Ike Under Glass [and other short stories]

Nannycam

It was the bear that brought the memories flooding back. An old stuffed back with a space for a camera near it's neck. It wasn't the same bear. It couldn't be the same bear. The similarities were too close for comfort and Yumei had stopped dead outside of the storefront, gasping for breath. When Binta placed a hand on her shoulder, Yumei hadn't even reacted. Only when her girlfriend started to shake her a little did she snap back to reality and laugh, making some off-hand comment about daydreaming.

But she hadn't been daydreaming. She'd been having a flashback. 

All day Yumei fought back the sudden tide of repressed memories. It made her feel sick and stressed. Binta noticed and ordered her to bed with a kind, concerned expression. She didn't put up a fight and retreated to be with her thoughts. 

Maybe it was time. Maybe she needed to remember what had happened, as unreal as it all seemed. She'd spent much of her life completely unaware these memories even existed, only for them to surface when she was a teenager. Her therapist had taught her how to hold them back and now here they were again. All because she'd seen that bear. Yumei felt it would take more effort to lock them back away then it would to explore them. It wasn't going to be easy, but her brain was set on it whether she wanted to deal with it or not.

She laid on her bed, hands on her stomach, breathing slowly. The memories were in shreds right now, scaring her more because they were so fractured. Yumei concentrated, trying to find the start of the story, the first memory in the link. She wanted the entire series of events splayed out before her, something she could dissect. Once dissected it would hold no secrets from her, and no power over her. She hoped.

Finally Yumei found something and reached out inside of her mind for it, grasping at it, going back to when she...

-

...was told by her mother that she had a fever and wouldn't be attending school that day. Yumei, who had felt pretty fine, got back into bed anyway. She felt glad that she wasn't going to school. At eight years old, she didn't hate school, but she preferred being home much more. There was no reason for her to doubt her mother's judgement. Everything had been perfectly fine up until that day.

Even so, Yumei put a hand on her own forehead and tried to decide if it did feel hot or if this was normal body heat. She didn't think she was especially hot but maybe that was because her sheets were so nice and cool. Yumei pulled her covers up around her and rolled into the quilt, finding a comfortable spot for some extra sleep.

As she was dozing off, Yumei had the sudden powerful feeling that someone was standing right behind her. Her eyes flew open and she flailed to untwist herself from the quilt. Her heart pounded fast and hard in her chest as she turned around. There was no one there. Of course not. She would have heard the bedroom door open.

'Not if you were sleepy,' her inner voice said. Her inner voice had always sounded to her like a more mature grown up version of herself.

'Or if they were hiding in your closet, or under your bed,' it continued.

Yumei growled at those thoughts and pressed her arm against her eyes. She hadn't been all that sleepy and if something had come out of the closet she would have heard that open and there wasn't all that much space under her divan bed for anything.

'Anything that's not a monster maybe, but monsters can fit anywhere'.

"Oh quiet, you're being very silly today," Yumei scolded herself. She turned back over and eventually found sleep again. The feeling of a presence in the room did not return.

-

Yumei woke up around midday, hungry and thirsty and somehow grumpier from having slept so long. She slipped out of bed, having completely forgotten the spook she'd had before.