Day 1,126

I don't know why it never occurred to me that monsters died too, after all they aren't the invulnerable monsters born of our darkest nightmares like most seem to think. They are born from living, breathing, bleeding beings just like we all are and just like us they all die in the end. The only major difference is that they are never mourned for by us, nor are we by them. They are our fears as much as we are theirs only their stories are never told.

When my granddad's porch was being renovated was when we found its corpse, all shrivelled and rotting but still clearly a bogeyman. There's no way anyone can mistake those nine-knuckled hands, black teeth for anything else, certainly not when it had such a prominent mouth on its upper chest.

Grandma reckons it probably crawled under there during the summer, trying to avoid the heat and probably dying of dehydration or too much exposure to sunlight. We didn't realise it died with its children until we tried to move it and found their plump little bodies still clinging on tightly.

Grandma reckoned they died much later, their parent's body had shielded them and possibly suffocated them. They were so much fresher than the parent's, maybe even hours old. We may never know for sure how long they were under there, vocal chords too undeveloped to cry for help, maybe not even understanding that they would die down there.

All three of them were burned alongside the garden waste.