It possesses more teeth than you can count, if you can only count to four. Its claws are as sharp as whiteboard erasers. If you dangle a leg over the edge of your bed, and it clamps its jaws around your foot, you’ll feel something wet. For a moment, you’ll wonder if it's your blood, before realizing that, no, the substance goobing your ankle is saliva. Following this epiphany, you may feel like screaming anyway because spit is icky. Resist this instinct. Never scream around the monster. Suck in your lips, hold your breath, cover your mouth with your hand if you have to. For the monster has sensitive ears, and if you scream, it will faint on the spot, still as a possum, consciousness guttering like a candle. When it awakens, it’ll scurry away, and you’ll never see it again. It will find a lonely spot, one to match its mood, and there curl up to die, not from fear but of rejection.
For monsters, loneliness can be terminal.
Suppose instead you hold still. It may decide you're a friend. It may poke its head up, take your fingers into its mouth, and gum away at them happily. Now you know not to scream, which is good, but you mustn’t pet the creature either. Not because you’ll scare it, but because when you stop, the poor thing will think you’ve rejected it, and off it’ll go to the lonely spot again.
There is a reason such monsters are rare.
Best to let it live in unrequited hope. Pretend it isn't there. Once it’s tired and it curls up again under your bed, get some sleep. Go to work. Eat dinner. When the time comes, approach your bed with caution.
Like you used to, jump into bed from a distance.
Like you used to do, keep hands and feet from the edges.
Should the monster emerge again to slurp at fingers or toes, pretend again it isn’t there. Repeat as necessary, every night, drawing out the inevitable for as long as you can, knowing the entire time that at some point you will do something, a thing subtle and innocuous and probably not even attached to a thought, which the monster will take as rejection. Knowing the entire time that, at some point, you will be killing it.
