Actually a good story, I'd like to see it continued.
I absolutely LOVED this!! Definitely going to fuel some nighttime comfort ♡
With a bit time to spare I took a look at this story and found it a bit funny and kind of clever.
The upside of your writing here on AFF is that you have improved your craft a lot with years of practice. This becomes very obvious when looking at your older stuff like this story. The setup with the reader making guesses about what there is below the bed is smart and the finishing line of the story is pure gold.
What is missing from making this a candidate into a JayDee's toplist is IMHO more explicit fantasies. If you could give us more details I think it would work even better than it does now. Another suggestion is that she did successfully masturbate in the shower...what about showing her making an attempt to masturbate in the bed but halfway through the fantasy she becomes disturbed about thinking her father put the monster there to hurt her. I think this could work as a buildup for successful masturbation in the shower and also even greater foreshadowing that her father intend to hurt her.
No biggie if you don't want revise this, but I think there is lots of potential here. I would love to see what you could do with this concept these days.
I really like something this story touches on, which is how we as humans deal with things that frighten us. There's the impulse to run from it, the impulse to kill it, but then there's the other route. If you can't escape something, you often find yourself attempting to humanize it, even befriend it. If I'm out walking and am suddenly approached by a dog I don't know, which could be hostile, I have a marked tendency to start talking to it in a friendly way, hoping to adjust its mood and make it friendly. That bit you describe where Joan starts rolling a present under the bed at Christmas is the best example of this sort of coping mechanism.
Granted, not all of us start fantasizing about the thing we're afraid of, but I guess that's a coping mechanism all its own!
The description of the demon is pretty cool too. I love you describe it as having "too many teeth and not enough jawbones," which is wonderfully suggestive of multiple designs, like maybe it has no jawbones and a lamprey-like mouth, or maybe its lower jaw splits or something. The mention of the suppurating lesions on its arm is a creepy detail as well, as is the stitched skin, a sort of Frankenstein's monster look.
And, of course, that ending. Looks like befriending that which frightens you is a valid strategy!
Talk about having friends in low places. :) The monster shredding the demon was a satisfying ending. Now we can only hope The Evil Dad drops by to see what went wrong...
I liked this short. I like your style: you have an extensive vocabulary. It's always fun to stumble over a word in a story that sends me to my trusty dictionary. (No, that really wasn't sarcasm. I like my dictionary. It smells good. Is that a weird thing to say?) You don't drag things out, which I also like, and this story actually has a strangely beautiful ending. Made sense, I feel like I should have seen it coming, but I didn't and I loved that.
-Clover