Two Perfect Monsters in One Family

"a story written for my kid lit. class"

By Greg Ellstrom

I woke up this morning with a grin on my face and shouted to my little sister in her bed across our room, “Niki, wake up! There’s no school today, and the monster is coming over!”

Niki jumped out of bed and ran down the hall calling to our brother, “Get up, Wobut! The monsta is coming!” Our brother’s name is Robert. Niki has trouble with her r’s.

Downstairs, Bart our Beagle was howling happily! To me it sounded like he was saying “the mooonster is coooming!”

While we ate breakfast, I said, “Remember, the time the monster was an ogre?” Then I made an ogre face and growled. We all laughed.

“Oh, Emily,” Niki said with a mouth full of Honey Nut Cheerios, “I wememba when the monsta was a dwagon!” She flapped her arms like a dragon might flap its wings, then pretended to breath fire from her nose, but milk came out instead. “Oh, gwoss,” she laughed.

Robert was laughing, too. “I remember when the monster was a mummy,” he said really loud and made his arms move all stiff like a mummy’s arms move “I was so scared I almost wet my pants!”

By the sink, Mom clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Robert!” she said.

We laughed! Bart howled! What a wonderful breakfast we were having and not just because we had the day off from school, but because the monster would soon arrive. Then the doorbell rang, and we raced to answer it, sure the monster was on our front porch.

I slowly pulled open the door, and the monster came in. She was smiling and had braces on her very white and scary teeth. Her monster hair was blonde and curly, and she had blue monster eyes and a t-shirt that said, “Hampton Middle School,”and jeans and a backpack on her back.

“Hi, guys,” the monster said and reached down to hug us all.

“Hi, Kelly,” we all said as we hugged back, because Kelly was the monster’s name, and the monster was our cousin. “Oh, Kelly,” Niki jumped up and down. “Will you play monsta with us today?” Kelly played the best monster in the world.

“I don’t know, guys,” the monster said, pulling her backpack off her shoulders. “I have homework I have to do.”

“Monsters have homework?” Robert said, surprised.

This made Kelly laugh, and she walked over to our couch and sat down. “I don’t know about monsters,” she smiled, “but 7th graders do.” Then she looked up and said, “Hi, Aunt Ginny.”

Mom was standing by the archway to the dining room. “Hello, dear,” Mom said to Kelly, and then she said to us. “Now I’ll only be gone a couple of hours, kids. Isn’t it nice that Kelly could come to sit for her cousins?” Then Mom looked at us. “Now don’t bother, Kelly. She has work to do. You can play by yourselves or maybe watch a video.”

Then Mom left and we stood there feeling pretty disappointed. The monster was over but wouldn’t play. In fact, the monster was on the couch reading a book.

So we all sat on the floor in a row. First me, then Robert, then Niki, then Bart. And we watched the monster as she read her book. As we watched, I saw how pretty the monster was, and I wondered if she had a monster boyfriend, which would be pretty cool, I guess.

Every now and then the monster would look at us over the top of her book, and at last she spoke.

“Robert, what grade are you in?” she asked.

“First.”

“What grade are you in, Niki?”

“Pwe-K.”

“Emily. What about you?”

“Third,” I said.

The monster smiled. “Well, guess what?”

“What?” we all answered, even Bart who sort of said “whooot?”

“It was when I was in third grade that I first became a monster. I think it’s your time, Em!”

Well, Robert and Niki and Bart all looked at me, and in just a few minutes we were playing and laughing, and “guess what?” I was the monster! We played monster in the kitchen and in the cellar and in the family room, and once, I jumped out of the bathtub being an ogre and scared my little brother and sister so much that they laughed until they fell on the floor.

When Mommy came home and Kelly had to go, I took her hand. “You were always the perfect monster, Kelly,” I said.

“Thanks, Emily,” she smiled, and I noticed that her very white teeth with braces weren’t scary at all. Her blue eyes weren’t monster eyes, and her blonde hair wasn’t monster hair, either.

When Kelly was gone I ran to the bathroom mirror and looked at my face. Oh my goodness! Now I had monster teeth and monster hair and monster eyes! It was awesome!

That night when Niki and I lay in our beds just about to go to sleep, Niki said to me, “Emily, today you wuh a pewfect monsta.”

“Thank you, Nik,” I smiled, and then we went to sleep, a perfect monster and her little sister.

(This is a story I was supposed to create for a picture book. All picture books are 32 pages long. I never knew that before. The idea came from when I was a little kid. I was the oldest of all my siblings and cousins, and whenever, we would visit our cousins in Cheektowaga I would have to be the monster.)

Thanks to Erin, whoever she may be, for her "perfect monster" image that I found on Google.