Ghost Story

To make up for the fact that I haven't posted in over two weeks (!) I present to you a bedtime story.

So it is late. I've finished my 11:00pm special snack (bowl of Black Cherry Jell-O and Wheat Thins), brushed my teeth, and changed into my pajamas. Before I go to bed, I decide to do a little reading, as my sleep cycle is way off lately for some reason. I settle on a book of short stories that I bought about a month ago but never got around to actually reading, due to my overwhelming workload lately.

The first two or three stories are funny and cute and a little simplistic. Y'know just like I am, so I'm completely hooked. But then the fourth story takes a really dark turn. It's still short, and pretty simplistic, but whoa it is for-serious scary. Actually, not real scary in the way that most people would be scared of it, but in a very Jason Way of Scariness, where it's all about how your imagination can take a story and run with it. Basically, it's a campfire ghost story, amped up in my mind to sudden Blair Witch-like proportions in my very sleepy state.

When I get ghost-story paranoid like this, I tend to take certain precautions (read: insanities). They are, in no particular order:

• I check the closet for any and all monsters/killers/clowns/etc, and carefully close the door behind me.
• I do the same for the bathroom (careful again to check behind the shower curtain, because monsters are clever like that).
• I lock the door to my bedroom (if something is coming in the apartment, it's getting Frank, not me).
• And I make sure that when I get in bed, I sleep right up against the wall, so there's no chance anything can sneak up behind me. (Hey, no one ever said I wasn't crazy).

Steps 1, 2, & 3 are all taken care of in due course. I'm still a little jumpy and worried about monsters, but dagnabbit, I am an adult, nearly a quarter of a century old, I can handle such things. I turn off my computer monitor, and the room is completely pitch black (damn my installation of those heavy curtains).

Again, hey, I'm cool, I'm an adult. I take the requisite four steps to my bed, stepping on various bits of clothing, books, furniture, and the like. The last step right next to my bed has me trodding on my comforter, which, whatever, right? Until all of a sudden there is this horrible WAILING NOISE coming from DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF ME UNDER THE BED.

I have no analogue to explain exactly how freaked out I was at this moment. Let's boil it down to the basics: Screamed like a little girl, kicked out involuntarily and seriously injured my foot on the base of my bed, fell over backwards while flailing my arms, managing to trip over the chair in front of my desk and knock a glass of water of the nightstand and all over myself before collapsing into an hysterical heap on the floor, certain that I was about to be devoured.

So it turns out that the phone in my room has a speaker phone option. Which means that if the proper button is pressed, it gives you a very loud dial tone. And that if my room is dirty enough, the phone may be buried under piles of clothes and comforter and wedged under my bed. And when you step on said phone, pressing said button, while it is properly buried under said items of clothes and comforter, it gives off a sound that is not entirely unlike a noise that a bloodthirsty monster who has a taste for nerd-flesh might make.

This is not my beautiful life. Also, my foot really hurts now.

So how have you all been?