Blog 4

Notes: I Have to focus on the message of my story. I have an idea but need to flesh it out more.

Paradigm Shift

My room has always been much smaller than I would have preferred it to be. Moving into what was once our guest room on the first floor from my even smaller nursery on the second would grant me, I thought, a bit more space and freedom from the rest of my family. Independence – or as close to it as a 13 year old could hope for. I no longer had to worry about being caught doing my homework at all hours of the night by my parents because they saw a light was on, acting like a beacon to signal my constant procrastination.  I could listen to my music as loudly as I wanted without having my sister pound on the wall separating our rooms because I was distracting her from her sticker collecting adventures. Clearly more important than whatever I had going on. If only I had a wall to pound on every time she decided to belt out and butcher whatever top 40 tune was on the radio during family road trips. I was finally free(ish) from the shackles of close-quarter-living and I felt like I could breath a little easier. The new room looked huge, until I got all my furniture and belongings into it. Sweet lord, I had a lot of stuff. I made a mental note to keep things organized. Probably should have written that down.

           

The Incident

The days of sleeping with a nightlight had long since passed so the pitch-darkness I woke up to didn’t feel frightening at all. What was a little unnerving, however, was the figure of a man I saw standing in the corner of my little room. It wasn’t threatening, but it was not someone I felt as though I could have a cup of coffee with either. He just stood there and suddenly I realized that I was sitting up in bed. I didn’t remember getting up like that but there I sat. Almost as though I had woken up that way. I knew for a fact that I was indeed awake. People think differently in dreams and this was not a dream. I stared at the silhouette and even though I couldn’t distinguish any facial features whatsoever, I felt as though he was staring right back. No, I didn’t feel it. I knew it. Silence fell and it was just the two of us now. I started to pick up on a slight shuddering. It wasn’t coming from me - I stayed perfectly still - but my room was most definitely starting to vibrate. Not as though there was an earthquake, but more akin to a shaky video camera recording. None of my possessions seemed to be affected by it even while it continued to escalate and grow more violent. It got to the point where my entire room became a large blur and I couldn’t make out a single thing, except for the shadow of a man standing in the corner staring at me. He stood perfectly still.

Up to this point there had been no sound whatsoever. That was quickly broken with what I could only describe as the shrill and ear-splitting shrieking of a woman. It not only filled my ears but my entire body. I could feel the sound piercing through my very core and, as though my senses had finally caught up to the situation I found myself in, I was suddenly filled with an unbridled terror. I lay back down in my bed and assumed a fetal position while the chaos continued to go on around me. I closed my eyes – tight enough that they actually started to hurt – and just waited. My heart beat so brutally in my chest that I thought it would surly stop at any minute. I knew he was still watching me. Seconds crawled by and then the screaming finally stopped only to be replaced by the sound of glass shattering. A lot of glass.

Silence fell once again but I dared not open my eyes. I continued to lie there for sometime until an extreme and fatigue overcame my mind and body and I fell back to sleep. 

The little girl with bells on

I remember sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen many years before she had passed away. She was cooking one Cuban dish or another absentmindedly as she listened in to the conversation my mother and me were having. The kindness of strangers was the main topic of our discussion, which was brought on by a news report of a good Samarian that had just been shown on the otherwise ridiculous Hispanic broadcasting network. My mother started recalling when she was a child living back in the homeland and that on several occasions, she would have episodes of sleepwalking. She recounted that on more than one night, she would find herself out in the middle of the street and that strangers who happened to be driving by would find her and escort her back into the house and alert my grandparents. It got to the point where they had to attach little bells onto my mother’s arms to keep her from wandering out into the night alone.