InsaneJournal

Portfolio - Lizzie and the Monster
The following was originally for a Children's Literature assignment. It takes place about two years prior to last year's NaNo (currently undergoing revision).

There was a monster in the house with Lizzie.

Lizzie had gotten used to monsters over the last few months, ever since they had started showing up wherever she went. At first it had been scary, but after a while they were just boring. Once you've been attacked by one giant wolf creature, she thought, you've been attacked by them all.

This one was different, though. Before, the monsters had never gotten into her actual house. They would just wander around on the streets, or growl at her from alleyways. This one, on the other hand, had just shown up one day, made its nest in the walls, and stayed there.

As monsters went, this one was incredibly annoying. Lizzie had never gotten a good look at it, because the few times she actually caught it outside of its hiding places it always ran away very fast, but she knew that it was small, and shaped like a snake, and that it had a habit of burrowing noisily through her bedroom walls while she was trying to fall asleep. It had also figured out where the pantry was, and for such a small thing it had an astonishingly large appetite, especially for sweet things. Many days, she had gone to get a favorite box of sugary breakfast cereal and found it full of nothing but air and crumbs.

"We need to do something about this," she said to the Construct, on one of those mornings, as it set a plate of toast on the table in front of her.

The Construct nodded, silently. It had been a present from her parents, left behind when they had disappeared a few months ago. It was shaped like a very tall person, with a large, blank, white mask covering its face, and it was a very useful thing to have around the house. Its main job was to protect her from the monsters, but she had also taught it to work things like the washing machine and the oven, and to get things off of shelves that she couldn't reach.

"If only we had some way of luring it out into the open," Lizzie continued. "You're really good at catching things, but only if you can actually see them. And we can't exactly tear up the walls just to get at it. But I don't know how we'd get it to come out..."

The Construct seemed to think about this for a minute. Then it pointed to the pantry door.

Lizzie jumped to her feet, forgetting all about her toast in her excitement. "Of course! It always goes after the sugary food, so if we get some more, it will come out of its hiding place to steal it! It's perfect!"

She quickly ran out to the store and bought two large chocolate bars. One of these she broke into small pieces, and arranged the pieces on a plate, which she put in the middle of the floor in the living room.

"Now," she said to the Construct, who had watched all this with interest, "all we have to do is wait for it to come out."

And so they waited. And waited. And waited some more. A few times, Lizzie could clearly hear the monster crawling around in the walls near them, but they waited even longer and it still didn't come out to take the chocolate.

"I don't understand," said Lizzie, crossly, after they had waited for another very long time. "It always eats all my candy, as soon as it finds it. So why won't it eat this stuff?"

The Construct had no answer for her.

"Well, maybe this was the wrong idea." Lizzie stood, and picked up the plate of chocolate. "We know it's kind of like a snake - maybe if we learned about snakes then we could figure something else out."

She headed off to her parents' old bookshelf, munching on some of the chocolate as she went, because of course there was no point in getting chocolate if you couldn't have any for yourself. She found a big book about reptiles, which she knew from school was the kind of thing a snake was, and settled down to read it.

The book told her a lot of things that weren't helpful at all for her problem—it told her, for example, that snakes liked to eat insects and small animals like mice, which was obviously not true for this one, and that they smelled things with their tongue instead of their nose, which was interesting but also not useful. But then she found a small paragraph about how snakes found their prey, and waved the Construct over excitedly.

"Look!" she said, showing it the page. "It says here that snakes know whenever something nearby is moving. The moving causes vibrations, and then it feels those vibrations and it knows there's something alive around. That must be why it's not coming out! I can't sit still for that long, because it's boring, and so it feels the vibrations from me moving around and knows that I'm waiting for it."

She got up, and ran back to the kitchen to replace the chocolate that she'd eaten. "But you," she told the Construct, as it followed her, "you aren't a normal kind of person, you're a Construct instead, so you don't get bored as easily, so you can sit still a lot easier than I can. And so it won't hear you, and so it will come out and you can catch it!"

She broke up about half of the second chocolate bar, put it on the plate, and handed the plate to the Construct, who took it back out to the living room. Then she took the leftover half and went off to her room to eat it and wait for the Construct to be finished.

She waited, and then she waited some more. After a little while she heard a thump, and then a crash, and then silence.

The Construct came to her room a moment later, holding the broken plate and a few leftover fragments of chocolate. It looked very unhappy.

Lizzie pouted at it, annoyed that her plan had not worked. "It got away, didn't it?"

The Construct nodded, sadly.

"I guess we need to do something else, then. If it's too fast to catch normally, then we're going to need to trap it with something. But first, we're out of chocolate again, so I'm going to have to get some more."

She ran to the store and got two more chocolate bars, and ate one of them on her way back, because she was still unhappy about the monster escaping and there was nothing like a bit of candy to improve your mood. The second one she broke up and put on a different plate, only this time, instead of just setting it out in the living room by itself, she found a cardboard box and propped it up over the plate with an old ruler.

"I saw people do this on TV," she explained to the Construct, proudly. "The ruler keeps the box up, so it can get to the chocolate, but once it goes inside it knocks the ruler over, and the box falls on it, and it's trapped!"

She went back to her room again and waited. And waited. Eventually, she heard a dull thump from the living room. She grinned to herself - that must have been the box falling down, this time it must have worked. But when the Construct showed up at her door, it wasn't holding the monster, but only the plate, empty except for a few chocolate crumbs.

"It can't have gotten away this time!" Lizzie exclaimed, and ran to the living room to check for herself. The ruler had definitely been knocked over, but when Lizzie lifted the box, there was nothing underneath but a hole in the floor where the monster must have burrowed down after it finished eating the bait.

"Oh, drat," said Lizzie, crossly. "Well, we're going to have to get more chocolate, then."

She got more chocolate, this time, a whole bag full, because it was getting annoying having to walk all the way to the store and back. They tried several more traps, much more complicated and elaborately disguised traps, but the monster escaped all of them easily, and the Construct continued to return with only an emptied plate and a discouraged set to its shoulders. Lizzie sat up in her room, eating the extra chocolate to keep her spirits up and trying to think of new traps to set.

Finally, late that evening, Lizzie gave up. "I've had enough," she said, after the monster had effortlessly torn up their last try. "This is getting annoying, and I'm tired. We can try again in the morning, but right now I'm going to bed."

She got up to get her pajamas, but as she did so she was struck by a sudden, painful stomach cramp.

"Urgh," she said, and sat back down again. The Construct looked alarmed. "My stomach," she moaned, unhappily.

The Construct paused, and then pointed accusingly at the half-empty bag of chocolate lying by Lizzie's bed.

"I guess I did eat a bit too much," said Lizzie. "Urgh," she added.

The Construct brought her a glass of water, which she drank, but it didn't do very much to help. "I'll probably be better in the morning," she told it, and curled up on top of her covers. The Construct nodded and left, and although Lizzie's stomach still hurt, she eventually managed to fall asleep.

She woke up early the next morning, with her stomach feeling much better but still a little bit sore, and noticed a faint rustling noise coming from nearby. She peered over the edge of the bed and realized, to her dismay, that the monster had gotten into her bag of chocolate while she was asleep and eaten all the leftovers.

"Oh no!" she cried. The Construct rushed in, alarmed, and Lizzie pointed to the bag. "It got everything," she told it, angrily. "Now I'm going to have to go all the way back to the store!"

But when she looked again, she realized that the monster was still there, next to the bag. It didn't slither away like it usually did, but just lay there, twitching slightly and looking very unhappy.

"Of course!" said Lizzie, excitedly. "All that chocolate must have given it a stomach cramp, just like it did to me! Quick, grab it before it recovers!"

The Construct did so. The monster struggled weakly for a moment, and then went limp again, and the Construct carried it off to throw in the dumpster at the end of their street.

"Well, I've certainly learned a valuable lesson," said Lizzie, to no one in particular. "I'm never going to eat too much candy again. It only leads to getting sick and having the Construct throw you in the trash." And she marched off to the kitchen to get herself a good, healthy breakfast.