The Knicknackery Issue Three - Monsters - 2015 | Page 7

He touched the creature and it stirred, but he could see it was in a bad way. So he returned to the well and he dropped the bucket down and he pulled up another creature, even darker and slimier than the first. The husband carried this creature to the woodshed, where he introduced it to the first creature. The creatures lit up when they saw one another. They began to play. As the husband had guessed, the first creature had grown lonesome, which accounted for its slump. With company, it came back to life.

Well more days passed and the husband spent even more time in the woodshed with his creatures, and he felt relieved to be around them. The wife noticed his absence but assumed he'd taken up a hobby. She was frankly glad to have him out of the house, so she asked no questions. The husband watched the creatures play, and sometimes he even got down on his knees and roughhoused with them, which slimed him up good. He didn't dare track slime into the house for fear of the wife's wrath, so instead he built himself a little shelter beside the woodshed and slept there.

But as the days passed and passed, the creatures played less and less, and one day the husband walked in to find them both slumped on their fronts. The husband wasn't sure what had gone wrong this time, though he reasoned that it couldn't be loneliness, since the two had one another. Maybe, he reasoned, they were homesick. So he gathered them up in his arms

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