]
“But gran! It is simply too unfair to make me go to sleep now because I ain’t in the least
Tired!” I whined in aggravation as she shut the door anyway.
I hate going to sleep anymore; I never fall asleep until late at least midnight, so I always wake up feeling like I done shaved a whole pen o’ sheep, the day before.
I remember someone saying that if you picture lambs jumping over a fence in your mind and count ‘em you’ll eventually fall asleep.
It didn’t seem to be working for me quite well though.
So instead I think of interesting ideas to make Josiah Mathew Hamilton so sad he runs crying to his mommy with his dirty thumb in his smoocher.
My most devilish but still delightful ideas included planting Betty Boop underwear in his dirty laundry so his momma would find it and wallop him good.
Then there was telling all of his chums he wet his bed still, (information courtesy of his bratty little sister Mary Ann last Friday at the town meeting.)
Other ideas would come to me soon, but for now I was darn near almost too happy thinking of his sobbing fat head in the recesses of my brain.
But soon I get bored of that, evil thinking gets a little tiresome late at night, and I sure as Godiva went bare don’t want the Lord to catch me dreaming evil and not be able to stop the heathens from snatching me straightaways into Hades.
Soon the heavy emptiness starts to creep up on me again and I lay there contemplating what it’s like.
I am too limp too move and too wired to just lie there, so I end up just a lifeless piece of meat.
It’s like my body is dead but my brain is alive or something, like a really stupid kind of awake dead.
I start doing the times tables in my brain, but that’s just making me more and more jumpy.
I’m getting really riled now because I know I got to get up early in the morning, but I just can’t go to sleep!
So I start singing a little ditty I made up in my head;
Awake dead, awake dead,
Like a circus in my head,
Spinning like a Ferris wheel,
Can’t stop how gloomy I feel.
Awake dead, awake dead,
Just lying awake in my bed,
With a head made of lead.
I sang it until my head hurt, and then I sang it some more.
There is always something just a tad more genius in something I made up than anyone else
My Sunday school teacher says that isn’t really true, what I made up just pleasures my ego, so I feel al puffed up and smug.
I heard a groan coming from beneath me and froze, but then I quick crossed myself, I knew for sure it was the soul of my dead cousin Gertrude. Some people blame me for her demise but that is just a bunch of hootenanny, she was smoking with her boyfriend on the bank of soot creek when I stumbled upon them and she was so surprised she fell into the crick, I think if you’re gonna go near bodies of water you should know how to swim. She had hated me when she was alive and I guess she must still hate me, because almost every night now I hear groans coming from under my bed. I kept on crossing myself; I didn’t want her coming out and cutting off my hair or putting black ink on my lips.
As I crossed myself at least a gazillion times, the solution came to me,
It was time I faced Cousin Gertrude once and for all.
This spooking and creep-outing could be titled as a form of abuse.
I started whispering Hail Mary’s under my breathe seven times the speed of sound.
And I slowly slipped my fingers down and grabbed the edge of my horse blanket, and quickly jerked it back.
I gasped, what was unfolding before my eye was just so horrible, so evil, so appalling, words could not even express.
There lay my little brother Johnny, groaning, wrappers littering the floor, the remains of my leftover Christmas candy melted in all colors of the rainbow around his mouth.
“Oh Katie,” he groaned. “My pooch hurts really badly!”
“Of course it aches you boob! Why did you eat all my stuff, it ain’t yours!”
I saw a tiny tear trickle down his ugly cheek.
“I’m sorry, heck; I could smell that stuff all the way down stairs. It called to me, little tantalizing whispers, “Johnny”, they said, “we want you, come and eat us; we want you to eat us!”
I sighed holding my head in my hands.
“Katie,” he said, “I think I’m going to be sick!”
“No!!!” I screamed as I saw the pink and yellow waterfall shoot out of his mouth with all the power of a dam, fast and spraying everywhere.
When he stopped, the floor his face and shirt, and the front of my nightgown were all covered in the smelly sourness.
I picked up Johnny and carried him to the washroom, where I poured buckets of water on him and wiped him down with a rag until he was clean, and then I put him in his bed and changed myself.
I almost added to the mess under my bed when I tried to clean it up but I didn’t knowing that would just make things six times worse.
After it all was over, I just climbed into bed, I was not going to sleep in my dirty nightgown so I just climbed between the flour sacks buck naked.
Gran says proper ladies don’t do brazen things like that, but I figures I never have been much of a lady, and now when I can’t really be one isn’t a good time to start.
So I just lay there and close my eyes.
But then I hear a groan again, and I look under my bed and no one’s there. So I lay there shaking for a while more before I fall asleep dreaming of cousin Gertrude chasing me through the corn field with a butcher knife.