snapshot [childhood]

"Come on, kid." Dad would sigh, "Clean under your bed. Pull out everything and put it away."

From house to house, country to country, we always had the same conversation.   

"You’re messy!" Mom would comment.

My child-long defense:

"It’s just underneath the bed."

I knew it frustrated them because our house was always clean. Every night, all the dishes in the sink were cleared away, my hamster got new wood shavings in his cage, and the cat’s litter boxes were emptied out and refilled. Yet underneath my bed, there were always treasures. Vacuuming was dangerous if you went in blindly, and you would have to first pull back the bed skirt and lift everything off the ground to ensure doll hair not being torn off or marbles disappearing in the vacuum bag with a clattering scream.

Still, I liked storing things in the darkness beneath my mattress, I liked knowing that if something was taking up the emptiness, then fear or bad dreams couldn’t find a place to hide. They’d be forced into the open. I was always more afraid of the hidden than what I could stare down, straight in the eyes.

It was a typical humid summer in Pennsylvania, I was seven. The cornfields next to our house were soaking in the languid heat and were the kind of maze you could get lost in for days, tops yellowing in the sun, but in an evening rain they’d appear dark green, darker than the grass, than the trees. That was all you could see for miles if you looked past the road, miles and miles of fields until the sky blended with the corn in the horizon and everything else dropped off into singleness, into one space.

I felt heavy from the heat as I meandered down the hill toward a garden my mom kept nestled between a row of cherry trees and honeysuckle bushes. It felt like clay was sticking to my shoes. Behind me, the family cat trotted along, and the closer I got to the garden the more distinctly I could hear my parents’ voices, rising and falling in a pattern that felt familiar, safe. Mom was pulling stray weeds next to the potato plants and dad was crouching in front of her, examining the leaves and stalks for large garden spiders that always made her shriek. I sunk onto the grass next to the turned soil and played with the dirt, letting it slip between my fingers, feeling the weight of it leave my hands.

"Hey, look at this!" Dad called out to me. I slowly got to my feet and walked over to where he was holding apart two touching leaves from neighboring potato plants. Between the two stalks was a spider the size of my palm. "Look at its body." He said, and I could hear the wonder in his voice. I didn’t match the same amazement at the body that was speckled with yellow and green, its long legs spindly and reaching.

The evening air was sticky and sweet with the scent of honeysuckle, and as the sun faded and dipped, fireflies began to glow and I left the garden to follow their light. The sky was a milky golden, honey on the tips of clouds, dripping into the fields.

Mom and dad gathered our garden tools and left them in the shed by the house, but I wandered up to the peony bushes that lined our house to the west. Fireflies were everywhere, and I firmly believe that even the most skeptical would be taken aback after seeing their swarming bodies lighting up the sky. It was the part of night that I loved best, the way light still lingered as if hesitant and unwilling to say goodbye, but night hugged the shadows deeper and deeper into darkness. It was a handing over of something beautiful into another’s hands, an exchange every day, and this was the moment when it happened, when you could see it slip through the fingers.

A lonely bat swooped over my head and I bit back a scream, ducking to avoid its wings. I hurried down from the hill and stepped onto the porch just as several blue jays started flying down right above our cats heads. The birds yelled angrily at each other, scaring the unsuspecting felines until they slipped away into the dark. When the cats were far enough away, the jays seized their opportunity and started picking at the food until my dad came up behind them, waving his hands.

"Scared-y cats." He said, laughing at his own joke. Mom shook her head.

I walked inside, my clothes and skin feeling sticky from a layer of dirt and sweat. My brother who was eleven, five years older than myself, was sitting at the kitchen table, folding paper into intricate shapes and my mom leaned over him, remarking at his skill. He was doing it all one handed, his left resting limply against his stomach, tied up in a sling. Three days ago he had gotten attacked by a German Shepherd dog, and I could still remember mom’s voice when she told me to go to the car and stay there— it had sounded tight, like something pulled from ice. I remembered the way the hospital had smelled: uninviting, cold, the tip of my nose burning like it did during the winter. I remembered my brother’s silence, the dark blood, the total silence from his lips, his throat— not a sound. It seemed strange to me that he didn’t cry.

"He’s in shock," the doctors said. "The bite when straight to the bone."

I wasn’t sure what that meant, just remembered the way it sounded, the way it rolled over my tongue when I repeated what they had said. Bone-white. I walked over to the table and sat next to my brother. 
"Show me how." I begged. My brother glanced over to me, his pale green eyes studying my face.
"Okay." He said finally, patiently. 
Dad walked in and shook his head at me.

"Not now." He said firmly, pointing to my room. "You need to get everything from under your bead, I'm vacuuming tomorrow and I don't want to do it myself."

I slunk back to my room, the bright orange carpet soft beneath my feet. It was the original carpet, had been put into this house when it was built a long time ago and even though my mom hated it, it was why I had picked that room when my brother and I were given the choice, it seemed different than the usual and I liked that.

Lifting up the bed skirt, I reached as far as I could into the darkness beneath my bed. One by one I pulled out whatever I had collected and put it away.

That night I awoke and the bed sheets were heavy with humid heat and bad dreams, they clung to my skin. The empty space underneath my mattress felt like a carnivorous hole that could swallow me alive. Touching the carpet with both feet until I was standing, I took a deep breath and peered into the shadows. 

"There's nothing there," I whispered.