Red Clay Weather

Falling

—33 Falling —For Bradford Morrow You share a bed with your mother in the two-room tenement walkup, because you’re afraid to sleep on the living room sofa on account of the rats. You don’t wet the bed anymore. One evening you were sitting on her lap, maybe she was reading you a story, you always hated being read to, when a huge one ran right past the chair, you thought it was a big dust ball or some kind of indoor tumbleweed. “What’s that, Mommy?” you asked, and she answered, “That’s a rat.” There were more rats than people in that apartment building, or so your mother said. When you wake up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night you put on a pair of her high heels and bang a broom on the splintering wood floor to scare the rats away or at least warn them to get out of your way. You’ve counted the number of steps to the bathroom, counted the number of steps to the kitchen. They say parents shouldn’t let a child have anything to drink too close to bedtime or he’ll be getting up all night, but you’ve only got your mother. One night you wake up and there’s a vampire standing in the doorway without a door to close off the bedroom from the living room. You know that he’s a vampire because his skin glows blue-white like the fluorescent kitchen lights (his hair is a pure white crew cut, glowing too) and he’s sleek in a black suit and staring at you with his dead white eyes. You duck your head under the covers and when you’ve mustered up the courage to peek out again he’s disappeared. Your mother doesn’t believe you when you tell her about him and it makes you mad at her. Another night you look out the bars over the bedroom window and there’s a dinosaur staring in across the fire escape it could rip away with just one tug, a Tyrannosaurus rex with carnivorous intent studying the puny mammals huddled inside their den, but even that deep in the dark you suspect you might have conjured it up from watching too many Creature Feature movies on Channel 9 when you get home from school. There’s a new one every afternoon and you try to catch them all. Even when you watch something scary well before dark, you have nightmares later on, but you watch shepherd text-2.indd 33 11/22/10 2:07 PM —34 anyway. You close your eyes and it’s gone, stays gone when you open them again. When you move into the brand-new housing project, you have your own room and your own twin bed with Mickey Mouse sheets you got at Disney World, and there are no rats. You don’t have a twin, it takes you a while to get used to sleeping by yourself, you feel alone and vulnerable to all the things that wake up when you go to sleep. They don’t have names and they don’t have shapes, but if you leave the closet door open before you go to bed they can collect in that dark, and you can’t get up and close it once you’ve turned out the light. If you keep your whole body under the sheet nothing can hurt you, not even when you feel yourself falling, plummeting into a void that isn’t sleep, and you hear voices laughing and muttering and calling to each other. Your grandmother in Georgia says that’s when a witch is riding you, but she’s a senile old woman who wets herself sometimes and wears her gray wigs crooked. She thinks the pennies she doles out like little candies (not often enough) can actually buy anything these days. Where would a witch ride you to? As long as no part sticks out from under the sheet you’re safe, even when you wake up paralyzed, unable to move and always in the most vulnerable posture, you can’t gather your voice to cry for help and some mornings you can’t even breathe, you don’t know for how long except that it’s too long. Sometimes it’s just a game, you lie there perfectly still though you could change position if you wanted to, tap your...