The Untitled Project

The Boogeyman

I was never afraid of the usual fire-side horror stories I was told as a child.

Unbenowst to me at the time, the horrors id endured in life had desensitized me to anything remotely scary.

I took my thrills in the form of agressive and gruesome slashers and thrillers until I moved into the real world horrors of true crime.

None of them compared to the boogeyman.

He appeared suddenly one day, like an exhale of smoke from my lungs. I blink, and he's there.

Long, knarled fingernails reaching.

He clicked his tongue, whispered the most vile things.

His voice was like a river of tar, sticky and heavy. Under the rancid breath of his decaying, crooked smile, I suffocted in those whispers.

I begged him to end it. I begged him to drag me to hell, which he was happy to oblige.

Then I took another look at this boogeyman- at the shredded remnants of cloth that hung to his grotesquely knotted body.

His smile was empty, his eyes, bottomless pits.

And on his lips, where they curled and cracked, I glimpsed a scar that was all to familiar.

Emotions they swelled, and in anger, I yelled.

Get out. Get out. Get out.

It was all in my head.

In an instant he's gone- just as he came. Silent and unceremonious.

Yet the smell of his breath remains.

In silence, even in his absence, I know he's real.

I know, because the boogeyman is me.