What is to report?

Boy, there has not been much going on the past few weeks! I haven't been able to come up with a blog post that is even remotely interesting. So instead I will put up the first part of a story that I will write over the next few blog post, please comment and tell me what you think

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By Adam Hensen


Part 1

I can’t sleep.

I have been lying in bed for the better part of 4 four hours. I am tired, but not sleepy. I’ve been staring at the ceiling above my bed and using the light from the street lamps outside to try to see shapes and animals in the drywall of the ceiling like a child does in the clouds on a summer day. My wife is asleep beside me. Her naked body is hot. Tonight is hot. It has to be close to 80 degrees in this house, even with the windows open. Global warming; like it hell it doesn’t exist. Here we are not 3 nights into the New Year and its near 80 degrees.

The ceiling fan is making a clicking sound. It’s a because of this click, click, click of the ceiling fan and the bump, bump, caused by the wind blowing through my window causing the door occasionally sway and bang against something on the floor that’s stopping me from even closing my eyes. I can’t take very much more than this. I slip out of bed and throw some pajama bottoms on.

It’s been several hours since I have eaten now too. I make my way through the dark house, careful not to turn on too many lights so my wife and kids won’t be woken up at 4:00 am. I make my way into the kitchen and flip on the light. There are a few dishes in the sink and the floor is a little dirty but other than that, the kitchen is clean. I haven’t realized how hungry I have been until now that I am standing in the kitchen.

I open the closet door and reach to the bottom shelf to grab some ramen noodles. Immediately I jumped back because there was a small roach crawling towards me on the floor from out of the closet. My back shakes and my gag reflex starts kicking in. I am a wuss when it comes to bugs. They have always bothered me. I make my way to the kitchen sink and put my hands on the Formica to brace myself when I gag. I look in the sink only to find about another two roaches crawling among the dirty dishes. This is almost too much for me and I run almost full speed out of the kitchen and into the dining room. Suddenly I have lost any appetite I might have had.

My heart is racing; not just because of the roaches; it has been for a few nights now. About 3 days after Christmas I had a dream. Until now, I could not remember what the dream was about. I am sure I don’t remember all the parts but there is something familiar about it. I think the dream is reminding me of one I had when I was a kid. It’s because of this dream I haven’t had any sleep, it’s because of this dream I had to subject myself to the roaches in the kitchen, and it is because of this dream that I have pulled my journal out and started writing in it.

This journal was given to me as a gift a few days before my wedding over 4 years ago, but I can count the times I have written in here on my hands and toes. But something is forcing me to write now, I am so anxious I can’t even think straight. I am sitting at the end of the table, the furthest from the roach invested kitchen and their layer of the dirty sink. But before I get started I feel something from behind, something haunting me from a forgotten world. I decide to change seats at the table. This time I took the spot closet to the kitchen. This way I can get a clear view of the hallway closet. I don’t like closets, especially when it is so dark like it is now. Down the hallway there is a light on in the bathroom. I must have used the light to help me find my way to the kitchen but had forgotten to turn it off. The bathroom light cast an eerie light onto the hallway closet and much eerier shadows on the ground below.

2

I have had this same dream I don’t know how many times. But I do know I have not had it in a long, long while; especially not in my adult life. Along time ago I use dream about a secret passage in my parents’ bedroom closet. To be honest I dreamnt of it so often and so vividly that I have to really think hard if it as a dream or not. It could have been real. If you climb to the top of the closet in my parents’ bedroom in some house we use to live in; who knows which house of the dozens I had growing up, although I would pay good money to find the house that it was so I could destroy that dreadful place but, I am getting ahead of myself.

If you were small, light, and limber enough you could climb to the top of my parents closet with the help of a friend sibling, I feat that I have done many, many times in my life, too many. I know at least two other of my siblings who have gone through it as well. I had many siblings, 2 sisters, one older, one younger; 1 brother and 4 stepbrothers. My oldest sister, Sarah, was the first of the three of us to go. She was also the one who showed me how to use the passage.

3

It was a typical bright and sunny summer day and I was no more than six or seven years old. I had a very happy childhood; however some people that have heard me tell some of the stories of my childhood and you dear reader at the end of my story might not think so. But to me, I was happy and content. I played a lot and had good friends. Even my sister from time to time was nice. Don’t get me wrong, if you crossed her you would most assuredly be in a scratch fight for your life; one that ended in a stalemate after I would have my older sister in a headlock and she would be scratching or slapping my back.

That’s a funny thing I remember: whenever I would get into a fist fight with any of my siblings, and I had very many, fist fights and siblings both, we would never hit each other in the face or the old bread basket to try to knock the wind out of your opponent. Thinking about it, I am pretty sure we never even hit each other closed fist. I guess we really didn’t want to cause each other harm, we just wanted the other kid to know that we were mad and we wanted our toy back, or use the Sega game console, or to have to other kid just shut the heck up! No, our fights never amounted to anything more than slapping the other kids back, or scratching their arms. The latter was especially true in the case of Sarah. I think out of all of us, she may have really intended to do harm. It would seem like she would sharpen her nails in preparation for the next fight. Sarah would also not follow the rules of sticking to slapping or scratching the back only. If she was in a terribly bad mood, you could find yourself being scratch on the neck. I have the scars to prove it.

I had been in there several times before this incident of course, it’s completely normal for a child to sneak into their parent’s closet. Especially if that closet was practically a treasure trove! For a good month or two out of the year it help Christmas presents, unwrapped of course. My parents had a bad habit of waiting until midnight Christmas Eve to wrap presents. When you’re talking about wrapping 8 kid’s worth of presents, you really need a Christmas miracle to get it all done by morning. So, from Thanksgiving to Christmas, if you wanted to spoil the surprise, you could sneak in there when the parents weren’t home a take a peak under a sheet atop a strangely shaped mound to see what you and your brothers and sisters would be getting for Christmas.

Other times, like the summers especially, you would want to sneak in there to pull out my father old compound bow and arrows. None of the arrows had any heads to them, and come to think of it, I don’t even know if the bow had any strings. But why would that stop a couple of young boys from sneaking in there to pull it out and play Cowboys and Indians, or maybe Ninjas.

Of course there were tons of clothes and jackets in the closet too. There were all kinds of clothes in there from my Father and Stepmother. There were even some old dresses of my mother’s as well. While I have never asked them, I am sure that my sisters had gone in there every week to try things on and play dress up. Assuming I wasn’t scratched hard enough to bleed until I was forced to cooperate and play the part of the groom in some elaborate make-believe wedding, I of course had never had interest in a closet full of dress up clothes. But I will be honest and tell you that on more than once occasions, I was forced to be that unlucky groom who had to marry one of my sisters.

Then there was hide and seek. The closet had a great deal of good places to hide. It was a long walk-in closet filled on both sides with boxes with unknown contents and clothes hung on racks; some in old dry cleaning bags, some not. The way we played hide and seek was different than the way other kids played growing up. It took me until I was almost 12 to figure that out. For the longest time I thought the rules for hide and seek was that there was one hider and all the other players were seekers as opposed to the alternate more popular version of o seeker all other hiders.

On this particular day, I was it. And according to the rules, I was the hider and all the other kids had to come find me. If they found me, that kid would have to crawl into my hiding spot and hide with me while we both waited for the next seeker to come. Then the three of us would wait, and so the game would go until we all were found in the same spot.

No remember from what I tell you from this point on, I cannot honestly remember if it was real or a dream. Or how many times I went to this place, real, dream or otherwise. Logic tells me that this place and this thing was a dream. For all that things that happened after this, there is no way that it could be real. I only wish to write down a nightmare I had from time to time growing up as a kid; a nightmare that I have not had in over 20 years until just a few days ago. If I have learned anything in my life so far thought it is this: dreams, and especially nightmares, have a way of making themselves become real.