The killer is beneath me – maybe coming through the floor, maybe the mattress. I am being tossed around like a coin and the killer’s hands keep coming at me and I fend them off until I scream at the top of my lungs and awake. She says, “What was that strange noise you made?” and she imitates it and it sounds like a little blurp… a whimper… a small animal in distress, or as she puts it: “a little girl.”
“A Monster,” I say, still too asleep to explain that it’s a serial killer with a whole back story that is already fading in my consciousness. She starts to laugh at me and mock my mouse like sound that made it all the way from the terror of my unconscious to the comfort my waking bed… albeit without the volume. Hidden in that little whimper somewhere is the all the horror of life and death… or someone else’s idea of a joke.