Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26027963-20150213180541/@comment-25148755-20150214032409

Got your note on my talk page. Hope you don't mind but I went ahead and reworked it to fix some grammatical and flow issues. It's posted below...you can use as much or as little of it as you like.

It had been five days since the elf last moved, and for five days its dead, black eyes had been staring at me from the top of my bookcase. The "Elf On the Shelf," my mom called it.

​I used to almost like the little doll, until two things happened. First, my mom started using it as a pincushion. It looked weird with all those needles poking through its stomach, like it was about to have surgery but once the anesthetic needles were in the doctors just gave up and left them there. That was nothing compared to when it started moving, though.

It felt like it was always following me. Sometimes, when I went into the bathroom, I wouldn't see it anywhere until I came back out. Then it would be sitting on the nearest shelf, staring at me. I thought it was my mom at first, but when I told her to stop moving the elf, she denied ever touching it. We lived alone in our house. My dad is in the Airforce and gone all the time, so that's when I knew: there was something wrong with that doll.

​That was the first time it had ever come into my room, though, and had been there ever since. For four nights I had tried to ignore it and go to sleep without any success. Finally I guess my exhaustion must have been too much because on the fifth night, I was rudely awakened by our dog Daisy barking around two in the morning. I lay there and heard my mother scold her, the sound of the back screen slamming as she kicked her outside, my mother stumbling back to bed. Everything was quiet again. That's when I felt something else on my pillow. I rolled over only to see the demented-elf thing sitting next to my head, staring at me. I opened my mouth to scream, but all that came out was an inaudible croak.

​Slowly it raised up onto its little elf legs, its motions jerky like it was a marionette controlled by invisible strings. Whether it was fear, or some magic of the elf, I felt myself held tight, completely unable to move.

"Do you know how I can do this?" its voice growled in a demonic rumble. "Do you know how we are powered? Do you even know how we are made?" It took a needle from its stomach and slowly, agonizingly, began to sew my eyes shut before lowering its head to my ear. “From the souls of dead children." I blacked out from the pain.

​Now I'm here, writing my story in my little elf body, waiting for Billy to come home from school. Apparently I'm a gift. Ha. I'll give him a gift all right, one so he'll never feel a thing. Don't worry, sooner or later I'll get to give you that gift too. Sleep tight.