Janitor Franks still keeps the door unlocked at nights, understandably since he’s nearly in his nineties now. The door makes an insidious echo when it opens, a sound I’ve gladly avoided all these years.

Inside, the halls smell of cleaning solution almost knocks me out, the walls still consumed with school propaganda. They put you in this place for four years, maybe even longer if you’re especially stupid, and expect you to come out just fine.

All too familiar footsteps push me into the nearest unlocked room, I think I took math in this room. I use my phone flashlight to illuminate the dozens of posters staring back at me, ranging from suicide prevention to essentially “learning is fun” ideologies.

I wonder about my friends, the ones I prided myself on handpicking you be my family, the same family I let slip out of my hands.

I look around this room and I see pain, kids sit here everyday to be told it’s their “life” and their “everything” then have to leave it all behind.

One summer I thought it would be fun to sneak back here in the dead of night, no reason in particular other then to see what the place was like without everybody.

When I did, I learned a beast lived inside. I saw it’s eyes, eyes so mighty and powerful I wanted to cry, its breath hot. No one believed me. I nearly went insane trying to prove I didn’t imagine it, I lost friends and my reputation, but I didn’t care.

I nearly talked myself out of it, but the nightmares wouldn’t let me.

Those footsteps weren’t of a man, only a beast could have such a body to rumble the ground with its movements. I open the door, the room frozen in a state I remember well, as if nothing has ever changed. I squeeze my eyes shut, none of this feels real. I open them again, standing two feet away from the monster’s face.

“What are you?” I sobbed into my hands, no this time I was certain it was real.

It’s eyes moved on its side, huffing and sighing as it laid onto the ground.

My body trembling, I close my eyes again. This time when I open them the monster is gone. I sit on the floor, crying with the sunrise as students begin walking to school.

*Rod Sterling walks on set*

“Today my friends we learned about a man, so obsessed with his past he made up something for himself to hang onto for twenty years. A monster as the beast of change, who tormented him too his breaking point. All this, in the twilight zone”

lol