You’re scared by a stuffed, gray bear. The roll of its head when jostled is a little too human. Sometimes, when the light’s right (or wrong), you see lust in its reflective eyes. You attribute this to your own sensitivities, to your own habits, to the fact that you’re having difficulty sleeping at night, wondering at the rustles in the garden, the scratching in the walls, the discordant thumps on the wood floors upstairs.
You never see the bear actually move. One night you watch it. It’s on the bed beside the woman you sleep with. You know the woman’s moved because the bear leans a little bit, turns to you, thinks to itself, “It’s late. A wonderful time for wakefulness.”
When you were ten, a wasp stung you on the thumb. Your brother caught his foot on the divisions of the tracks. He pointed his bionic limb at you last Thanksgiving and said, “Remember when . . . ”
The old man in the house next door has threatened the postal worker. You stand at the window and watch him struggle to the curb on his bum knees just as the letter carrier has driven away. He pulls the papers out of his mailbox, rips them up, and tosses them onto the street where they are further scattered by occasional traffic.
The woman you sleep with waves goodbye. You say, “Have a good day at work.”
She says, “The insomnia’s killing you. Try to get some sleep.”
You think you might try. You go into the bedroom and find that the little gray bear isn’t on the bed. You hear the sharp but inexact sounds of clawing in the walls, mice maybe, perhaps a Carpenter Bee at work, which you know you can do nothing about. The weight in your feet almost hurts. Your shoulder blades feel like they’re trying to chop through thick, wet plaster.
You hear breathing. Something says, maybe from under the bed, “Remember when . . . ” The voice is glubby and slow and accusatory, like a sacramenting priest frustrated by love. It reminds you of the time your mother said, “The devil’s waiting for those who sin without remorse. If stones spoke, they would speak with the devil’s blue tongue.” You understood none of this, but at the sound of the voice a cold snake rushes up your back and bites you with on the neck.
You hear the voice again. “Remember when,” it says.
On the street, the old man is screaming at the letter carrier. The little gray bear is under the bed waiting for you to get down on your knees and look under. Something with claws and the remorselessness of a garden spider is working its way toward you under the floor. You back away. You don’t dare turn to run. Because you know that if you do that bear will rush out and snatch at your heels.
This is what scares you most: that you will never sleep again in this house. What’s more, the cracking, waking world makes absolute, perfect sense.
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