Monsters in the wall. Kinda.

2010-09-25T18:52:47Z

The wall buzzed.

Now, as those of you who have spent any time with me in the morning are all too sadly familiar, I am…not at my best when I first awake, or am awakened by something else. Incoherent or pretty out of it are kindly ways to put it; deranged is another.

And, by an odd coincidence, I'd just started writing two different short pieces about something in the walls. (What that something is, I'm not entirely sure in one case. Possibly a chocolate demon. Possibly not.) So I had monsters in the walls on the brain.

And now the wall was buzzing and thumping at me.

Naturally, I assumed it was either a monster or an atomic bomb. The unlikelihood of an atomic bomb hiding out in the walls of a Florida apartment, quite forgetting about the size issue, was completely lost on me. No, what I was trying to figure out – I wish I were making it up – was how I could defuse the bomb, and, if a monster had made the bomb, what the chances were of the monster setting off the bomb accidentally or otherwise.

Meanwhile, the Little One leapt into the bed to stare fixedly at the wall. Oh no, I thought, he's going to get blown up by the bomb. So I scooped him up and brought him to the living room (which, come to think of it, would not have been particularly far away from a bomb) where we both flopped back to sleep.

When I woke up the second time it took me awhile to figure out where I was, but after Brazil was eliminated (I don't know where that came from) I gradually figured it out, and then remembered the bomb and the monster. Talk about one annoying nightmare, I thought, and then headed back into the bedroom to sleep a bit further.

The wall still buzzed.

This time, I was less inclined to go with the bomb idea – while not discounting the monster – and more inclined to go with the downstairs neighbors must have been up to something but how, precisely, were they sleeping through this? I started to investigate. No bombs. No monsters. But a definite something buzzing rhythmically against the wall.

…..a large floor fan in my brother's room, fallen against the wall, but still churning and vibrating on.

Monsters come in many guises.

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mariness

Monsters in the wall. Kinda.