Reading and the Monsters

She was always in a hurry to get ready for bed. Brushing her teeth furiously for the full minute Mommy prescribed. It never failed to irritate my sister but she did it anyway. Then she would hop into bed a full hour before I did; every night with a different book in her hand. While I watched TV with our mother, my sister would read. No-one loved books as much as she did. When it was time to sleep Daddy would come in from outside where he spent the evenings drinking beer and watching the stars. He had a smile on his face every night when he came to turn out the lights because he knew what was coming. Alissa would say "Daddy one more chapter, please?" and Daddy always said it was alright. He knew that when he came back in ten minutes at least three more chapters would have passed under her hungry eyes. This happened three times every night, four on nights when she got close to the end of a book and needed more time to finish it. Daddy always let it slide for awhile.

Alissa had thousands of stories in her mind. We would lay in the dark and she would tell me tales of everything. There were complicated versions of fairy tales I only thought I knew before she opened my eyes and simple stories involving missing red bikes. She knew the biography of every classical musician she could find a book on. I loved to listen but I loved the game we played much more. After she filled my head with her tales, we made up a story together. I invented a monster to inhabit our room and Alissa created a "spell" to destroy the monster so it couldn't get us in our sleep. My favorite was the vampires that lived under our beds. While they were there we couldn't so much as let a finger stray over the edge of the bed or they would grab us and pull us under to suck our souls dry. Our vampires didn't take your blood; they feasted upon your "essence." When they were done with you, your eyes were black and cold. You would never know warmth or love and were lost to God forever. Alissa dealt with them expertly. She created a perfect hollow crystal sphere and we prayed the vampires into the crystal prisons, releasing the souls they had stolen. We then took the sphere and closed our eyes, picturing the cold, black space between the loving light of stars. We hurled the spheres as far from earth as we could possibly imagine, where they would spend eternity imprisoned in the cold crystal without knowing the light. Nothing could escape us. We always went to sleep knowing we were completely safe because Alissa's spell had saved us and we never woke up tired.