Create a Scene Tuesday

I'm not sure I'll be able to finish this scene today, I'm including this more as an effort to remember it next week. I think it's a cool challenge, and writing challenges are a great way to stay in shape. I found this one through a few links that led me over to Ketch's Tavern and the Create a Scene Tuesday. You get character, action and setting and write a short blurb. Today's parameters are:

Character – A Monster

Action – Trying to Scare Someone

Setting – Anywhere

Shannon's monster was tricky. He was something between a Boggart and a Ringwraith - shapeless but shaped largely by the books Shannon had read in middle school.

The monster lurked beneath Shannon's dorm bed when she went to college. It had been tricky moving from home here. The monster had been familiar with the haunts of Shannon's childhood home. There were plenty of nice, dark spaces in the spacious old Victorian. Sometimes the monster hung out in the attic and sometimes in the basement and, in the winter or on stormy fall nights, he found shelter under Shannon's bed, though there had been less and less space there these last few years.

And then the dorm room. Cheap blue linoleum floor and unforgiving florescent boxes in the ceiling. The monster felt himself shrink from the light and shouts of new friends.

But when Shannon's roommate was in bed and Shannon herself sat alone, working on an assignment for that awful accounting class or facebook stalking the boy from the sub shop, he felt free to sneak out again. He knew Shannon could sense him. She would frown and snuggle into whatever out-sized hoodie she was wearing. She would pick nervously at the Lean Cuisine dinner she'd let get cold. This was always the kind of stance that meant he could pounce at home. She would stay up reading for hours to make him go away.

Now, though, she just left. She went off to find friends because she knew there was always someone awake, and she left him behind to slink back into the shadows, uncertain of what shape to take, and wishing for the haunts of home.