"I watched as my alarm clock changed to 10 just as I realized that I was holding my breath. I had been watching the clock for the last hour, hoping that this moment wouldn’t come. But there’s one thing you can be sure of; and that’s that time will always go on.
I knew my parent’s routine. It had been the same my whole life, minus a few short month when my father had a mid-life crisis and swear he was going to persue a career in night, glow-in-the-dark mini golf. My parents would watch tv until 10. After 10 lights went off. Every great once in a while they stayed up longer, but never past 11. And they never left their rooms.
I grabbed my brown leather bag that I considered my monster kit. I had put it together within the first week of discovering monsters were real. It had been my Grandmother’s and it made me feel more confident using it. I didn’t really know if there was a set item list of what should be inside. Regardless, I had filled it with things that I considered to be essentials: holy water that I had gotten one year from a family vacation to a Monastery in Utah, a notepad and pen, compass, watch, camera, Swiss army knife, thermometer, candles, an old tape recorder, salt, blessing incense and banishing incense, and a cross.
I slowly opened my door, jaw clenched as if it would prevent my door from creaking. I was moving silently. I stood outside my parent’s door for a few moments. Thankfully no sounds. No movement. I slowly and silently inched down the staircase, praising whoever made it in my head.
It had been earlier in the week, when my mom convined me to go to the grocery store with her to buy more bird feed for the feeders (like it was some emergency). I reluctantly agreed but on the way back I noticed something bizarre.
We were stopped at a stop sign on Adam St. while my mother tried to convince me for the third time this year to try out for the advanced choir (no use trying to explain that usually you have to be enrolled in any type of choir first, and that I was not), when I saw it. It lasted only a few moments. A shadow. A movement of a tree.
But my training and instinct of a Gurardian of the Day has taught me to never ignore these types of things. You see, as we get older, our adult common sense tells us to say “It must have been a bird or something.” Or “perhaps a cloud caused that shadow.” But I knew it was something much different. I try to block out my adult common sense at all times.
As we drove off I used the rearview mirror to once over the house. It looked like a normal brick house built probably in the 1920s, like most of the houses in the neighborhood. The interesting thing was that everything in the yard was dead. The front yard looked like the dirt had been turned recently. But still, even the things growing in pots were dead. I knew at that moment that I would need to take a closer look.
I immediately went over the list in my head of monsters that made plants die. Ghosts were a very common one. Especially ill-tempered ghosts also known as poltergeists. I knew a lot of lore talked about demons making beautiful plants die. Was I ready to face a demon? "
