There Are Monsters Under My Bed (I Wouldn’t Look in the Closet Either).

*Note: This is my half of a collaboration I worked on with another fellow author. I did not include hers here, being that the first half is her work and it is not mine to share. This is my own half about fear in the dark.

The static seeps into my brain.

And it drains itself into my eardrums unwarranted as my throat

fills with choke.

And these demons become the birth of white noise settling themselves into

ribcages and opened veins,

a silence so deafening it devours all my nerve endings

in traumatic renditions of airplane crashes

and flesh burning at the stake.

And I am damned. I am damned.

And I can hear the static singeing

and engulfing and consuming

in muffled hums so paralyzing,

maggots bury themselves into my skin.

And I am laughing.

And I am laughing,

until I am crying

and my body is an avalanche of earthquakes —

tremors of terror —

and there is nothing in the darkness except:

fizzzzzz tschhhhhhh....

fizzzzzz tschhhhhh...

fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzztschhhhhhhhhhh...

And I am crumbling. I am crumbling and

my eyes are fixated on an endless abyss

as my eyelids lock in place, stiff

and solid in their fixating

on the projector playing in my mind —

a waltz of haunts and grotesque ghosts

mocking,

as my fingernails are scraping blood tracks into my thighs.

But I cannot wake up, I cannot wake up,

I cannot wake because this shell is alive.

This body is a night terror of silenced screams,

a twilight zone of tumult as my tongue remains glued

to the roof of a mouth unable to move,

and of cries unable to be heard because they are drowned to their death

in the never ending, inescapable nightmare sounds of:

fizzzzzz tschhhhhhh....

fizzzzzz tschhhhhh...

fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzztschhhhhhhhhhh...

The static seeps into my brain.

And I am paralyzed within my own coffin

of a frozen body.

And my screams are dissipated into an I fathomable darkness.

Light on.

Light off.

Light on.

Light off.

Light on.

Light off.

Off.