David,
If you're going to read this, you can't tell.
You can't tell anyone. Not a single soul.
Especially not Mom.
Please.
I already know I'm crazy.
I chew on the end of my pen and look at the words. Then I scribble over them again and again, tangling the words in black lines, so hard the paper tears. I rip the page out, crumple it and kick it off the end of my bed to be devoured by the mess in my room. Maybe by the monsters themselves.
I blink and look to the side. I thought something was there. But no. If it was, it's gone. Except...
Light. Or maybe darkness. It's hard to tell. Maybe it's both. Or neither.
I move my eyes back and forth and this spot of something or nothing moves with them, always at the side of my sight.
It looks like a left-over flash, like an annoying camera took my picture too many times. When I blink, there are smudges on my vision. Black spots? Or blank spots? Their the opposite of the flash, the negative, like the camera turned my eyeballs into un-developed film.
I blink-blink-blink. Blink some more, trying to scrub the reverse-flashes off my retina.
I don't even remember what caused the flashes. It had to have been a flash, right? Darkness can't leave a negative of itself on my eyes.
The spots don't budge.
I scoot off the bed and stand up. The carpet is layered with my things, like a geological measuring of time. (Here are some beat up textbooks three layers down. That must be the end-of-the-school-year era.) I skip-step-hop-trip trying not to skewer my foot on a fork. My butt lands on the humidifier, and I hear a crack.
I push stuff aside to make a safety zone for sitting and blink-blink-blink some more.
Why am I seeing spots?
For that matter, what did I just get off the bed for? Maybe I was looking for something, but finding it in here would take an archeological excavation. I look around, trying to remember. But there's a roadblock in my memory. I try to see around it, but all the other memories honk at me to stay in my lane. This sort of thing happens to me all the time. Talking to my friend mid-sentence and Justin Jersey walks by and my brain detours and that's the end of that thought. Good-bye.
Anything de-rails me. Chocolate. The color purple. Spiders (though not for the same reason as JJ). Any song by Ray Sway, especially "Little Blue Heart." And, apparently, broken humidifiers.
I have no idea what I was doing ten seconds ago. Well, make that more like thirty seconds to a minute with all the brain-wringing I'm doing.
And still those spots. They should have faded. But no.
I rub my eyes, squeeze them shut. Open them. Blink-blink-blink.
Still there. The spots aren't black. Aren't white. They're just there. Or rather, my vision is just not there. Like someone took an eraser to my eyes.
So I sit, fold up my legs in lotus pose, and breathe. This is something my therapist said to do when I feel stressed. I told her I would never go to school or eat or even pee ever again in my whole life if I had to do lotus pose every time I felt stressed. It seems like it should be stupid, this whole meditation thing. But - I would never tell anyone this - it's kind of fun.
I feel all important and together, like a queen ruling her cluttered kingdom. Sometimes I imagine myself all decked out in crown and glittering dress, sitting there, breathing and being.
"Katherine!" Mom yells up the stairs, because of course she can't be bothered to actually walk up them. "Time for therapy!"
The spell is broken. I'm not a queen. I'm not important. I'm just me. Strange little cluttered me with broken pencils in my hair and monsters under my bed.
Oh, and the voices. Let's not forget the voices.
The monsters only come out when all the lights are off.
It's like a little kid, I know, which is why I pretended to grow out of it when I was twelve. A little late, but you should have seen how relieved mom was when I said I'd finally checked under the bed in the middle of the night and there wasn’t anything there, and I was sorry for being a scaredy-cat for so long. Moms like to think their daughters aren't crazy.
Daughters like to think they're not crazy too.
But sometimes, that's just not true.
I don't tell the therapist about the monsters or voices anymore either. I told her I made them up. To get attention. Now, five years later, we talk about my "depression" and my "anxiety disorder," and how it's important that I don't become anorexic.
Mom bought me a "Happy Light 4000" when the therapist said it sounded like I might be struggling with "seasonal affective disorder." (I think they made up that name just so they could abbreviate it S.A.D. and make people who have it feel even worse.) The happy light is supposed to imitate sunshine and cheer me up. I crawl under my bed before the sun goes down and plug it in down there on nights when I can't stand to listen to the monsters. But the more nights I get rid of them, the angrier they get when they finally come back. And they always come back. The happy light bulb doesn't last forever.
And like I said, the voices in my head always want to talk to them.
I fiddle with a pen and draw a big gushy heart on the back of my hand while my therapist talks. But the spots are still getting in the way of seeing. None of them are right in the center of my vision, so I can see straight ahead, but my peripheral vision is severely limited. Like a horse with blinders on. I want them gone.
Like, right now.
"We haven't talked about your brother in a long time," the therapist says.
I can never remember their names. This is - what? - the tenth one I've seen.
I draw a mouth on the heart.
"Last time we talked you said you didn't think closure was possible for something like this. Is that still how you feel?"
I trade the blue pen for a black one and fill in the mouth with sharp pointy teeth.
I'm sure she sees what I'm doing, but she doesn't comment. She told mom my drawings were a way for me to "express my repressed emotions."
Whatever.
"I think that these feelings inside you, this depression, this anxiety, everything like that, can all be traced back to this incident. If we were to finally resolve it-"
"I'm seeing these spots," I say. "In my vision. They won't go away. It's like after seeing a camera flash, but it's been going on for maybe a couple hours now."
The therapist taps her pen against her other hand. "Spots?"
I nod. "They won't go away. They're kind of driving me crazy."
"I'm not a doctor, Katherine. I'm sorry, but I can only counsel you on emotional issues, not physical ones. It could very well be a symptom of stress, but I have to advise you to see a qualified physician. You understand?"
I nod.
"Have you been doing your meditation morning and night?"
I shrug and go back to doodling carnivorous hearts down my wrist. "So, it should go away soon? Like, if I keep doing my meditation? It's just a temporary thing?"
"Have you told your mother about it?"
"Not yet. It just happened right before we came over. But I'll let her know." I glance at the clock. "Looks like our times up. Thanks." I cap the pen and slide it back to her over the desk.
Wherever the monster come from, I can't tell. There isn't a hole or anything under my bed leading to monster kingdom. When I'm brave enough to lift the dust ruffle, it just looks like the underside of anyone's bed. But that doesn't mean the monsters aren't real.
I can hear them, feel them, smell them under the bed. Everything but see them.
When the rocking and thumping and mulch-smell all get to be too much, and the voices are shrieking with laughter, sometimes I whirl and rip up the dust-ruffle, hanging my head over the side of the bed. But there's nothing there. Except laughter.
Sticky-wet laughter.
"What did you talk about in therapy today?" Mom asks.
I shrug.
Isn't the point of therapy that you can talk to some stranger about stuff you specifically do not want to talk to your Mom about?
I can see her eyeing the blue hearts on my hand at a red light.
I pull out my phone and google "blind spots in my vision." The first thing that comes up is cataracts, but I'm pretty sure that's just what old people get. I scroll. After "macular degeneration," whatever that is, there is stuff about "optic neuritis."
Why do doctors make everything sound so weird and serious?
Next is migraines. I know what those are only because Mom gets them every other week. I click the link.
Sometimes, I read, when under extreme stress, people can experience an ocular migraine. This may or may not be accompanied by other symptoms, such as headaches or sensitivity to light. Ocular migraines occur when blood vessels in the brain constrict, cutting off or thinning the blood supply to part of your brain that controls vision and causing partial visual loss.
I might have a headache in my eyes. After watching Mom gulp pills, turn off all the lights, and moan in her room, I would rather take blind spots than pain any day.
We pass the alley and I see a little black kitten next to our dumpster. She's the blackest cat I've ever seen. Not a speck of color on her. I watch her lick her paw and rub it behind her ear.
"Can I get a cat?" I ask.
Mom frowns. "Why?"
"For therapy. Lots of people have therapy cats."
"We're not getting a cat."
I frown as well.
We pull into the driveway, and I unbuckle and bolt before Mom pulls into the garage.
Tonight I sit in a puddle of cleared out clutter listening to Ray Sway and doodling on my pajama pants with a sharpie. The pants are pink with red bows printed on them. There must be a million little bows on these pants. A present from my grandma last Christmas Eve. My sharpie is black and I meticulously turn each of the red bows into a black star, drawing over it in thick lines.
The visual migraine, if that it indeed what it is, is steadily getting worse. Looking at one bow/star, I can't see the bow/star to the left of it. Closing my left eye helps, since it's only in one eye, but I can only keep my eye squinched shut for so long before I feel a real headache coming on and open it.
When I finish all the bows I can get to while still wearing the pants, I cap the sharpie and look at my dust-ruffle.
The voices in my head are relatively quiet for 10pm. They're always silent during daylight hours, like they're nocturnal and only wake up in the late evening. They've kept me up all night before, shrieking and laughing and whispering to the monsters under the bed. Most of the time I can't understand what they're saying, which is probably good.
I can feel little whispers at the back of my mind, like an itch. I can't quite make them out, and I don't try. I watch the dust-ruffle for a long time, an old worn-out pink frilly thing I've had on my bed since elementary school. When I was little, I thought that the dust-ruffle would keep the monsters inside, keep them trapped. Maybe I still think that, since I haven't gotten rid of it. And it's not exactly cute.
I hear a thump from under the bed and a wet squelch. The monsters are arriving. I don't know where they go during the day. Maybe just to sleep. But, like the voices, they only come out to play at night. I don't know what they are or where they came from or why they insist on camping out under my bed night after night for almost ten years now. But I know they're there.
Using the tip of the sharpie, I lift the edge of the dust-ruffle up, bracing against being grabbed again. Is that what they're waiting for? To get me? To drag me under the bed and... what? Eat me? Turn me into one of them? Free the monsters from where they're locked up inside my skull?
Ray Sway sings in the background, "You are the oxygen I need. You are every breath I used to breathe. Without you, my blood turns blue."
I wonder if the voices will leave me alone when I move out, go to college, get a different bed. I've lived in this house, this room, since I was seven. Maybe they've always haunted this one room. Maybe it's not me, just them.
When I was little, and the monsters got so wild they would shake the bed, I'd count to ten and then leap to the floor, heart ricocheting, and race to my parents room. Sleeping on their floor, the monsters couldn't get me. But the voices were still there. The voices are always there, in my head, no matter where I am. Nine or ten at night, they'll wake up and start whispering, murmuring, laughing. By around midnight or one, they've elevated the noise so that I can't hear my own thoughts let alone anyone else talking to me.
Now, I peer into the darkness beneath my bed trying to see. I can hear the voices and the monsters garbling words at each other. Laughing with each other.
Am I really crazy? Is this all in my head? Am I some psycho who's brain went haywire and invented this whole awful situation?
I scan the corners, daring myself to stick my hand under there and see what happens.
I blink.
There is something there.
Something under my bed.
I drop the dust ruffle and jump back, knocking into the broken humidifier so that it pokes me in the back and I yelp.
I am crazy. There is nothing under my bed. I should be locked up in a mental institution. I should be on a handful of pills. I shouldn't be staring at hallucinations under my bed.
The chorus comes on and I close my eyes to listen to Ray Sway's voice as he sings, "Don't let me die here in the dark! Come back and restart my little blue heart!" His voice is like fluffy white pancakes with a whole bottle of syrup poured on top.
He helps me feel a little more sane.
I lay down on my stomach, kicking mounds of dirty clothes I forgot I owned and a moldy bowl out of the way. Then I suck in my breath and use the sharpie to lift the dust ruffle again.
I squeak.
There isn't just something. There are lots of somethings.
Wriggling, squirming, like a knot of twisted octopus legs.
The voices in my head shriek in delight, so loud I can't hear Ray Sway anymore.
I don't look away, like I am watching a horror movie and I know some stupid girl is about to get chainsawed but I have to watch just in case it doesn't happen. Just in case this isn't real.
I can only see parts of them. I blink, and then close my right eye.
It's the blind spots on my vision. That's how I can see them. Somehow, in the blank gaps in my vision, I can see the monsters, like the real world got erased, and the monster world opened up.
I poke the edge of the dust ruffle underneath my mattress so that the dark underneath of my bed is exposed without me holding the pink frills up.
The monster arms squirm and make sucking noises as the separate and twist back together. I slide away from them on my stomach.
What do I do now? Do I try to kill them? Talk to them? Tell my therapist about them?
I shudder. Sometimes therapists and what they can do are more intimidating than monsters.
"It's Wednesday," Mom says while I'm eating chocolate cheerios for breakfast.
I forgot. It's so easy to forget the days of the week during summer vacation. I chew louder.
"Do you want to come with me?" Mom asks. "You haven't been in a while."
"I already have plans. One of my friends invited me over this morning," I lie.
"That's nice. Which friend?"
"Maddison."
Mom puts the dishes from the counter in the dishwasher. "What are you two doing this morning?" She's suspicious.
I drink my milk to give me time to think. "She has a date tonight and she wants me to help her buy an outfit."
"That sounds fun," says Mom. "Will you start the dishwasher after you put your dishes in?"
"Sure."
When I hear the garage door close after her, I get on my tennis shoes and pop in my earbuds. I do have plans. Just not with Maddison.
As I jog down the street, I pause at the alley with the dumpsters, but I don't see the black kitten.
It takes half an hour by bus to get to Happy Sun Ln. I don't know who names streets around here. They're all weird and painfully optimistic.
From there I walk. It's only a couple blocks, but my feet go slower and slower the closer I get. I turn up the volume on Ray Sway's newest single "Forgotten Feathers" but my shirt still feels like it's choking me.
I stop dead at the corner like I waked into a brick wall. There it is. There is our old house.
The feelings press against me and I want to punch them. I haven't seen this house in ten years, but that yellow paint is still the same. That brick wall against the driveway. Those cracked cement steps. I colored the whole driveway in chalk one day and it started to rain before I was done.
I try to take a deep breath but it gets stuck on its way to my lungs. If there was ever a time for lotus pose, this is it. I take a step back.
Whispering. In my head. The monsters have woken up and it's only noon.
The smell of the trees, the look of the neighbor's perfectly mowed lawn, the upstairs window. It all crashes down on me. I am suffocating. I am drowning.
I close my eyes and listen to Ray Sway, but I can't hear him over my own heartbeat and the monsters that are chattering and cackling.
When I open my eyes, I see them.
Tentacles disappearing around corners. Eyeballs peeking through sidewalk cracks. Claws gripping tree branches.
The sun is shining and the monsters are here.
They are coming for me, scuttling from one bush to another, slinking along a white picket fence, slurping out of the storm drain.
I run.
The bus isn't at the bus stop, so I just keep running until I've outrun the monsters and the memories.
The spots are getting worse. Some of them have gotten big enough to overlap each other. More and more of the real world is being obscured.
I don't sleep that night. I sit with my back against the wall and a table knife in one hand. It was the best weapon I could find.
The monsters stay under the bed, but they are restless. I keep the dust ruffle down, but long wet arms reach out and feel around for me before sliding back. I want to vomit.
When the voices get rowdy, I bang my head against the wall to shut them up. It works. But only for a minute.
Mom had a migraine and took a sleeping pill before she went to bed. Good thing or I would wake her up.
Around 3am when the noise is so unbearable I can't sleep even if I want to, I consider climbing under the bed and letting them take me. I wonder how it would feel if they grabbed me and pulled me in. Would they absorb me? Strangle me? How soon would Mom find my body? Would there even be a body to find?
I wonder which is better, being psycho and not letting anyone know, or being sane but having everyone think you're crazy. I think I might have the worst of both worlds.
As the voices and the monsters get louder than a rock concert, I realize that maybe the voices aren't just voices at all. Maybe they are monsters too. Maybe I don't have monsters just living in my room, maybe I have them living inside me.
"I want to see him," I tell my mom.
It's morning. I'm wearing the half red bow, half black star pajama pants again and a baggy t-shirt. The kitchen is clean and bright and after sitting in the dark all night long staring at something that should not exist for eight hours, I feel like hiding under something myself.
Mom looks up from making orange juice. Like, literally making it. Herself. Not from frozen concentrate, but from actual oranges. She does this about once a week. I think it's her final attempt at having the close-knit, cocoa and marshmallow family she's always wanted. Instead she got my brother and me.
"What, sweetie?"
"David. I want to see him."
Mom drops the orange half she's holding. All the juice has already been squeezed out, so it doesn't make much of a mess, but she busies herself cleaning it up anyway.
"I can go by myself if you don't want to go today. I know you just went yesterday."
"No, no, I can take you. I can drive you."
"I know I have therapy, but-"
"I'll give them a call and reschedule."
I take a glass of the orange juice and sip it. It's too acidic for my stomach in the morning, but it's the closest I can manage to saying thank you.
We pull into the parking lot and mom runs over an apple. The ground is littered with them. The trees in front of us are dripping with them. As I watch, one falls right off a branch and rolls until it hits the curb. I get out, pick it up, and wipe it off on my shirt.
Inside, a lady at a desk asks if we have David's visiting code. Mom gives it to her. The lady beeps us through a door.
Mom leads me down a hallway, around a corner, down another hallway, through a door.
And there he is. There is my brother. In a small clean white room, sitting on a tidy bed, fiddling with a wooden 3-D puzzle. There is my brother. Locked up and crazy.
Mom glances back and forth between the two of us.
"I'll give you a minute to talk," she says and closes the door behind her on the way out.
I hold out the apple. "I picked this up for you," I say.
He sets the puzzle down on the ledge of the windowsill. "You came."
"Yeah." I set the apple down next to the 3-D puzzle. I hope he's allowed to have it. He can't have shoes with laces or blinds with the string to pull because he might hang himself, you know. But I can't think what anyone could do with an apple. Bash himself over the head, I guess. I pick the apple back up and test it with my fingers for bashing firmness.
"What's up?" he says.
I shrug. I don't know why I came. Maybe I wanted to tell him about the monsters - one crazy person to another - but now in his fluorescent cube room with a plexiglass window in the door it seems ridiculous. If I say anything, I'll get my own one of these rooms.
I wonder if these beds have monsters underneath them.
"How's school?" he asks.
"Good." It's a lie. Why do people even ask that question? "It's summer. How's- Um. You know... Life?" Why did I ask that question?
He laughs, and he sounds so much like my sane brother that it sets me on edge. People in places like this shouldn't be so normal. If he was always crazy, it might be easier to come talk to him. I could be prepared. But when he's like is, I never know when he's going to flip and turn into a psycho.
"Life's great!" he says. "I love this place!" He stretches out his arms and looks around the room with a big smile like he's welcoming me to his palace.
There is nothing on the walls. There is nothing on the carpet. There is nothing but him and the bedspread on the bed. I wonder if they take his pillow away during the day or if he just doesn't get one. Maybe someone suffocated themselves with it.
Maybe he tried to suffocate himself.
"Well," I say. "I just wanted to come by and say hi. Haven't seen you in a while." I wish I hadn't said that. He's locked up for goodness sake. It's my own fault that I haven't seen him.
"You want to play a game?" he asks.
I look around because there are no board games or card games or anything in here.
"Um..."
He laughs again. "They're out in the main room."
"Oh. That's alright. I just came by to say hi." I turn back to the door. I can see mom out the plexiglass, talking with my brother's psychiatrist, Tim. "It was good to see you."
"Katherine," he says.
I freeze. This isn't his sane brother voice. This is something else. Soft and desperate like a faded old blanket.
"Are the monsters still bothering you?" he asks.
I don't turn around. I wonder if there are cameras in this room. Maybe mom put him up to this. She might not mind having two of us in here to visit between 10 and 4 on weekdays. Maybe the drugs would wash the monsters out of my head, leak them out of my ears.
"I know you told mom they don't, but-"
I twist the doorknob and fling open the door.
Mom jumps.
"See you later!" I say to my brother.
"Everything alright?" mom asks.
"Yep, it's super. Ready to go?"
I wait in the main room while Mom talks with David. Probably interrogating him about what I said.
I squirm in the plastic chair. This place doesn't have many memories for me. I haven't been here much. But something about it presses on my brain, makes it crack like an egg. I watch memories leak out and spill on the floor.
I try to close my brain back up, but it's too late. They've already escaped.
David is on the floor. There isn't blood. There should be blood. He should be lying in a pool of it. I think about adding it to the memory because it would feel more real, but no. No blood. Just an empty bottle. No pills left inside.
David screams at me, and when I see his eyes he is not my brother any more. He is someone else. Something else. I think my brother has become a monster. Maybe he always was one and I never noticed before.
David crying as the medics load him into the ambulance. "Mom! Please! I didn't-"
"Ready to go?"
I jump.
I am going to die.
Either the monsters are going to eat me, or my brain is going to suffocate with lack of sleep.
My shoes are easy to spot in the mess because they're always on top. I lace them up, grab a hoodie to throw on over my pajama top and black star pajama pants, then creak my bedroom door open. Mom should be asleep, but she didn't have any migraines today so it's not a drug-induced sleep. And she's not a heavy sleeper. I tiptoe down the hall and through the kitchen to the front door. The light on the microwave reads 2:30.
I inch the dead bolt on the front door out of its place and turn the door handle in slow motion. When it clicks open, I slip through the crack and ease it closed. I'm out.
This isn't any safer than being in my room, but at least here there's fresh air to breathe and the moon as a witness. I walk. I don't have a destination in mind. I just need to move.
Halfway down the block, something in the alley dumpster clanks. I freeze. Only hooligans and people with monsters eating away at their brains are up at this hour. It clanks again like an empty bottle against the metal. There's shuffling. I back away. Is someone seriously dumpster diving?
Something small and dark leaps out of the dumpster and I jump in surprise. It's black and I can see it's fangs. A monster.
As I'm turning to run, my brain finishes processing what I saw. Not a monster. A cat. A kitten. I stumble a few steps, and turn. The kitten is puffed up, hissing and spitting at the dumpster. Something - several somethings - slither over the lid of the bin. Teeth and small eyes stick out of the tentacles. My throat closes up.
The kitten backs away, making a deep throated noise. I look from the kitten to the monster and back. The tentacles lunge and the kitten jumps, claws out. But the tentacles are bigger and the kitten never stood a chance. The tiny thing hisses and claws and bites, trying to kill the thing that is strangling it.
I lunge forward. I know I'm insane and these things will kill me and eat me too. But this is the first living thing that can see what I see, that has tried to fight back. There is no way I am letting it go. I grab a tentacle and yank, feeling its teeth cut into my palms. I tug and squeeze, but its no use. The kitten is going quiet.
A feeling wells up inside me. I haven't felt anything this strongly in months. Maybe years. It bubbles up until it erupts from my mouth. I let out a scream - part battle cry, part despair. I slam the tentacle I'm holding against the dumpster and kick it again and again and again letting this new found rage boil inside me, make me superhuman. I kick and scream even after the tentacle goes limp, even after the kitten drops to the ground, even after the tentacle breaks away from the rest and hangs limp and oozing in my hand. When the screaming and the kicking have sapped every particle of energy inside me, I drop the severed piece of monster and stumble back. The kitten isn't moving.
I kneel knew to it and slide my hands under its head and tiny hips, scooping it into my arms. Its black fur is matted and dirty, but when I lean my ear softly against its side, I can feel a flutter of heartbeats.
Stroking her, I feel my own heartbeat settle. I'm not crazy. This kitten knows it.
Cradling her, I make my way back home. I don’t know what I’ll tell my mom, but I need this cat. I need her more than medication or sleep or even meditation.
I feel the purring first, vibrating my arm that's holding her. When I peek at her, I see her eyes have blinked open. She regards me with perfectly round pupils. Her eyes are a bright green.
"Hey," I say. "Hey little girl. Its alright. The monster is gone." She seems to understand because the purring grows louder. She head buts my arm and then starts licking it - little scratchy kitty kisses. "You're welcome." She crawls up my arm and nuzzles her head between my ear and my shoulder, burying herself in my hair.
She's small and she needs protecting. There are monsters out there. Heaven knows I know. Her purring settles into my bones and makes me relax in a way I haven’t in years. For the first time, I think I might survive.
Dedicated to sweet little Violet
2004-2018
