The little girl wandered into her daddy’s workshop even
though she knew she wasn’t supposed to be there. How is it that small feet so often find
themselves in places they’ve been told not to go?
“What are you doing down here?” she asked the back of his
head.
The daddy turned. The
little girl’s voice wasn’t big enough to startle him, but he was definitely
surprised to see her in the basement.
“I’m doing what all daddies do in the basement,” he
said. “I’m making a monster.”
“Oh,” she said, and tried her hardest not to glance into the
too-dark corners. And then, after an
uncertain pause she said, “A monster? Can I see it? Where is it?”
“Oh it’s hiding down here in the dark,” he answered. “But I’m not sure you should see it yet. Monsters can be very frightening, especially
to little girls.”
“I’m not sure I believe you,” she said, her eyes wide.
“No?” he replied. “You
know that monster that lives under your bed?
Where do you think he came from?
And the one in your closet? And what
about the one that peeks under your brother’s door after we turn off the lights? (Well,
to be honest, that monster was already in the house when we moved in.) But those other ones I made down here, in the
basement.”
The daddy carefully laid his hammer on his workbench next to
a glass jar full of rusty bolts and screws.
The jar once held something like grape jelly, pasta sauce, or dill
pickles, but now it was filled with a mismatched assortment of pieces and parts
leftover after various projects. Every
workshop, it seems, has one almost exactly like it.
Noticing the jar, the little girl asked, “what are those
for?”
“Those? Oh, those are
the bolts that hold the monster together.”
“They must be very special bolts if they’re strong enough to
hold a whole monster together,” she said.
“But daddy, what if the monster is too frightening? What if you make it too well?”
The father was good at building monsters, but he wasn’t a
skilled question answerer. After taking the
moment his inexperience required, he said, “If you grow up one day and decide
you’re tired of having a monster under your bed, or in your desk drawer, or
creeping around the corners of your marriage, or wherever you decide to keep
all the monsters I make, all you have to do is wait until they hold still for a
moment and then take out their bolts.
Most of the time, they’ll fall right apart.”
“But how will I do that,” the girl asked. “How will I remove them, and what if they’re screwed
in too tightly? And how will I make the
monster stand still?”
But before the daddy could answer, a very old monster – one
he had apparently neglected for quite a long time – jumped out of the shadows
and gobbled him up in one big bite.
Then, after a loud burp, the monster ducked back into the
shadows and left the little girl alone with her questions.
