Darryl lay in his bed in the darkness,
doing everything in his power not fall asleep. He clenched and unclenched his
toes, hoping the movement would keep him awake. Then he did the same thing with
his fists. He dug his fingernails deeply into his palms so that it hurt. It
still wasn’t working. He could feel the lids of his eyes growing heavier with
each passing moment. He opened his eyes as wide as he could and stared up at
the dark, empty ceiling. His eyes began to burn as invisible specs of dust
landed on his eyeballs. He fought the urge to close his eyes, but they began to
water, and he was soon forced to blink. A tear trickled down the side of his
face.
None of physical tricks that Darryl had
used in the past were working so he knew what he had to do. He hated it, but he
knew he had to. Darryl began replaying baseball games that he’d played in park
in his head. To ease himself into it, Darryl started by thinking about positive
moments, moments when he got a hit or made a nice catch or throw. But
remembering the good moments did nothing to keep him awake. In fact, they only
seemed to speed up his drift into unconsciousness, so Darryl took the next
step. He started picturing every mistake that he had ever made on the baseball
field in his mind.
He recalled the ridicule when he struck
out, the cat calls when he booted a ground ball.
Over and over again, he let himself
relive the moment when he had dropped an easy fly ball, allowing the other team
to score three runs and win the game. His stomach turned but, on that night,
even the bad memories weren’t doing the job. No matter what Darryl did, his
mind kept drifting towards emptiness.
Darryl wondered if he’d been awake long
enough already. He sat up in his bed and listened. He turned the side of his
head towards the open bedroom door and listened.
Beneath the sounds of the television,
Darryl could still faintly hear the sound of his mother shuffling around the
living room. She was still awake. He needed her to be asleep.
He didn’t dare get out of bed until she
was asleep. Desperate, Darryl decided to take drastic measures. He began to
imagine bodies, dead bodies. He imagined them piling up atop a wheelbarrow
being pushed slowly down a dirt road. The bodies were piled up so high that
Darryl couldn’t even make out the face of the man behind them, pushing the
wheelbarrow. The image in his head was so vivid that he could smell the stench
rising off the rotting corpses. He could hear the sound of the
flies buzzing around them. His heart began to race. He could feel sweat rise on
his palms. He endured. He didn’t even try to wrench the image from his head. It
was working. The image haunted him. He knew that, now that the image was in his
head, he was stuck with it. He had no power over it any more. Darryl followed
the image of the cart in his mind. Every so often someone would come out of house
along the side of the dirt road and throw another body on to the heap.
Darryl could see each of the bodies so
clearly. Their skin was almost a translucent but still had a strange blue hue.
The bodies were covered in boils and bruises. He saw their faces, void of
expression, their eyes glassy and empty; their jaws hanging slack beneath their
noses. Time passed. Real time passed. Darryl didn’t know how much time, but he
knew that he was still awake. Sleep wasn’t going to come to him for a long time
now.
Darryl sat up in his bed again. He could
still here the sound of the voices coming from the television, but the sound of
his mother’s shuffling was gone. It worked. At least, it seemed to work. Even
as young as Darryl was, however, he wasn’t the type to take a thing like that
for granted. Before he made his next move, he had to see for himself that his
mother was truly asleep. He pulled his sheets aside and swung his legs over the
side of his bed. Before he’d gotten into bed, Darryl had placed a pair of socks
on his night stand. He grabbed them now and slipped them on to his feet. He
used the socks to muffle the sound of his footsteps. He dropped his newly sock
adorned feet onto the linoleum floor and stoop up.
It wasn’t a long walk down the hallway
from Darryl’s bedroom to the living room. During the daytime Darryl didn’t even
notice the distance. During the night, however, in the darkness, trying to be
silent, the hallway looked long and ominous. The darkness stretched it out like
a hallway in a funhouse. At the far end of the hallway, Darryl could see the
blue-gray shadows born from the flickering light of the television as the
shadows danced along the walls. It made the walls appear to be alive. Darryl
put one hand against the wall behind him and stepped slowly down the hallway
towards the moving shadows. He placed each foot on the floor gently before
putting any weight on it, making sure no footstep squeaked. All the while, he
listened. He listened to see if he could hear any sound other than the laughter
echoing from the audience of whatever late-night talk show his mother watched
as she fell asleep.
Slowly, Darryl found
himself near the end of the hallway. He leaned his back against the wall so
that the living room was behind him. He took a deep breath. Then, with only one
eye at first, he leaned into the emptiness of the doorway and peeked into the
living room. At first all he could see was moving light. The light from the
television was so much brighter. It flashed around the room, changing colors and
intensity with each new second. It took a moment for Darryl’s eyes to adjust.
When his eyes finished adjusting to the flickering light, he could see his
mother lying with her eyes closed in the middle of the pull-out sofa. Ever
since his father left them—so for almost as long as Darryl could remember—his
mother had fallen asleep with the television on. At some point in the middle of
the night she would wake up and turn it off. She used to sleep in Darryl’s
room. Darryl used to sleep on the sofa. Then, when Darryl turned ten years old,
his mother gave him his own room and she began to sleep on the pull-out. It was
his birthday present. His mother said that a growing boy needed to have some
privacy. Even though his mother still wouldn’t let him close his door after
nine o’clock at night, it was by far the best present Darryl had ever gotten.
Darryl stared at his mother. Even
sleeping, there was no peace in her face. Her eyes were closed tight, and her
mouth was turned down in an unpleasant scowl. Her jaw was clenched, and Darryl
could see her grinding her teeth together. Darryl traced his eyes down to her
chest. He watched her chest rise and fall with each breath. He counted the
number of seconds for each rise and fall. Three seconds—that’s what he was
comfortable with. He knew from experience that if each breath took three
seconds, that meant his mother was sound asleep. He counted. Inhale. One, two.
Exhale. Three. He was satisfied.
Now he could get the work.
The walk back to his room was quicker,
but Darryl still took each step carefully, trying not to make any noise. When
Darryl got to his room, he took a flashlight out of the drawer in his
nightstand and flicked it on. He immediately flashed the light into each dark
corner of his room to make sure that he was alone. Then he walked over to his
closet door and slowly opened it. He pushed aside the shirts that were hanging
in the closet and made his way towards the back corner. He shined the light on
a pair of old sneakers that he had resting on the top of a shoebox. He had
drawn an outline of the soles of the sneakers on the cardboard lid of the
shoebox so that he could tell if anyone had moved the sneakers.
They were still in place.
He reached down and picked the shoes off the shoebox and placed them behind him.
Then, the beam of the flashlight still his only source of light, Darryl sat
down on the closet floor and leaned up against the wall. He lifted the lid off
the shoebox. Inside was another, older pair of sneakers. He stuck his fingers
inside the left shoe and grabbed the list. He pulled out a roll of paper from
an old, desktop calculator.
He’d found the roll years earlier when he
and his friend Benny had snuck into the old abandoned middle school down at the
end of Benny’s block. They climbed in through a broken basement window and ran
around inside for hours breaking glass and exploring old lockers. Darryl saw
the ancient looking calculator in one of the classrooms with the roll of paper
hanging from the back. The paper had yellowed at its edges over time.
Without knowing why, he took the roll,
shoving it in his pocket and not even telling Benny about it. He brought it
home and did nothing with it for months. Then one day he needed it and he knew
exactly why he’d taken it and what he was meant to do with it.
Darryl reached inside the other sneaker
and pulled out a thick pencil. He took his flashlight and propped it up between
his shoulder and his cheek. He slid the fingers of his left hand into the
center of the roll of paper and slowly began pulling the end of the paper with
his right hand. The paper slid out from the scroll, revealing the markings that
Darryl had made over time. They were words. Some of the words were crossed off
but many remained untouched. Darryl kept unrolling the scroll into he got to
empty space. He had unrolled nearly four feet of paper. Then, in the empty
space, beneath the word Zombies Darryl began to write.
He stopped for only a second to determine the exact word or words that he
should write. It was important that he write the right thing. His history book
had used a number of different names—the bubonic plague, the black plague. The one
he chose was Black Death, being sure to capitalize the first letters of each
word. He felt a chill drift down his spine as he wrote the words.
After writing the words, Darryl stayed
hunched in the corner of his closet, the yellow beam from the flashlight barely
cutting through the darkness. Darryl took a few moments to look at the words he
had just written. He remembered the illustrations from his history book. He
remembered his teacher’s descriptions. His classmates had giggled and joked.
Darryl didn’t think it was funny. Black Death. Darryl looked at the words one
more time. Satisfied, Darryl began to slowly roll his list of fears back up,
scanning the list as he went. This was the most important part
of the ritual. Every time Darryl added a new fear to the list, he looked at all
of his old fears to see if there were any that he could cross off the list. His
eyes scanned past the names of monsters like zombies,
werewolves and vampires. He
glanced at the names of kids from his school, older kids and bullies. His eyes
moved over the names of animals: lions, alligators, snakes, rats, bats. The
word dogs appeared on the list, but Darryl had crossed
it off. He liked dogs now. Now he knew how to put his hand out so that they
could smell him before he pet them. The further up the list Darryl got the
greater the frequency of crossed off words. Darryl looked at each crossed off
word with pride. He was no longer afraid of water after learning how to swim at
the local pool. Darryl’s friend Elton had made the list when he first moved
into the neighborhood because Elton was so big, but then they became friends
when they were seated next to each other in science class. Some words that
Darryl had crossed off were added again. Sometimes conquered fears returned.
The word Dad appeared on the list at least eight
times. It was the first word Darryl ever put on the list. He started the list
after his father came to their house drunk one night. Darryl had watched
helplessly as his father slapped his mother in the face with his open hand.
That night, as Darryl hid in his closet in fear, he started the list. The word Mom appeared on the list five times. It was the second word
Darryl ever added. All five of the Moms were currently
crossed out. The same couldn’t be said for the most recently added Dad. The night Darryl added Black Death, he didn’t find any words that he could cross off. He
hadn’t conquered any new fears. Slowly, Darryl made it to the beginning of the
list. He could see the words Dad and Mom at the very
top, both crossed off there. His hand writing was so much better now.
Then Darryl looked at the third word on
the list, right below the words Dad and Mom with their lines running through them. The third word
was the highest word on the list that Darryl had never crossed off. It stood
out among all the other crossed off words, surrounded by fears that Darryl had
overcome long ago. Darryl didn’t need to think about whether or not to he
should cross the word off this time. He knew that he was still afraid.
He looked at the word. He had capitalized
it without even really thinking about it when he wrote it. The word was God. It had been written so long ago that Darryl barely
recognized the child’s handwriting that it was written in. Darryl remembered
writing it though. He remembered the fear. After staring at the word for what
could have been a few seconds but also could have been an
eternity, Darryl finished rolling up the scroll. He placed it back inside the
right sneaker and placed the pencil back inside the left. He put the lid back
on the shoebox and carefully lined up the second pair of sneakers inside the
trace marks on top of the lid. Then he turned off the flashlight and stepped
quietly back out of the closet. Slowly, gently, Darryl climbed back into bed.
It took Darryl a long time before he was
able to fall asleep.
