Evil Smurf

I have always been a scaredy cat with an overactive imagination. As a child I had nightmares that every night Evil Smurf was standing just outside my bedroom door waiting to get in and bite me. Unfortunately for him, this blue devils's dimensions were exactly one inch larger than that of my door frame. The fact that he could not get in the room, I imagined, made him so angry that both his eyes and razor sharp incisors were blood red. It seemed logical. As long as I stayed in bed half suffocating under the covers I was safe. If I had to use the bedroom in the middle of the night I would violently fling myself out of bed across the hallway to the bath room and click on the light. The trip was about 5 feet total but it seemed long and perilous. Once in the bathroom I had to wait for what seemed like a full minute as the florescent lights came on. First they would hum and pop, scaring the Smurf away, and finally light the room. The bathroom was a Smurf free zone. On the return journey I always made sure to flush and run at the same time; the flushing sound would cover my footsteps and distract the blue menace buying me enough time to get back to bed and safely under the covers. The the covers, door frame, florescent light and the flush were magic items that kept me safe.

I had safety rituals and protective totems for every imaginary monster including the local hillside dwelling yeti, the fox head peeping tom who could pass through window screens and the frozen leviathan from John Carpenter's "The Thing" living under the hall floorboards. Every night I was running through the house from room to room just to stay alive. As I got older the monsters only got more sophisticated. Large creatures developed the ability to shrink in order to get into closets, chest and even dresser drawers. They knew exactly where to lurk where I could only catch a glimpse of them. I longed for gullible Evil Smurf who was brazen enough to let himself be seen in full and got scared away by loud plumbing. I was unhappy that monster pathology had somehow changed.

As an adult I am usually able to control these kind of fears or at least I don't have as much time to indulge them- usually. Yesterday I was in the shower when I noticed that the door was open slightly. Neither my dog nor my husband were at home so I had the radio on to provide background noise. All of a sudden I got paranoid that there was a zombie, a midget zombie or possibly and an evil monkey zombie just outside the door. (I had seen at least 4 zombie movies in the past week and i have always hated primates- they have hands). I tried to peer through the cracks nonchalantly to see if anyone or anything were there. Then I thought - If he knows I am looking he will reposition himself so as not to be seen, let me just continue to shower casually.
Wait, what the f*ck is wrong with me. Am I crazy. Has my line of thinking gone to crazy town? I castigated myself for my thoughts. I had to get ahold of myself and regain some logic.

If there were a zombie of any kind out there- simian or otherwise- why would it care if I saw it? If that thing is going to attack, it will attack. I'm in the shower, I got nothing, no defenses, not even a loofah on a stick. Then I thought maybe he had a plan, wanted to add some finesse to the attack. I put myself in his shoes (paws) and tried to think how I would plan it out- a thinking man's murderous brain craving zombie spider monkey.
By the time I had figured it out the shower was over; I had lost interest and guess so had he. When I got out there was as always no one there, not even a sign.