Gas

Bax watched with morbid fascination as the pale stream of light caught the rise and fall of his middle. In the corner, a dust bunny eyed him with equal intensity. The thing swelled daily, adding layers of gray fuzz to its already substantial girth. Bax’s own middle ballooned in tandem, his glossy belly beginning to resemble a massive, bald human head— a protrusion so profound it now obstructed his own hairy feet. A soft, incessant whistle leaked from his nostrils like the wind between the window panes on a blustery day. Lethargy and gas weighed him down. Between him and the dust bunny, a grim race unfolded: the bigger the bunny grew, the closer it came to freedom as it awaited the broom to sweep him out; the bigger Bax grew, the closer he came to bursting.

​

His six stomachs grumbled in a discordant choir, their vibrations rattling the floorboards beneath his back and echoing around the chamber. The dust bunny and starvation have been his only constant cellmates since he landed in this slammer. The “meals”--- a few bitter dark squares of chocolate, a bowl of horribly tasting green lumps that masqueraded as vegetation, and the inedible slab of mystery matter that his captor called a sammich—hardly sustained a beast, let alone a full-grown Boogey Being. 

​

Most creatures withered without nutrition, but Bax’s kin were different. They expanded. In his species, gases transmuted food to energy; without work to burn them, those gases multiplied exponentially. Left unused, they’d inflate a Boogey Being like a parade balloon until he literally burst. Other species of Boogey Beings slowly disintegrated from the inside out until they were mere shadows.  And others stayed the same size but multiplied their legs— an evolutionary gamble to increase the probability of grabbing anything of sustenance to eat. As much as that sounds useful, it wasn’t and rarely ended well. Eventually, the legs hijacked the whole being, turning it into a rubbery, centipede-like thing that wiggled aimlessly until it wiggled to death.

 

Starving Boogey Beings was constituted a capital crime under the United Nations’ Other Beings World Order Merger of 2020. Apparently, no one told his captor, or she just didn’t care.

​

Bax’s gaze flickered back to the dust bunny again. Food? No. Definitely not edible. He recalled his last attempt to eat one—the gagging, the near ejection of a stomach, and the final wet thud of the soppy hairball as he spat it back out. The poor thing had sat dejectedly until it dried enough to roll away. No, this beastly thing would only choke him. Still, it looked almost cute there in the corner, shivering in a barely perceptible breeze. 

​

He clicked long black nails on the wood as a sliver of light crept across the floor, marking the gap between his prison bars and the heavy blanket fabric draped from above. He waited for nightfall with a patient but desperate hope that each sunset might herald a Shadow Man. He spent his entire monster life idolizing the Shadow Man platoon, legendary for their rescue missions, and for scaring the pants off anyone who dared look at them. But the days ticked by and the Shadow Men remained in the shadows. 

​

The vibration of small feet approaching reached Bax before he heard them. His once-stellar hearing had dulled, damaged, he suspected, from too many screams in his long career of closet creeping. It’s how he got himself in this predicament to begin with. Creeping in closets was the only known and acceptable way to travel between realms. Boogey Beings didn’t have the luxury of beaming down as Extraterrestrial beings did. 

​

Bax rolled to his feet, his belly brushing his toes as he waddled to the wall and peered up over the ledge and into the bedroom. Shaded by the overhanging blankets, he watched the door swing silently open, then slam shut. Two small bare feet with pink-painted nails padded across the lilac area rug and stopped directly before him. His claws itched to snatch them, to drag the girl into the dark, but he was far too massive to squeeze through the grates she’d somehow masterfully affixed to the bed. 

​

Suddenly, she plopped to her knees and yanked up the blanket. 

​

“Hi!” Her grin was two front teeth short of toothy. Her wet tongue slipped over the empty gums. 

​

Bax retreated towards the center of the bed. This little beast had discovered a cruel quirk of physics: if you trap a Boogey Monster beneath the bed, the space expands to accommodate the size of the monster— but only once. It did not continue to grow. So as Bax inflated with starvation, his prison seemed to shrink.

​

“I’m not afraid of you,” she slowly articulated, as though speaking slower would increase his understanding. Stupid child, he thought. He was fluent in every language of the human world, six thousand sixty-eight languages of the Shadow World, and thousands more from the universe beyond. But International Other Being Law decreed a death sentence for speaking to humans.

​

“Do you want to play?”

​

Bax pressed his back against the wall of his twin-sized cell. He couldn’t kill her; if he did, he’d never escape. He needed her to feed him, to stop the gases from crushing his insides. He needed to shrink. Which meant he needed to eat… a lot.

​

Her cheeks pressed against the bars, as her big brown eyes searched the darkness. “Do. You. Want. To. Play? We could play Go Fish, or dollies?  I can’t believe I actually caught you! Jimmy at school said he caught a monster once, but I didn’t believe him. Pete says his mommy uses monster spray to keep you away, but I told him I wasn’t afraid. When I heard you in the closet that night, I knew I could do it. Jimmy said he threw a towel over his monster, but I couldn’t see how that worked. I think he was lying anyway. So I thought really hard and wondered if you only come out when it's really dark out.” 

​

Bax listened with rapt attention. How could something so young talk so fast? She lisped every “s,” her tongue slithering over that same empty spot in her mouth.

​

“And I saw a reel on my Tikky Tocky on my phone that talked about moon water and how it can bring something out in the open,” she continued, heaving a great breath. “So last full moon— mommy calls them howler moons— I set out a bottle. And when I saw you in my closet, I sprayed you. You froze up just like stone! I tied you up with my robe belt, and now here you are! It’s the coolest! Isn’t it the coolest? Now we can be friends.” She flashed that devious toothless smile. 

​

This was, in fact, not cool. 

​

“I won’t tell no one about you. We can be the bestest friends.” She pressed her face into the bars until it puckered. And then her eyebrows wrinkled. “How come you look so fat?” 

​

As if on cue, his stomachs roared, vibrating the mattress above, and his nose let out a shrill, piercing whistle.

​

“Shhh! You’ll get me in trouble.” She glanced at the closed door and then back at him. “You don’t have to be afraid. But you have to be quiet, or Daddy will be mad. He said absolutely no pets.” 

​

She looked thoughtfully at him. “What should I call you? How about….”

​

“Dinner!” A woman’s voice shrilled from somewhere beyond the white door. 

​

“Ope… Be good. I’ll be back.” The girl whispered. The blanket dropped, plunging Bax back into the gloom, and the painted toenails skipped away. The door slammed, leaving him alone with his rising panic. 

​

Bax slumped back to the floor, his body too heavy to hoist without the adrenaline of facing his captor. He lay there in the shifting shadows, whistling into the dark, nursing a faint hope that she might return with a scrap of something—anything—to quiet the volcano in his guts. 

​

“Well, well, well,” the raspy voice curled from the shadows like mist filling a graveyard. “How the mighty have fallen. Or should I say…. Expanded? It’s really not a good look for you, Bax, my dear sir.” 

​

Bax's head snapped up from the floor, his nostrils emitting a sharp, jagged whistle. 

​

“Ab?” 

​

“The one and only.” Abedon’s face appeared on the other side of the grate, lying on his belly with his chin propped in his hands, kicking his feet like a bored child. Despite the youthful posture, Abedon was millennia old.  “How in the seven levels did you get yourself all snared up?” 

​

“Ab, you need to get me out. Now!” Bax wheezed, attempting to roll to his feet. He looked less like a monster and more like a stuck pig, his glossy skin scraping the floor. “We have to inform the Board. The humans— they’ve figured it out. She used moon water, Ab. A child!” 

​

“Moon water, you say?” Abedon picked at a row of very straight, very white teeth with a long, onyx nail. He inspected the tip with mock fascination.

​

“Yes. Moon water! Now get me out of here before she comes back!” Bax's stomachs roared in a rhythmic thrum that vibrated the very foundation of the house. 

​

“No. I don’t think I will.” Abedon continued to dig at his teeth, but his black eyes glimmered with a cruel light.

​

“What do you mean, no!?” Bax’s voice popped like a circuit breaker. 

​

“Well, you see, you’re kind of pathetic. Out grew your britches. And your usefulness. You’ve become a liability, Bax.” Abedon offered a casual shrug of a black suit-coated shoulder.

​

“Stop pricking around, Abedon. Let me out.” Bax ground his sharp yellow teeth together, his black lips curling back in a snarl. He rocked back and forth, his massive body nearly filling the entire cell. “The Board will have your head for this!” 

​

Steam spat from his nostrils, accompanied by a high-pitched agonizing keening. The gases were reaching critical mass. 

​

“The Board sent me, Bax. They told me to leave you here,” Abedon said, his voice dropping low, a melodic purr. “Who do you think put that moon water reel on her phone? She is a brilliant little thing, isn’t she? Maybe I’ll recruit her. But you…” He pointed that black nail at Bax, “Well, I’m afraid you’ve been… downsized.” 

​

Abedon let out a full-bellied laugh that sounded like the dry whisper of dead leaves in the wind. He lunged forward, gripping the bars, and flashing those gleaming white teeth in a terrifying imitation of a smile. “You, my dear brother in monstering, have been untethered… like a… discarded parade balloon.” He laughed again, clapping his hands. “Oh, this is fun.”

​

Bax was too large to move now. His belly pressed firmly against each side of the cell, pinning him firmly in place. 

​

“You can’t....they can’t…” His voice popped again, thin and frail.

​

“Oh, but we can. Sorry, ol’ chap.” Abedon mocked, his tone steeped in the tropes of the human movies he loved too much. “Don’t worry about the mess. The little beasty who caught you will have to be the one to clean up after you, when you finally pop your innards all over her room.”

​

“Ab…please…”

​

“I almost want to stay,” Abedon mused, slithering back into the darkness. “There’s nothing quite like the look on a human’s face when they realize that monster guts look an awful lot like piles of clothes and broken toys.”

​

“Please, Ab! Take me with you!” Bax pleaded, his keening now a deafening wail. But Abedon was gone, leaving only the scent of rosemary and the creaking of approaching footsteps on the floorboards in the hallway.  

​

The explosion didn’t sound like a bomb. It was a wet, heavy sigh, followed by the dull sound of piles of clothes being hurled into the room. The dust bunny landed on top in a puff of gray particles. With a rough shake to fluff its hair, it scurried away back into the shadows just as the white door opened.