abandoned monsters

I had skinned a thousand rabbits by the time I was ten. I had seen thousands skinned. My father and I made frontiersman caps from the rabbit pelts. We sold them on the side to kids at the stations that wanted to play cowboys and Indians.

Seeing all those dead rabbits and staring all those lidless eyes does something to a boy.

I had nightmares about a man with no skin. He wore the dapper attire of a landed gentleman of the nineteenth century. He wore a tall black cap. His leather boots were the brownish-green color of the bacteria tank toads. Everytime Plog moves, the boots squish, chirp, and croak like a chorus of frogs. His suspenders are made from the same stuff, but I don’t know if they croak when he wraps them over his shoulders, straps his smart trousers over his narrow waist.

I’ve never seen Plog take off that top hat. Maybe he has bunny ears under there, maybe not. I never considered that he might until one of my ex-wives mentioned that the hat would be an excellent hiding place for bunny ears.

The clothes – though smart – really ought to be caked through with blood and ooze from the exposed muscles and tendons and bones. Plog has no eyelids, and that’s what is really creepy, to me, that he never blinks and never sleeps.

Here’s what I don’t tell anyone. When I see my reflection in glass, I can usually see Plog standing behind me, watching. Then I turn, and he’s not standing there. I turn back, and he’s gone from the glass.

I dream of him all the time. He’s sitting in my subconscious at the head of a table full of trussed up friends and family, asking me if I want to say grace before we eat Grace, and laughing at his own jokes alone. His frog boots... (the journal entry ends abruptly here. likely, the author wandered off to other pursuits. however, there is a small chance the monster crawled through the canvas and struck suddenly, before the author could express his impending doom like a fictionist ought to do.)