My lips parted in a scream, yet I made no sound. In silent horror, I watched my mouth open wider, jaw dropping lower, until a deafening snap resounded in my ears. There was no pain, only untamed terror as my jaw dangled at an inhuman angle.
Insects crawled out of my disfigured mouth, snakes slithering over my shoulders and down my body to form a puddle at myfeet. Spiders, cockroaches, beetles—they choked me, smothered me, ate away at my flesh.
A faceless shadow materialised behind me, clawed hands wrapping around my throat. It leaned down to whisper in my ear, my name pouring from its lips in a menacing hiss.
I willed myself to scream, to alert someone,anyone,of the danger I was in. The sound that erupted from me instead was laughter. Cold, wicked laughter. As my body shook, drops of flesh melted from my face, devoured by the hungry creatures crawling at my feet.
I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream, I wanted tobreathe. But air no longer ventured into my lungs, and my voice had long since abandoned me. This was the end.
The mirror vanished when I awoke. In its place, darkness glared back.
The dark and I had never been friends. In the dark, the Devil hid in the shadows, waiting to plunge his teeth into flesh and bone. The light drove him away, but there was no light when I sat up on the front porch, locked outside just as I had been in the nightmare I escaped from.
North Lane was surrounded by trees, and in the endless black, they morphed into leering monsters threatening to tear me limb from limb. One tree stood guard by the entrance, shielding me from its hungry brothers while I stood to slam my firsts against the door.
“Mumma!” I cried. “Mumma! Let me in!”
The gentle whistle of the wind was the only response.
Punishment upheld, alone in a darkness threatening to consume me, I slid down the door and turned to the one being us Christian children were told would never abandon you. God.
“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” I signed the cross and clasped my hands together in prayer, straightening my posture just as I would in church.
The Lord’s Prayer had been ingrained in me from the moment I said my first word, as familiar to me as breathing in through my nose and out the mouth. And so, without a second’s hesitation, I recited, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”
The prayer spilled out of me, desperation lacing each and every word as my gaze lifted to the heavens, pleading for salvation. Stars winked back, a lone cloud sailing past the pale glow of the moon. The Devil’s cold grasp was near, and God’s warmth so, so far away.
“Please,” I whispered, “I’m…scared. I want to…to go inside. Please help me. I didn’t mean to be bad for Mumma. I will be good. I promise. Please help me.”
The problem with being raised on the belief that God was an all-powerful, omniscient being, was that when your prayers went unanswered, you knew He had abandoned you. Why wasn’t He listening? Why would He not save me?
“Please,” I repeated, “I don’t want to be out here all alone.”
An owl hooted, a bat landed on a tree, and a cool breeze caressed the hair out of my eyes. But still, no response from God.
“I don’t want to be alone anymore,” I continued. God may not have been listening, but maybesomeonewas. Maybe an angel was sitting up in the clouds, my voice carrying through the wind that drifted up to Heaven. “I want a baby brother or sister. Someone to be with me when I’m out here on my own.”
I wanted someone to face the shadow monsters, a brother or sister to stand by my side as we fought the Devil, sharing the burden of beinggood.
God did not answer my prayer that night.
I remained out in the cold, haunted by tree monsters and sinister shadows until the sun rose, its light finally banishing the darkness.
But He answered my prayer nine months later, delivering a baby boy—his piercing wail hauling me from my slumber, my paper aeroplane falling to the floor to be crushed by a nurse hurrying into the maternity ward.
Dressed in a pair of dark green dinosaur pyjamas that barely fit, I shifted upright, blinking repeatedly to adjust to the waking world. I didn’t know where I was, or how I got there, only that my wrist ached and that the metallic taste of blood assaulted my tongue.
I had been in a hospital once before, and recognised the distinct, bitter scent of antiseptic and chemicals. As I slipped off the bench where I slept, my gaze drifted to a door on my right, open just enough to reveal my mother holding a white bundle in her arms. There were muffled voices all around her, drowned out by the beeping of machines and alarms from other sections of the ward.
I approached the door, lured in by the faint, yellow glow around the newborn. Everything in the room was a blur of motion as people scurried in and out, but my attention remained fixed onhim,as if there were nothing and no one else in the world.
“Hey, baby,” my mother greeted me with a small, tired smile, her untied hair drenched with sweat, “come meet your baby brother. Isn’t he just a precious little gift from God?”
I risked a step closer, avoiding the tubes connecting my mother to the machines beside her bed, slithering up her arm until they disappeared beneath her gown. The baby cried, and I barely saw a wisp of dark hair before I was scooped up and settled on the edge of the bed, my father holding me up to secure a better view.
“Why is he sad?” I asked.
Despite my mother’s attempts to soothe him, his cries did not cease. I was not allowed to cry. The second I did, I would bethreatened with something toreallycry about. And so, I avoided the tears, knowing it would not grant me the same compassion or sympathy it granted others.
