Sharing Nightmares

Robyn Marie || Cross My Heart

Cross My Heart by prose-punk

The clock on my wall watches me. Its mustache twitches left, right, left, right, left, right in a motion that Aunt Ada says is impossible and I should stop telling lies. But it's not a lie. The clock does watch me; a raised wart on the wallpaper, its pale face hashed—I, II, III, IIII—like the scratches on my arms. The clock face is always shiny. Pearlized, Aunt Ada says. But I think it is a fat man who sweats a lot, and right now he frowns at me, mustache steepled protectively around the VI of his sour mouth. I slip a peek over my shoulder again and again, because the one time I don't look, he'll jump off the wall to stop what I'm doing.

The box springs peep when my knees shift, pushing the bed pillows into the gullet between the mattress and the headboard. Every now and again, the headboard rubs the wall, leaving a streak of varnish-crayon on the floral wallpaper, but that's not why the clock-man frowns at me. My fingers set him ticking wrong—forever stuck in a clink and a clonkkkkkkkkk. Twist, twist, pick, pick, pull, he watches me pinch at the nail in the wall. Then, I glare at him.

His mustache tells the time: 5:35

Sunset glows in the window, dowsing my room orange, warming the tip of the corner table to its right, coloring my writing desk beneath the clock-man. Shadows appear where the light won't reach and, suddenly, the tables grow four more legs apiece. The lampshade funnels buttery light onto the wall beside the window curtains. A picture hangs above, spotlighted; a little beachcomber in grandma-pants (bloomers Aunt Ada calls them) picking shells off the shore. I pick things too, and what I want is hammered above my bed.

5:35.

Night is coming.

I pull harder. Give it to me. The edge of the flat head nail turns, rolling in the raw crease forming on the thumb pad. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.

My thoughts talk with the clock-man.

Beyond the gingham curtains, the peaked roof of the house next door fills the only window my bedroom has. The peak is triangular, a Jack-O-Lantern's eye—one in a hundred that guard the neighborhood tonight behind bucktooth grins. We don't have a pumpkin, though. Uncle Fred refuses to waste money feeding squirrels for free.

I think, maybe, squirrels deserve a party, too.

Yellow cake and lacy frosting. Candles burn like tiny torches for tiny heroes.

Plaster snow trickles from the hole in the wallpaper as I finally get the nail free. The wooden cross I'm after tilts and swings upside down, stuck on a second nail at its base. Seeing it the wrong way round creeps me out, and I want to apologize to God or something. I check the clock-man again, half expecting him to waddle up behind me to whack me with a Bible.

But it's not the clock-man that puts the Fear into me—

Aunt Ada doesn't believe in knocking.

My bedroom door opens, and I jerk the cross from the wall, peeling paper with it. The last nail tumbles into the dark gap behind my bed, and I drop the other one after it, scrambling to bury almost every inch of me under the quilt, pressing the glossy, wood cross to my flat chest out of sight. My burrow into the bedlinen releases an odd, musky smell that tickles my nose. Salty sweat and faint pee and the dry stink of baking powder biscuits in the oven.

Aunt Ada smells like Chanel N°5.

"Is this how you treat BooBoo?" she chides, bending like a squat teapot to pluck a stuffed animal off the floor. She waves the bunny in my direction like I'm three and not thirteen—