Short Scary Stories

It's there, In the dark.

You're right to be scared of the dark.

You know that feeling you get when the covers are pulled up to your face? When you're lying in the dark with your eyes open but too afraid to look? That feeling that makes you a child again, holding your breath while you say to yourself, If I don't look, maybe it'll go away?

If you muster your courage to stare back at the watcher in the dark, it'll be gone...

...if you're lucky.

I'm not.

Let me tell you about when my life fell apart.

It was 1982.

I was in the kitchen. Mom said that there were no such things as monsters. I can hear it, now, clear as day.

"You're too old for that crap." She spoke over her shoulder from the stove.

I'd been having nightmares and she couldn't keep waking up in the middle of the night. Work started early and ended late.

"That's kids' stuff, Johnnie." I saw the dark circles under her eyes and the way her face sagged with fatigue. She was working double shifts to make ends meet and it was wearing her thin as a coin passed through too many hands.

"I need to rest," she said. She wasn't telling me as much as she was pleading, and even as a kid I could hear the difference. That made my part in it worse.

The pan rattled across the burner and I could smell the sausages browning. It was Sunday, so breakfast was more than Wonder bread and peanut butter.

Gran-dad sat in the kitchen, too. He was drinking his coffee from an off-white mug with a chipped rim.

He had a cigarette in his other hand, and when he wasn't taking a drag, his hand was on the table next to his GPCs like he was guarding them. Gran-dad called them Good People's Cigarettes.

His nose was almost as red as the Marlboros he couldn't afford once he'd been laid off. He coughed, his face blue with the effort. But as soon as he could breathe again, the cigarette was back in his mouth.

Mom dropped two links on my plate from the sizzling pan.

"When I was your age, I was already working odd jobs to help out."

I didn't know what to say so I kept my mouth shut.

"And I wasn't keeping my folks up half the night."

Gran-dad rescued me. "He knows, Tammy. Give it a rest."

He looked at me, and I could see that he was asking for assurance. I was just a kid, but also somehow the fulcrum on which the family's troubles pivoted. Maybe that's not entirely true, but it seemed that way to me: I was a mouth to feed, a knot keeping the ends from meeting. Those dark circles, that tired sag that pulled at her mouth-one way or another, life was using Mom up. By stealing her sleep, I was tightening its grip.

Shame's heavy, and it bent me just then.

Gran-dad noticed me sag in my chair. "Johnnie's just shook up. He'll be alright."

He didn't look so sure, but he gave me a nod anyway.

"Right?"

"Yeah." I knew I was lying.

So did Mom, but she kept her peace and dropped two dollops of scrambled egg next to the links on my plate.

High-cotton. That's what Gran-dad said about sausage and eggs. I didn't feel it, though, not that morning.

He used a fork to cut the links into bits and to mix everything together. I usually liked mine separate and made sure no egg touched sausage, but I watched them meet in the middle as though they were best friends. I had lost my appetite somewhere so far off that even the smell of Jimmy Dean couldn't call it back.