After her husband left for work, she stared out her window at her garden with nothing to do. The garden had an oak tree she’d planted as a little girl. She sits at the window for a long time, carrying on a conversation with the tree in her head, when she hears a rumbling noise approaching. 

At the base of the tree, the ground trembled before giving way to a little green monster. The monster had human-like eyes and claws, and she trembled as it knocked on her front door. It clicked the lock open and entered the house and she wished she had thought ahead and ran to the kitchen to grab a knife to cut its nose off. As if it had read her mind, it smiled and told her its nose grows back like a lizard’s tail. 

When she wondered if it was going to eat her, the monster replied aloud that it meant no harm, and that it wanted to propose because it loved her. It said that others had tried to stop them but they couldn’t wait any longer and so they crawled up to the surface to meet her. 

She thought to herself that this was rude and presumptuous and the monster grew sad. Angrily, she talked to the monster in her head, and said it was an ugly little monster until the creature shrank and began to cry tears of red juice. She painted pictures in her mind of the cruel things she would do to the monster — tying it down with thick wires, ripping its scales out with pliers, cutting deep into its skin with a hot knife — making the monster writhe in pain. 

The monster begs her to stop and said it only has love for her, and she tells it she never asked for its presence in her home and continued to torment it in her mind until it dissolved into nothingness.