by Abby Short

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“Do you remember your dreams? I don’t recall mine either. The Eater-Eater probably got to them. You know, the Eater-Eater? He just eats. And eats. And eats. And eats, and yet can never seem to get quite enough. A single sugar grain, even an imagined one, is enough to trigger the inner workings of his brain, and he must consume. Gorging himself on little sweets in crinkly wrappers and then entire bags of candy, he goes on to find much greater confections, more delicious than anyone should handle. You seriously don’t know the Eater-Eater?”

The boy didn’t respond. His lips wouldn’t do much more than allow a string of drool to pass by them and slide down his cheek to his pillow. He could wiggle his toes as much as he could wiggle his fingers, which is to say none at all. Breathing had become more difficult than it ought to be, and that, the boy decided, was probably the demon’s fault, who was sitting on his chest.

This demon, with hair that crawled into her eyes like spider legs—eyes that were sunken or glowing, the boy could never tell—with a narrow waist and prickly legs, had visited him many times before in the early morning hours.

If the boy could, he would groan as the demon went on and on about how the Eater-Eater was consuming the figments of people’s subconscious, and maybe one day would devour the world. The boy had listened to this exposition for weeks now, had become bored by it, and said no when the demon asked, “Will you help me stop him? Normally, corrupting dreams is my shtick,  but I can’t do that if the dreams are eaten first.”

If he could get his mouth to move alongside his brain, the boy would tell the demon that she should find a different lucid dreamer, because why would he want to hunt down this Eater-Eater just because he was hungry?

Removing her hands from either side of the boy’s head and leaning back, the demon contemplated before asking, “What would it take for you to come with me this time? Drugs? Money?” The demon crossed her arms. “A cute hookup? A puppy? What?”

But the boy simply shut his eyes, willing the demon to go away as she always did when she grew tired of waiting. This time, however, the demon didn’t. Straddling his chest and crushing him under her weight to ensure he wouldn’t fall asleep that night, especially when she started to whistle and drum on his forehead with pointed nails.

After a long day with no rest, the boy was disheartened when the demon came back the following night, inquiring if he would come and defeat the Eater-Eater. The boy said no again, and again the demon stayed, stealing another night’s worth of sleep.

The night after, the demon pulled the boy from a dream of his teeth falling out, and asked him the same question. The boy gave the same answer: “No.”

He had the pleasure of spending the night’s remainder staring up at the monstrous creature above him, who glared back with impatience.

 Their meetings persisted for nearly a week, much longer than the demon expected it to take, before the boy’s willpower had all but dissolved as his sleep deficit grew. That night, when she shook the boy awake, he said yes.

The demon clapped her hands like a small child and told the boy to prepare himself for the dream of a lifetime. Instead of hauling the boy through the folding doors of his closet to a monster land or dragging him under the bed by his foot as he cried for help (the quintessential night terror thing to do), the demon pressed her mouth to the boy’s face. Finally, his eyes eased shut and he was able to fall away into a dark slumber.

At school, which was sitting in about three feet of water—a fact that everyone ignored as they trod through it—the boy realized he had forgotten to do his homework. Naturally, this meant he was going to die. His teacher, a blurry-faced woman with a bob and broad fingers, would punish him in front of the entire class. The boy didn’t want to stick around and see if she would drown him, flagellate him, or resort to a more unique form of discipline, so he ran out of the classroom, sloshing through the water until he found a bathroom. He locked himself in the stall furthest from the day, sucking in deep breaths (as he wondered if he was awake).

Before he could decide, the bathroom door creaked open and someone else entered. Instead of footsteps, the boy heard splashing. The water lapped more intensely at his shins as the person came nearer, pausing at every stall until they reached his. Then the splashing stopped, and the water became still again.

Through the crack in the stall door, the boy saw an eye that sat under a cruel brow, peeking back at him. Despite the boy locking it, the stall door opened the wrong way, revealing a girl in a skirt too short for the dress code with a cafeteria tray in hand.

“Do you really think the Eater-Eater would come here for this?” she said before chucking the tray at him. It hit him in the chin, and the different food slobs slid down his chest in chunks.

“Hey! Are you the demon that’s been pestering me?” the boy asked, cowering in the corner next to the toilet.

“Obviously,” this girl said with hair neatly trimmed into a lego-esque shape and bright eyes, before grabbing his hand.

Together, they ran out through the hallway. While shoving past students (with familiar-ish faces, the boy thought), the demon berated the boy, telling him that he needed to dream better: “The Eater-Eater finds academic stress dreams boring. Give him something he would actually want.”

They slammed into the main doors of the school and were let into a new plane of space: a race track for trains. All the trains had giddy faces and big doll eyes as they chased each other in the circle, and the sky was black, so everything was lit only by the gentle glow of the track laid with rainbow brick.

The boy could feel that the demon wasn’t pleased with this, but instead of arguing with him, she simply seized him and they floated away into the grey void between dreams.

After a few seconds, they emerged from the dark vacuum of no thoughts and drifted over a flower patch. As they sauntered closer to the ground, the boy noticed that the yellow, pink, and red dots were all small flower-headed women running about. “I’ve resorted to using your neighbor’s dream until you can figure yourself out. He’s currently reading Lolita,” the demon informed him, still dressed as a schoolgirl.

Maybe if we were having a picnic, the boy thought, the Eater-Eater would like to come. A checkered blanket bloomed up from the ground, and trays of dainty pastries and jams sprang up with it.

The two sat on the blanket, and the little flower women careened around them, a few settling on their laps as they waited. No one seemed to come, but when the boy looked back at the arrangement of sandwiches and goods, and saw that they were all gone.

“Aha!” the demon cried, jumping to her feet and tumbling a pink-headed flower child from her lap. “It’s working.”

The boy wanted to ask more, but the demon grabbed his hand and carried him away again.

From the void darkness, they appeared in a sort of candyland—a real, proper one, from the roads paved with Toblerone squares to the sky made of different colored cotton candy knitted together. The candy people had peppermint faces and laffy-taffy waists and were trouncing around all merry-like in their sugary utopia.

The boy was about to dip his hand into a pile of marshmallow fluff left on the curb of one of the houses like a trash bag when it was all violently snatched from him, and he fell down a purply-black abyss.

He jumped awake, back in his room. “What happened?” he asked the demon who was lying beside him in bed.

“The Eater-Eater, obviously,” the demon told him. Not only had the Eater-Eater guzzled the candy, but the entire dream too.

“Oh,” was all the boy could say before the demon knocked him out again.

This time, he was riding a unicorn around a carousel. The demon sat behind him on a mutated-looking giraffe steed. They took a few spins round and round with the fairground shining bright around them like a twisted Christmas come early.

The boy noticed that a bunch of tall figures with face-splitting smiles and gangly limbs started gathering around them. They were laughing so hard that their tongues lolled like socks from their mouths, and their eyes rolled so far back they were swallowed by their sockets. They’re laughing at me, the boy thought, and took to the sky on his unicorn, which now had chicken wings. The demon followed him on her bat-winged ride.

The fairground rides twisted from their foundations in the air like tendrils, as they tried to knock them to the ground, and the stench of fried food was everywhere. “Mmmm, elephant ears,” a deep voice crooned beneath them, and just as they were about to reach the eye of the Ferris wheel, the dream went dark.

“He’s following us now,” the demon said, excitement making her face all hot and rosy as she pulled the boy into new spaces with increasing succession. The boy witnessed different worlds of color and horror until they went black again, but his eyes couldn’t focus on anything because it was too hazy and vivid at the same time. It was like watching a movie with missing frames every few seconds and an ill-sequenced plot. However, it wasn’t a silent film type, and the boy wished to cover his ears to block the crunching sounds and yelping when he wasn’t swallowed by the pauses between dreams. He thought he saw a bulbous man in the distance, peeling back the corners of people’s suppressed thoughts to reveal nothing beneath, but he wasn’t sure. 

“How am I supposed to stop this?” the boy called to the demon.

“Just take us back to a candyland one more time. Picture it in your mind’s eye, but make everything a little more sour,” the demon yelled back over her shoulder as the subconscious jumping ran her ragged.

And there they were in another candyland of sorts. The sugar scenery looked old, like a forgotten window display in a rundown bakery. The candy people’s faces had been melted to remain in a frowning expression, with their eyelids pulled down to reveal too much of their insides and their lips downturned like hooks pulled on the corners of their lips.

Spent, the demon flung herself onto a birthday cake cushion, only for it to expel clusters of fiery ants. They started biting her all over, and when one bit the boy with its sharp jaw, a rumbling took to the earth with such force that everything started bouncing like it was on a trampoline.

“He’s nearly here,” the demon announced, her voice uncontrollably vibrating as she remained on the ground.

The candy people began screaming when they heard that and tried to hide in their houses, which collapsed into piles of crumbs since they were composed of soggy graham crackers.

The scene frightened the boy so much, he tried waking himself up to escape from this ensuing nightmare of the Eater-Eater’s making, but the demon grasped his ankle and wouldn’t let him go.

The Eater-Eater arrived, rising from the muddy chocolate lake like a hippo. However, he was not what the boy expected to see.

“He kind of looks like you,” the demon said, nudging him.

The boy looked at the Eater-Eater again, who had started sucking on the hairline of a particularly small candy child. When the Eater-Eater bit into the child’s brains and red mush splattered in all directions, the boy cried, “No, he does not!”

The boy had envisioned the Eater-Eater as a ginormous mound of a man that looks like tons of lard encased in sausage lining to make up the rolls of his body, but had been completely wrong. The Eater-Eater was no bigger than the child he had just swallowed. When the child’s little Peep feet disappeared down his gullet like she had gone headfirst down a slide, the Eater-Eater remained a mere wisp of a person with a pitted stomach and big, sad eyes.

The demon shrugged and told the boy to make the Eater-Eater go away.

The boy concentrated, trying to snuff out the Eater-Eater’s existence like a small flame or throw him down the garbage disposal of thought like he was a bad apple. But that didn’t work, and the Eater-Eater drank the entire chocolate lake in one gulp, even though it was of the 90% cacao variety.

The demon kicked the boy. “Try again.”

The boy closed his eyes and wished for the Eater-Eater to suddenly become full and fall back into a peaceful slumber he would never wake from.

In response, the Eater-Eater moved on from eating people and their things to the fondant foundation of the world beneath them.

Not knowing what else to do with the demon rolling her eyes and the candy people begging him to do something useful, the boy started taunting the Eater-Eater. “Greedy-greedy!” the boy called through cupped hands. “Everyone, look how greedy-greedy the Eater-Eater is!”

The candy people paused their panic and analyzed the Eater-Eater who had started mowing down the sour sugar grass better than any lawn mower they had ever seen. They found themselves agreeing with the boy and started pointing and laughing at the Eater-Eater.

The boy laughed and pointed too as they all chanted how greedy the Eater-Eater was being, but then the candy people began calling the Eater-Eater other names that were so hurtful the boy could no longer join in with them.

“Wait! You’re going too far!” the boy tried telling the candy people, but they couldn’t hear him over their glee as they formed a tight circle around the Eater-Eater. “Hey! Stop! He’s starting to cry now. This isn’t fun anymore.”

Big, fat tears rolled from the Eater-Eater’s eyes, and what he had eaten from all the dream worlds fell with them. Sweet dreams and midnight snacking exploded out from his face, and the demon used the boy as a shield so that it all hit him with full force instead. The boy was drowning in the waves of the Eater-Eater’s longing and despair amongst the glucose, and he found himself regretting taunting the Eater-Eater as some of it ran up his nose. He’s only a kid, like me, he realized.

Though the Eater-Eater didn’t stop crying, he had disappeared. Whether he had sprinted over the horizon with his hands covering his face or hid behind a building, no one knew. Yet, the sound of his crying remained even as the candy people cheered, bolstering the boy on their shoulders.

“Is this what you wanted?” the boy yelled at the demon as he was celebrated for his heroic fight against the Eater-Eater.

The demon only smiled and walked away.

The boy suddenly awoke and found himself standing at the fridge, eating peanut butter by the spoonful.  

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Abby Short is an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina Honors College with a background in painting. With a passion for storytelling, she expanded from her painting major to combine visual art and short fiction to create experimental graphic novels that explore themes of origin and self-creation.