Cheeky

My aunt Silvia loved pinching my cheeks every time she saw me.  She called herself the best aunt I had because she was going to make my cheeks nice and strong.

I tell you, she had problems.  For twenty-five years, that woman pinched my cheeks as hard as she could.  If—and when—I screamed for her to stop, she would laugh and pinch even harder after stopping just long enough to tease me with relief.  She would always tell me she didn’t know when to stop.  I honestly think she believed that was a valid excuse for any and everything.

She had the nastiest habit of licking the serving utensils.  She, not one for just settling for mildly obnoxious, would coat the spoons she licked with a thick layer of saliva.  Again, she would claim not to know when to stop.

If she wasn’t trying to rip my face off or orally violating the silverware, she was drumming her long nails on any surface she could (literally) get her hands on.  If she were going to be the best aunt I had, it would have to be the best at annoying every living creature.

I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her when she woke up, bound with rope and held inches away from a large nest of fire ants.  Well, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, as I always imagined someone would become fed up with her enough to want to torture her.

It didn’t come as a surprise to me, and frankly that’s because I was the one holding her ratty head above the ant bed, while my parents looked on.  They reflexively rubbed their cheeks as her very presence evoked painful memories embedded deeply in the cells of their cheeks.

It also wasn’t a surprise that her cheeks had been painstakingly grated off with the fine side of a cheese grater.  Grated cheek goes well with sliced tongue, which is best served cold, of course.  It would have to be fed to her, because my mother personally removed Silvia’s fingers by inserting each hand into a blender.  It was the only thing in our house that could drown out that drumming sound.

I saw Silvia look toward me, and it almost sounded like she was asking me not to shove her bloody face into the mound of furious fire ants.  I smiled, feeling merciful, and pulled her back away from the ants.  She seemed to have learned her lesson by the feeble attempts she was making to apologize.

I brought her face close to mine, so I could tell her I was sorry too.

I told her I was sorry I didn’t know when to stop.

Irresistible

Jeff cradled his wife’s head in his arms.  It had been weeks since their ship crashed, but it seemed like forever since his wife, Sylvia, had spoken to him.  They got into an argument about how it was all Jeff’s fault that the storm crashed their ship and how he should have listened to her when he told him to steer away from land.

Sometime in the argument, Jeff—out of sheer frustration—pushed his wife.  She landed on a pile of debris, and cried for a while.  She calmed down after a while, but she refused to do so much as acknowledge Jeff’s presence from then on.

 This only furthered Jeff’s animosity toward her.  Though he resented her for ignoring him, he would continue to talk to her, as if she were going to listen to anything he had to say anymore.  He tried to feed her, but she consistently refused anything he offered her.  There was next to nothing on the island, so Jeff had to make due with what he had on hand.

  He still found it in his heart to hold and comfort her.  She was mad at him, but she couldn’t object to his comforting embrace.

Literally.

Out of Mind

If I told anyone that I hear voices in my head, they’d think I was crazy.  I hope no one finds this, because I am just writing this to put into words my feelings.  I read it was good therapy for crazy people, though I really don’t consider myself crazy.

It would be only so bad if there were only voices, though.  At night, the creatures behind them haunt my dreams.  They’re always talking, screaming, yelling.  I can’t sleep now, because if I do, I’ll have to see them.  Hear them louder and clearer than I do when I’m awake.

Some days it’s a struggle to focus on my day-to-day tasks as a phone consultant for a local toy store.  I have trouble in hearing customers sometimes; that’s just how loud the voices get.

There’s Aglagox, the headless teddy bear.  The stump of its neck is one big eye that looks about nervously, and each little furry toe is a mouth that spits a different kind of bee.  He’s the least threatening one in my opinion.

The creature that calls itself Kevalwor is a 16-legged spider with 16 eyes and 16 mouths.  All of its mouths are drooling and slobbering; where a droplet of drool hits a surface, it becomes a swarm of tiny spiders.  It is especially fond of crawling on heads for obvious reasons.  I hate spiders.  Hate.

One of the oddest is Jack.  Jack is a severed head with a spring jutting from the remains of each of its eyeballs.  They honestly look as if they burst outward from within the eyes themselves.  On the end of those eye-springs are crude and ironic boxes.  Their sole purpose in existing seems to be to function as a sick parody of jacks-in-the-box.  It occasionally and unceremoniously will flop its tongue about.  Its tongue is a mass of writhing earthworms, swollen with pus and one will occasionally explode to release a foul-smelling white substance.  It is from this pus-like goop that a misshapen, bloody chicken fetus will emerge only to squawk noisily and in great pain before dying.

As much as I hate spiders, I would gladly wear Kevalwor as a hat if it never meant having to see Olee-o again.  Olee-o is a Rubik’s Cube, though each face of the blocks is a mouth that beckons you to solve it.  It whispers lies and horrible truths, and the only defense against its 3x3x3 gnashing mouths would be to try to solve the puzzle.  That’s its gimmick.  Once you are holding Olee-o, it will begin to eat your hands.  You become so engrossed in trying to solve it that you lose the ability to feel pain.  By the time you have lost your hands, you have undoubtedly gone completely mad.  Olee-o will berate you before attempting it and more so while holding it.  It’s unsolvable, though.  I dreamed so many times that people were tricked by it.  It should be obvious.  No two squares share the same color.  Once Olee-o has taken your hands, the cube breaks apart into a small swarm of gibbering blocks that I have seen strip a body clean far too many times for my own comfort.

Though there are only four entities in my head, they make a horrible amount of noise.  They say different things to different people, but they always say the same thing to me.  They want me to destroy them, I think.  I can’t imagine why these nightmarish creatures would tell me how to get rid of them.  They keep telling me I have to get them out of my head, whatever that means.