Thirsty - M. T. Anderson [14]
I am anxious because I don’t know what to do. Obviously Chet the Celestial Being wants me to act with these inhumans as if I were happy to become one of them. Otherwise, I won’t be able to slip in with Chet’s magic Arm. But there is no way that I am going to visit vampires alone. There is no way that I am going to pencil in on my social calendar a gruesome kegger of death. So I don’t know what to do, and I wish he’d come back and tell me.
I wonder how he expects me to just figure things out with nothing to go on. I’ve never fought with the Forces of Darkness before. That was a Cub Scout badge I seem to have missed.
In the nights, I cannot sleep. I lie in my bed, and I hear the rain drumming and drumming until the roof must be numb.
I can hear others moving about the hallways, and sometimes I can hear them in sleep. I lie awake on my bed and I can hear them all, almost down to their pulse.
I can hear my mother snoring. I can hear my father turn uneasily. And after my brother thinks we are all asleep, I can hear him get his secret magazines from where they’re hidden under his video equipment and use them.
But the worst is when I can hear no one. When there is no tread on the carpet in the hall, and I know I am alone.
When I was very small, there seemed to be a forbidden time after my parents went to sleep. It was fine when I lay awake and heard my parents talking softly down in the kitchen, or guffawing at sitcoms on the television. But after they went to bed, and the dishwasher stopped running and sighed, and the house was silent, it seemed like I had found a vast abandoned lot of night where no one was allowed, and I was staggering in that place alone, with walls that held me from all who slept.
Now I feel that again because I can’t sleep, and the same thoughts run again and again in my head.
I lie on my pillow one way, and when my cheek gets used to it, I turn the other way. I cannot sleep, and I think about that.
It is then that my thirst starts, in the dead hours.
I think: I am so thirsty. I wish I could go to sleep. If I don’t go to sleep, I will be sleepy tomorrow. I would sleep if I weren’t so thirsty. And these thoughts go on and on wheeling in circles and I get more and more desperate for something to break the silence.
Sometimes I get up and stare out the window. I stare out across the little lawn to the fence and then each moon-defined object there in the next yard: the plastic wading pool; the sun-bleached Big Wheel; the tangled apple tree.
And then I lift my eyes above the houses, above the comfortable roofs, and see the woods on the hills. And I sense then, in the way the moon drapes itself easily, obscenely over them all, that there is something wicked all around us, something staining the aluminum siding and the four-door sedans. There is something hiding behind it all, Tch’muchgar scheming, locked in darkness, and I pray to Chet the Celestial Being in my mind, if he can hear me, that he comes quickly so I no longer feel this danger in myself and out there on the hills.
And I lie in bed, turning this way and that. I think about how I got the curse. And when Chet will come. And what I should do.
Sometimes I can’t stand the thirst and go to the bathroom and have a glass of water. But the water is too thin. I scoop it into my mouth, suck hard as I can, but I can’t take in enough. I snap my teeth in midair. I clasp them and grind them and close my eyes. I want to hit something and feel flesh.
But I am standing still, my knees twitching in my pajamas. The thirst is upon me, so I am not in the mirror.
I sit on the bathroom floor, curled up in a ball. My arms are around my head as if someone were kicking me.
I can’t wait to have burned out of me this stupid thirst, this hunger that lies coiled and miserable in my throat and stomach like a tapeworm.
After a wakeful night, I am thankful for my reflection in silverware. It’s like silverware is what I’ve been waiting for all my life.
I walk downstairs and take real pride in the flash of my arm I see in the window in the front hall. I stop by the