\chapter{Untitled} \by{fishguzzler} Son of a bitch, there's a storm on --- no lightning, so I do this little dance between the light switch and the bed, partly because my room is just too dark, no light leaking in through the levelors, and partly because I can't let my mom see the light on when she trundles past for another batch of rainbow cookies --- six neat little rows by five in the box, and four at a time carefully arranged on a little white saucer-plate, and about a box and a half gone by the end of the night, which means at least eleven trips down the hall past my room to the kitchen on a night when she's watching HBO in bed, pretty much every night --- but mostly because there's a mad badger in my closet, an evil monster with beady little eyes glowing faintly green. Actually, I don't really know what `beady' means. But I know what a monster is, even if, come to think of it, I actually don't know what a badger looks like. But I imagine it looks just like this little bastard in the closet. Maybe not so mean. I can hear the television from the next room, though the walls are ancient and incredibly thick --- I once put my fist into one, broke through the new plaster, and then through something brittle and white, until I sliced my whole hand open on a rough mixture of sand and antique horse-hair that exploded into powder even as it broke my left pinky and the knuckle of my pointer finger. I can hear the television because of the heating vent on the wall between the closet and my bureau, which conducts the voices from the television with perfect clarity into my room and provides me with fair warning every time there's a commercial break. That's when I make my move. I'm fifteen, and I may be a little pudgy, or maybe a little more than a little, but I'm extremely light-footed, so I leap down from the bed and tip-toe sprint to the door as my mother's clomping footsteps reverberate back and forth in my little acoustic capsule --- it's not because she's monstrously overweight, though she must have gained over two-hundred pounds in the last three years, it's just that she's such a hard stepper. I fly barefoot across mathematically smooth and cold wood flooring that, I know, I wouldn't feel if I could really fly. I keep my eyes trained on the door of the closet and flick off the light, crouching with my left hand poised on the light switch and my right hand gripping the doorknob, white-knuckled, the scar where I split the shit open standing out whitest, crisp even in the near-blackness as I glare past it into that shadowed crevice with the mad chittering sounds coming from inside. But it always quiets as she passes my door, as though it doesn't want to be heard; I still don't know how she doesn't hear it through the walls when she's in her room. Stupid old cow. But tonight she's doing alright, I think, because she's only made three trips down the hall to the kitchen, three trips lasting three to five minutes each over the course of three hours, which is a real record-low for her since things got bad, like maybe now she's finally getting over it --- or maybe she's just gotten too fat to walk and decided to start bringing the box with her from now on. Either way, I've still had to squat here three times so far in the dark, smelling that musty yellow odor like rotten tomatoes mixed with, I don't know, curry or something, listening to that thing cackle and scratch at the back of the closet door, swinging it open millimeter by millimeter, because I never dare to leave it closed --- I'm too scared not to try and hear what he's doing in there, plus I know perfectly well that he knows we both know that he can open the fucking door if he wants to. I've seen him do it, not in minute, scratching increments, but fast. Tonight the door has stayed put, and I haven't heard a sound from the little monster. Even his stink, the one everyone else can't smell, seems to be receding. Normally it hits me at odd points during the day because it's burned into my fucking skin, but tonight it seems to be clearing away, the dissipating pestilential fog. I hear my mother put down her dish in the kitchen, but the cupboard does not creak open. The sink splashes on instead, a sound I hear more through the pipes in the walls than through the air. Is she washing the dish already, packing it in, with so much less than a box consumed? Maybe she is getting over it, at least realizing that a box and a half of delicious rainbow cookies per evening won't help --- but more likely, she's probably just got a stomach virus or something. I hear her stomp into the bathroom, even whistling the tune we all used to sing, ``Your Face is All over the Place'', which is sung to the tune of ``Your Kiss is what I Miss''. I smile in the dark, no fear now, thinking it's gone, and maybe this will be the time it doesn't come back. There is a muffled thud from the bathroom, and a short, sharp cry from mom. It brings to mind an image of my mother, beached, prone in her fuzzy white robe on the bathroom floor, writhing in pain and as-yet half-realized fear, the muscles in her neck bulging, showing clearly for the first time in almost two years, as that little fucker chews through cotton and into her chest. Blood spattering. Chimp-like, upright badger-monster body, head like a nasty little dog, Chihuahua or something, only with a cerrated nose like an alligator, or one of those colorful baboon-things. Snarling bubbles into the blood welling through the shorn muscle and cracked bone of her left breast like a child with his chocolate milk{\ldots} Chittering. Laughing at us. Oh my god her heart. Instead of flinging the door open and running to the bathroom, I smack the light on and sprint to the closet door, throw it open and freeze, staring right into those unforgiving dog-black but compassionless spheres. So it rears before me, wipes it's dripping chin with a bony little wrist. Cackles. Now you're mother is dead too. First him, now her. First him, now her.