Andie watched her dad wander into the kitchen and resume cooking pancakes, finishing up the last few bites of her breakfast as she did so. “Thanks for the food, Dad! Gotta go!”
“What? But the bus won’t be here for another twenty minutes?” Tully turned to look at his oldest daughter, making sure to keep the sizzling pancakes in his peripheral vision. “Can’t you spend just a little time with your family?”
“Uh…” Andie’s gaze floated between her little sister playing with a cheap plastic unicorn, and her little brother who had just wiped his runny nose on his sleeve. “Nope. You know what Mom always says, ‘better definitely early than maybe late!’ See ya!” She bolted out the door and down the stairs, before her father had a chance to protest further. She could have taken the elevator, but she didn’t want to. Sure, sprinting full tilt all the way to the bottom floor was probably a little reckless… but she enjoyed the exercise.
It didn’t take Andie long to reach the bus stop, which was only five minutes away from her apartment complex. Every day she’d take the bus to a stop nearby school, then walk the rest of the way. Today was different, though, because today, there was a monster. It looked two dimensional, as though it had been angrily scribbled on top of reality, like a thought doodle - or maybe it was a thought doodle… Nobody else seemed to notice anything unusual. They just walked around the creature as if it was a normal person. Perhaps it wasn’t dangerous?
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No. There was something unsettling about the creature. The scribbles that made up its form were dark and messy, like it was doodled ham-fistedly into the margins of a book by a child pushing the pencil down with all their might - then scribbled out before it was finished. It had no color, only the dark gray left behind by pencil lead. Still it didn’t seem to be doing anything malicious at the mom…
A wisp blew off of the monster, and into the claymation styled thought doodles of an innocent bystander. The wisp shifted into an angrily scribbled stick figure, which proceeded to distort the claymation surrounding it. Andie could only gaze on in horror as the clay shifted from colorful, clean, and playful, to drab, messy, and uncanny. Happiness seemed to drain from the face of the poor man. His smile disappeared, then reformed, this time hollow and laden with a grim auspice.