A Monster Inside

Each minute plots against me and the line between sanity and it’s antonym subtly ceases to be so clear and I find myself tightly grasping the covers, using them as a filter to block the sound of my breath, but despite my best efforts to hear nothing,  I notice that my heart has become audible, and it pounds and pounds and pounds and it marches a terrifying march and I imagine heavy footsteps moving to a rhythm or rather a morbid dance, yes a dance,  one foot after the other beautifully dancing towards death, and suddenly I feel comfort, but quickly I realize in realizing that I felt comfort that I no longer do feel comfort because the little day dream is over; I’m no longer in la la land. I’m back in this bed staring at my digital clock, waiting and listening.



Thump thump, thump thump, thump thump. My eyes have been open so long now that they’re beginning to water, but this is also partially out of fear- a forty four year old baby.



Suddenly a sharp crack pops from the ceiling, and just like that, I’m convinced that someone is in my house. I hold my breath waiting for another noise, but nothing. Behind my eyes a vivid picture forms. Yes, I see the scene, but I see it as a single frame. It’s a man. He’s wearing dark clothes, but I can’t see his face because he is standing in the doorway and the moonlight behind him is blinding me from those kinds of details. I mostly see a silhouette,  but somehow I know it’s a man, and he’s standing in the doorway with one foot inside; the one that pressed down on the cold hardwood floor allowing it to let out the crack, and now he’s motionless, or at least I assume he is because no other noise has followed. He must be wondering if the disturbance was loud enough to wake me. I wonder if he’s scared. But this is what I don’t understand. What other reason could this man have to enter a house as shitty as mine, unless to kill me. Why would he freeze like this? Why wouldn’t he just run down here and kill me already? The only explanation I can wrap my mind around is that he must not be a man simply looking for a kill, but that he must lust for some other sort of pleasure in my death.  Maybe he wants to see the fear in my eyes as I awake from a warm dream to realize that my fate has suddenly taken a sharp turn and that the rest of my short lived life will be lived in panic and fear. Maybe if I’m awake, his whole plan is destroyed. I’ve seen this on television, some sort of documentary interviewing cannibal killers. They say the whole scenario gives them a feeling similar to what god must feel. These men’s’ eyes are so cold, really cold, and they tell such detailed stories about the way they did what they did and how the meat tasted, and you just stare at their eyes, but they never change. How can a man eat another man? 



Thump thump, thump thump, thump thump. I’m gripping the covers even tighter now, but my breath has become so heavy that the blankets can no longer be used as a muffler. Suddenly my mind shifts and I think, maybe this is to my benefit, the noise I mean. Who’s to say that he isn’t just as frightened as me? Yes that’s right, maybe he’s thinking that he has entered the house of a fellow monster, a fellow crazed lunatic and that I could be waiting, lurking in the sheet of darkness just behind the corner, my favorite butchers knife steady in hand, my mind craving and my mouth watering for his savory blood. Little does he know that the house he entered may as well have had a sign above the door reading, Coward Inside, in bright neon letters.