Anyway, here's today's words:
“He’s from that Yo Gabba Gabba show. You saw it.”
Oscar raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“He’s the big orange guy with one eye. You didn’t notice him?”
Oscar shook his head. “Sorry, I wasn’t watching it that closely.”
“Well, that thing that was in Trevon’s bedroom was a lot like Muno. He wasn’t totally the same. Muno doesn’t have spikes all over him for one, they’re just bumps, but otherwise, it was really similar.”
“So, I got this gash from today’s equivalent to the Cookie Monster?”
Simi nodded.
“Holy shit, does that mean what I think it means, Simi?”
Simi nodded again.
When they made it to Seton Med Center, they told the doctor that his gash had come from when he had slipped and accidentally put his hand through a glass window. They cleaned and dressed his wound, and gave him six stitches. He was given a round of oral antibiotics, and directions for cleaning and changing his dressings over the next couple of weeks while it healed. Muno did not enter into the conversation at all.
VI
From that day forward, they watched Trevon very carefully as he slept. Some how, some way, all this stuff was coming from his mind while he slept, from his dreams. Everytime there had been an event, it had always ended when Trevon woke up. At first they were harmless things, because he had no experience with anything else. It was just colors before he was born, blobs of light when he was a newborn, soft round shapes as he grew a little more, and now, children’s television nightmares.
They didn’t know what caused it to happen though. It didn’t happen every night, or even often. There seemed to be months in between bouts, except for the one time when it had happened at naptime and bedtime of the same day. They needed to make sure that it didn’t happen again, because it had gotten dangerous. Maybe it wouldn’t be dangerous again, but Oscar was inclined to believe that it would only become more dangerous the more Trevon grew and learned about what dangers were out there in the world.
They couldn’t prevent him from sleeping though. Sleeping was as necessary as eating, drinking, breathing and the like. They just had to watch him, and wake him if anything happened as soon as possible. They had to get him to an age of reason, get through this until he was old enough that they could explain to him what was happening and work on ways to keep it from happening again. Otherwise, they’re little darling baby was a very dangerous person indeed.
Trevon’s crib moved back into their bedroom, and Oscar bought a bunch of air horns, and left them all around the house including one on each of their night stands. He assumed it would be a quick and easy way to wake Trevon up in a hurry. He tested it out that night, and it certainly worked. The baby was crying in seconds after he blasted the horn. He had hope that this was going to work, and it did for a while.
Oscar’s arm was completely healed, and the stitches removed before the next time one of Trevon’s dreams came true. They had banned him from TV after the incident with Muno in an attempt to restrict his apparitions to a more garden variety. It worked this first time at least. One Friday night in late January, Oscar was deep, deep asleep, when Simi shook him awake. He opened his eyes to find her standing next to the bed, bent over him. He blinked again and again, trying to shake the sleep from his eyes, and his head.
“What is it?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. She just stood up straight, and continued looking at him. As the sleep dropped away from him, he realized that something was wrong with Simi. Her face was wrong. It was soft, and lacking in detail, as if it were being seen through one of those pantyhose filters they always put over the lens in old black and white Joan Crawford and Katherine Hepburn movies and the like. And the eyes, they weren’t spaced right. The nose was larger than it should be. So was the mouth, that was much larger. Oscar’s breath stopped and his heart leaped into his throat.
He was filled with an intense revulsion that sent shivers down his spine.
He was looking at some sort of body snatchers version of his wife, a shape-shifter disguised as the love of his life.
“What are you?” he hissed, casting his eyes about for a weapon to use against this thing, this not-Simi. He slid away from it on the bed, and his hand, then his but fetched up against something. The thing he’d hit groaned, and rolled over. It was the real Simi.
And with that, his mind cleared enough to know what was happening. He grabbed the air horn, and blasted it straight in the apparition’s face. It was enough to ruffle its hair in the wind before it vanished with a yelp that came both from the crib and from Simi who was no longer sleeping next to him.
“Oscar?” Simi said, waking up, “was it a dream?”
“Yeah,” he said, standing up and going to the crib to pick up the crying baby. “It was horrible.”
END OF DAY TEN
2 comments:
Still with ya.
I took a break from reading the story for a couple of days, but I still thought about it. I figure that, except for light and dark, pain and hunger, the thing that probably occupies a baby's mind most of all is his mother . . . it's likely that he would conjure up visions of his mom when he sleeps too. How would they react to an angelic version of Mommy appearing, caring and comforting? And you must've thought of it too.
But dI do think you could expand on this a bit. The situation is just too weird not to milk a bit. If the room is dark, wouldn't he just assume it's his wife at first, and the horror of discovering it's a ghost-wife is pretty unique. Anyway, good stuff.
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