jumping bean's monster

Jumping bean’s monster was unlike most normal kids’ “monster under the bed” fear. Her monster took shape not just as a physical being but more so the odor that it left behind. How quickly that odor was able to crawl its way under her toenails, past her epithelial tissue, through muscles, tendons, bone to finally coarse directly through her bloodstream. And there was nothing she could do to prevent it once it got to her vessels, traveling up and into and through her heart, past the ventricles, the valves, the atria, and flooding into her eyes. As hard as she might to keep it out of her eyes, her portal to the world, her monster came that much faster, seeping out the corners of her mouth, bleeding into her eye sockets and pouring through her capillaries, scalding her cheeks.

Fear.

Crawling, screeching, twisting, bending, horrifying, yet so very real was her fear that it quite literally grew into her skin, finally slurping it's way to her hands, her fingers, the things that demanded a stop, a safe space, demanded protection. The fear became her hands and they grew frantic and shaky. Self-conscious and disbelieving in her own ability to provide the very thing that she needed from her predator: an escape. It seemed as though the fear was all she could see, all she could feel, all she would ever know. But for some reason each time the stench and squelch of that rancid bog slipped under her skin. a glimmer of courage would follow it. Sparkling and igniting pieces in her that fear tried so very hard to erode. That courage peeped from her mouth in the form of music. In the form of song. So the little girl finally learned that fear has a weakness and that its weakness takes shape in a harmonious, yet still fearful melody, but it exists all the same. And that knowledge alone was enough to believe that the monster the girl feared was never truly her at all, that it never would be or could be, as long as she could sing.