I was walking home from school with a friend; someone I've known for a while and who I always walk with. The road was long and sometimes there was no real sidewalk, only a dirt path cut through the fields at the side of the road by other children who has come this way. The air was moist the way it gets before a really terrible and cold rain.
We were talking about something silly like a kid I saw in the locker room, how this one teacher needs to be put in an asylum, and other topics that school kids get at after school. But it was late. The sun wasn't up and it was that time after twilight has left where the sky can't really believe the sun isn't there anymore and still holds traces of goldy light. When we came to my house we stood outside the gate, and I rested my hand on top of the old wooden post that held the latch for the yard.
This wasn't the house I grew up in, no, but it was the house I grew up in at the same time. It was wooden and tall and covered in splinters. All of the wood had the look to it that old wood gets if you leave it in the sun for days and days and days and it's not the treated and polished wood of furniture. The grass hadn't been mowed but that was quite usual. The tall weeds of almost wheat looking plants sprouted nearly as tall as the fence.
"Go in, come one. It can't be that bad," my friend said. I shook my head and bit my lip, suddenly aware of how I looked and where I was standing. I looked down at my sneakers, right at the edge of the dirt path that leads to my front door. They were dirty and well used and looked like they had trot the Earth. Sometimes I feel as if I have walked around the world and found nothing, nothing at all besides more paths of old cement and sections where it's just a dirt trail cut in by everyone else who has come this way.
"You don't understand," I said, knowing that my friend was a simple thing and couldn't (or wouldn't) comprehend the types of monsters that didn't live inside story books and movies. I shook my head and we both walked in. We talked in the kitchen, in lowered tones but not whispers. I perceived a disturbance upstairs and my friend vanished, now, this was a dream so I thought nothing of it. I set my bag down and it was night. I began to walk through the house to find out the source of the problem.
For the longest moment I treaded past a cabinet that was not a cabinet but a remnant of another dream. Inside the cabinet opened into a wide and white or gray tunnel, as wide as a subway tunnel and as brightly lit and sterile as a hospital. Inside lurks a monster. It's not alive, however, it is not dead. It is a sort of beast made of up humans. It has bled into the tunnel and has become a part of it. But it is not friendly in the least. If you're in there, it takes parts of you and rightly so for trespassing into its territory. I cannot explain how terrifying this thing is unless I describe the dream it comes from and somehow find the words that I am at a loss for. But to say that it could possibly be one of my deepest fears is to begin.
I walked down a hallway, upstairs and came into a room with a sleeping girl in it. She was young. Six or eight. At the time I thought she was a sibling. A dream-sister but I knew then, in the back of my mind as fact, that she was simply a younger incarnation of myself. She had the perfect little girl's room, though. It was pink and purple and white and filled with fancy and fluff. She as sleeping. I kissed her forehead and pleaded that she stay that way.
Then I was in a little boy's room. My brother's. His room was full of dinosaurs and toys and it felt so ordinary and boyish. He was awake. His little lips pursed into a look of concern and tiredness. I helped him lay back down and tucked him in. I stood, feeling relaxed and refreshed and left the room. Across the hall, I entered a door into my parents bedroom, but expanded, white and large. The small entry way into the open space bathroom was a tunnel, similar to the Monster In White but smaller. I perceived that it could be a child Monster In White (one in the making).
Inside my parents were fighting. My father had his hand raised and his voice was wide and bellowing and without edges, as he is. My mum was all teeth and heaving chest. She leaned towards him, her grim face looked almost like a twisted grin. I got the impression that while she hated the way she felt; while she hated her situation she loved the fight. They were attacking each other with words and postures.
Until my father raised his arm and meant to hit my mum. I stepped in and he struck me instead. He seemed surprised but not concerned. He tried to get me to leave; to believe it not my place to step in. I attacked him with my own words and griefs. All my emotions at being neglected or emotionally abused came out and it was not as crippling as it was when I was awake. In my dream it was possible for me to scream and shout and show him how much I hurt without it becoming too much and beginning to weep.
He began to yell back and behind me my mum was yelling as well. She was attacking him on her behalf and I him on mine and my 'siblings' and he was hurting us both. He raised his arm again and said that I did not belong here and that I had no right to say these things to him. I stood tall, and proud and when his hand came down I kicked him. Hard. Right between his legs and yelled that I had every right to be here and that I had more right to say what I was saying than he had right to breath.
Suddenly on each arm I was holding my younger 'sister' and my little brother. My father was crouched over, tending to his wounds. My mum was cawing in victory behind me. I wasn't afraid and it felt so freeing. I wasn't afraid to speak and when I did speak I didn't choke and when I went to hit my hit didn't go wide, as it normally does in my dreams. I felt elated. Then he stood and his face was white than it should be and he was smaller than he should be and his hair was blonder instead of ginger and he bared his teeth and my familiar gape tooth stood before me and he said "Be careful who you look to" and I was injured. So bad. My heart felt as if a fist that had been inside it out-stretched from inside of me and injured me beyond repair.
I was dying, metaphorically, from the inside. The two children in my arms clung to me but it wasn't easy and they weren't heavy but they suddenly dampened me. I couldn't move, or act and I began to sink to my knees, the weight of my own soul too much to bare.
My father stood and looked down at me with grief for himself. My mum still stood proud and behind her my brother, this one his proper age stood with her. Both of them were glaring down at me as if they had just defeated Goliath and they, David, where now free to live happily ever after.
My insides where turning white and the children on my sides were becoming my appendages. We were a freak of nature and we hated ourselves and everyone else because they made us this way. I was entirely helpless as to who I was and I shrunk back and crouched in the tunnel that stood between my parents room and the doorless way into their bathroom. I hid in the white tunnel and felt myself changing from my heart out. Tearing and and freezing so cold it burned and now I understood the Monster In White because it would be terrible to become just a way towards something. To just be a means to your own end. My hips didn't snap but shifted, like putting weight on a sleeping foot and then I was more like a spider than a human. My limbs arching up above me before going to meet the ground.
I was contortioning along the walls and not screaming because what would be the point? I was a monster and nobody saves monsters.
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