Our theme for the month of October is “childhood fears.”
A true story.
The light of the TV glows in your eyes as you, immersed, behold the untextured 1995 CGI of the original Toy Story movie for the first time. A cowboy toy named Woody meets the new toy in town, the space ranger Buzz Lightyear, and chaos ensues. You might learn something about the harms of jealousy or self-centeredness as Woody struggles to maintain his position as favorite toy and repair his unwillingly broken reputation. But honestly, you aren’t paying attention to any of that. You follow the toys instead with growing unease into the CGI fluorescents at a decrepit gas station and garbage-strewn pizza truck. You’d prefer being a lost toy to being a toy of the psychotic neighbor boy, Sid, but the story doesn’t give you that choice, so you’re forced with Woody and Buzz into the house of he who is essentially a toy serial killer. Your skin tingles with the booming brass and cymbals and discordant strings as Sid shuts the door and bathes his bedroom in shadows.
Then, out from the depths of child hell—that is, the underside of Sid’s bed—creep the mutants.
You don’t really remember the rest of the story. It turns out the mutant toys that Sid dismembered and reassembled are actually kind, victimized toys despite their horrifying exteriors. They help Woody and Buzz make a narrow and harrowing escape back home, and the credits roll to the easygoing swing of Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” But the damage is done. Did you watch the movie in the afternoon or evening? It doesn’t matter. You have to go to bed eventually.
You do so in your family’s RV. The single room is a narrow hallway with the door in one corner beyond the kitchenette, and the beds filling the opposite end. You’re at the table with your parents and two siblings when someone points at the window, black with night in the rural countryside, and gasps a warning. “A monster! It’s coming for us! Hide!”
You only catch a glimpse of long, glistening steel legs in the moonlight before scrambling, along with everyone else, under whatever piece of furniture you can find. The room falls silent, still as a held breath, until your dad whispers, “Oh no.”
What now?
“We didn’t lock the door.”
Horror fills the silence as the clanging of the metal-limbed creature grows louder in the yard. Steel spikes click on the RV stairs, the creature climbing to the door. Mama knows what must be done and darts out from her spot under the kitchen table to lock the door.
But it’s too late.
Her arm is still outstretched when the door cracks slowly open, the screen door rattling, and the cold night air whispers your doom. All you can see, tucked beneath the farthest back bed, is the glint of surgical steel on a single spider leg. It clicks onto the linoleum floor, followed by another, and another, until the entire creature stands in front of Mama with jagged pincers open. The monster, once pale cherub, now turned demon with hair shorn to black spikes and only one baby-doll eye, considers its victim with innocent lips upturned. You want to scream for Mama to run, but where is there to go?
The spider-cherub does what all monsters do. It eats your mother.
How visceral and surreal, the horror that follows. Daddy leaps out and cries, “No!” in his grief, and then he, too, is in the path of the beast. Your older brother leaps out next, his distress overwhelming his logic to keep hidden under the cabinet. Then your younger brother follows suit.
The ruination of your life proceeds as clockwork. You, the silent observer, are unable to look away from the demon. Its one electric-blue eye bobs open and closed, the other socket empty and unseeing. Its round pale cheeks and gleeful curved lips enact savagery. Its legs and claws do not stay clean, not by the time it’s done with everyone else and there is only it and you, tucked into the dark, back corner. You always were the best at hide-and-seek.
There is one good thing about this night, though, and that is your helpful fear-processing brain. Your body, in its dream-state, has decided you’ve had too much terror for one night and had better join Pooh Bear and his friends for a party in the Hundred Acre Wood for the remainder of your REM time. The scene switches so abruptly, like flicking to the next channel, that you are no fun at all at the party, frozen stiff among the fluffy celebrating animals.
You wake on top of your bed, not huddled under it, with the morning sun beaming into your face. You blink at your bedroom ceiling. You don’t watch Toy Story again for a long time and thankfully, the spider baby doesn’t come back in the sequels.
Emilyn Shortridge (’25) spent her Calvin years studying English linguistics, Asian studies, and ministry leadership, and intends to finish her Asian studies program in Chiba, Japan, in 2026. When at home in Plymouth, Michigan, she thrives anywhere near fantasy novels, houseplants, hot tea, or her calico cat, Genie, but she plans to live and learn in many cultures before deciding which corner of the world needs her most.
