuade her friends to see her “monster”, but everyone was so fed up with her antics that they either ignored her or told her to buzz off. Even her father told her that the discussion was over and if she carried on like that, he will have to send her away.
Nina did not entirely grow out of her monster obsession as the child psychiatrists predicted. In fact, when she grew older, she decided to research on creatures and its mythology and earned a degree in her thesis research. But she never spoke of the “monster” she caught in the tool shed ever again, and through time, she forgot about it.
The abandoned tool shed remained abandoned till today. Some say it was haunted and no one dared to go near it. Some even say that during some nights, you can still hear sounds of moaning and groaning and a light shake at the padlocked door…
Comments