BIZARRE DREAMS: a collection of short stories

CREEPY CRAWLIES #1: The Voice

Will you be my best friend?

The voice was soft and slow, and very, very clear. It had come from her room, she was sure of that because the house was silent and her mother had gone out to get some things from the market.

Her father was asleep in his room, and there was no way he’d be asking her if she wanted to be his best friend. Not in that soft, slow voice.

She placed the novel she’d been reading—basically just a young readers series about twenty pages long, which seemed almost too long for her—on her bed and rolled off, groaning at the thought of leaving the bed and at the same time curious about the voice she’d just heard.

She didn’t hear the voice again, at least for the full minute she’d spent kneeling by the side of the wall, where she thought the voice had come from.

A braided strand of her hair fell over her face, the tip decorated with colorful beads most of which had either fallen off or were about to. Holding her hair and subconsciously pulling at the beads on it, as she was fond of doing (which was why her mother almost always complained about the rate at which she had to replace the beads), she stood up.

Where did that voice come from?

She was sure it hadn’t been her imagination, but hadn't her mother said, the other day, that her thoughts had the power to get loud enough for her to hear them, and that her imaginations sometimes had voices?

That could explain the voice, and so she decided to go back to the book she was reading. Although she was perfectly okay with staring at the wall—her mother had gotten her a literature text and asked her to read some chapters, saying she would ask her questions when she got back.

Anything was better than reading about a poor girl who couldn’t go to school but somehow managed to overcome her misfortune and win a scholarship, ending up as a lawyer or doctor.

“Why do people always have to be lawyers or doctors, or engineers?” she’d asked her father one day. She tried to recall the answer he’d given her as she walked back to the bed, her feet dragging against the ground. Giving up a few seconds later, she picked up the book and continued reading.

“Chapter six,” she mumbled—which sounded more like a frustrated sigh—and touched the space beside her, groping for the pencil she used in circling relevant points for quick memorization when her mother came back.
She was sure her mother wouldn’t read the whole text, and so she guessed the few places where the questions would come from and circled them with her pencil.

Questions like: how old was the poor girl? Or who gave her the scholarship? That was the idea, but now a different question formed in her head as she squinted her eyes and looked around.
Where is my pencil?

The sheets on her bed were rumpled, the colorful designs of cartoon characters misshaped by the way the sheets folded.

Placing the book on the frame of the bed, she lifted the sheets and arranged it neatly, hoping to see the pencil fall off but that didn’t happen. She did, however, hear a scraping sound from the side of her bed, and also a soft giggle. Curious, she climbed on the bed, rumpling it again, and crawled to the edge. The edge of her bed, where her feet usually lay when she slept, was positioned a few inches close to her clothes drawer.

Between that space was a pile of her clothes which she’d been too lazy to pick up and fold, even though she knew her mother would yell at her and call her incompetent (whatever that word meant).

She stared at that pile, for it moved ever so slowly like it had some living creature underneath it. She hoped it wasn’t a rat—she hated rats—but then she heard the soft giggle again and it came from the pile of clothes.
It had to be her mind.