The First

It gets colder as I’m carried in my mother’s delicate arms down the long narrow hall.  My heart starts to race as we approach the door, and my mind pleads with my two year old mouth to find the maturity to express my fear and dire need to be put anywhere but in that room.  My mother mistakes my hysterical crying and tantrum flailing as an expression of rebellion against napping, and grows frustrated with my antics.  We enter the room and I refuse to look around, I just keep trying to make eye contact in the hopes that she will read through the wide eyed terror, to the anagram of words that she could then use to form a coherent sentence; DO NOT LEAVE ME IN HERE.  She gently places me in the crib, hushes my choking sobs, and wishes me sweet dreams.  I watch as she slowly pulls the door shut and as the room submits ever more to the darkness, my final attempt at a scream is violently silenced by my panic, and all I can do is still my breathing as much as possible, until I resemble I fish out of water, my breaths labored and infrequent, and I lay as still as I possibly can, no blanket to protect me, all the while I’m staring intently at the thin slice of light that illuminates the gap between the floor and the door. 

My flesh prickles with energy, like static shocks from stockinged feet shuffling across a carpeted floor, electrifying the thin space beneath the skin.  My little hands grasp the mattress as I feel my insides become hollow, and morph into a vessel for the frigid afterlife.  I feel him; young, in his late twenties, maybe early thirties, and he paces himself as he approaches the crib…silently, calmly.  I won’t look at him and I can sense the annoyance that my refusal causes him.  I can feel it all, see it all, and it is a violation of my personal space.  Every thought and feeling he had…the pain he felt in life, all the anger and hate that festered and grew more putrid with every unhappy year, and the anticipation he felt for his death, for the pleasure it would bring him, and the failure in realizing he went about things the wrong way…it’s all there, taking me over.  I remain transfixed on the light…the comforting, rescuing light that mocks me.  He stands next to the crib, his cold legs right up against the rails, frosting my scalp, and as he lowers his icy hand to stroke my hair, I succumb to the fear…the saving light

extinguished.

E.A. O'Connell