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My Teddy Bear
My favorite childhood toy was my stuffed teddy bear. I gave him the creative name of Teddy and carried him wherever I went. We were best friends and he was a picture of childhood innocence. He would always lay next to me at night and I fell asleep in his soft cream colored fur. I always felt safe when we were together. I relied on him to protect me from all the monsters that lurked in the corners of my room and wreaked havoc while I slept through the night. Little did I know, Teddy was the monster.
One night, as soon as I fell asleep, Teddy arose from the crook in my arm and his shadow fell across the entire wall as the moonlight shone through the blinds on my window. A smirk appeared on his fluffy face and his eyes turned from a warm dark brown to a bright glowing red. He somersaulted from the foot of my bed onto my dresser and pulled open the drawers. Teddy began ripping out all my freshly folded clothes and throwing them into a messy pile on the floor. From there, he climbed his way up to my desk where he knocked over a box of crayons and slid across the surface, trinkets and papers flying everywhere. Rooting through my backpack, he grabbed my homework and stuffed it into the bottom of the waste basket where it would never be found. Sometimes he would even scribble on the wall and let the markers fall onto the carpet, leaving several ink blotches which could never be fully washed out.
When he grew tired of ruining my clean bedroom, he turned to my frightened toys. He ripped the stitches from his face and tore open his mouth so all the toys could see his sharp yellow teeth. All my other stuffed animals cowered in fear which only made Teddy laugh harder. Cornering all my toys, he decided to choose tonight’s victim. Teddy grabbed my stuffed giraffe by the tail and dragged it into the middle of my room. With all the other toys weeping and begging for him to stop, he slit the giraffe’s throat with plastic scissors and cotton poured to the ground. The giraffe was lucky. His end was one of the quicker ones.
There were a few toys who dared to challenge him but they soon found themselves at the bottom of the hamper, laying there in solitary, only to emerge years later with squished bodies and deformed faces. You can still see them hobbling around in the corners, alone and unloved. On some nights, Teddy would throw my toys into the hallway and let them get ripped apart by my dog. Some of them are still alive even after having their limbs torn off and their eyes gouged out. Though they are mangled and torn and beg for death every day, my mom still sews them up and their wish is never fulfilled and they continue to live as my dog’s chew toys to this day. And Teddy just laughs. He knows he can do whatever he wants and no one will suspect him because to me, he is my guardian angel but all the toys know that he is a demon from hell.
The toys are too scared to stand up to him and no one’s ever managed to escape so they shall remain under his reign of terror until the end of their lives. The only problem is that toys can live forever. They all say a silent prayer for any new toys that are brought into my room. They have no idea what’s in store for them and Teddy likes to torture them the most. All the toys wait for the day when I grow up and lock Teddy in a secure toy box in the basement where he can never wreak havoc again.
I almost caught him once. It was in the middle of the night when I awoke for a glass of water and he was ripping out the fur of a stuffed cat. Luckily for him, I walked right past him because it was too dark to see anything and even if I had, it would have been too unbelievable
that I would have passed it off as a dream the next morning. All the stuffed animals are hoping that one night I might wake up and see him doing all of these things and put a stop to it. That day hasn’t come yet but that’s still all they ever hope for. My windows are locked permanently and my door is firmly shut every night and my room has been their prison for years.
No one knows why Teddy does such despicable things. Some say he does it for the thrill of just being bad. Some say he was tortured in the very same way and now he lives his life inflicting the similar pain on whoever crosses his path. Some say he was just manufactured that way. But every night, he crawls back on to my bed and lies perfectly still in the same place where I left him so that when I wake up, I wake up to the cuddly face of my harmless teddy bear.