Creatures

When you hear rustling and muttering, the hardest thing is to open your eyes. You need to open your eyes as quickly as possible, otherwise the creatures will get really close. It's not dangerous; they don't have the strength to do anything, but it's very disgusting. What do you think it's like to open your eyes and see another creature pressed right up to your face, staring with white bowl-like eyes? Their faces look like human faces, if you ask me, only much smaller, much uglier, and like a skull covered in white skin. They still look like what they were in life.

That's why I always sit up on the bed first. I don't let my legs down, otherwise some creature might lean on them like a dog and still look into my face. They can climb up my body, but not one of them would dare jump onto the bed themselves. One day, one tried to crawl up to my brother. He woke up to a cold, dead creature pressed against him, and chased it into the bathroom with a candle. The creature sat there until morning, alone with a mirror that could devour even one like it, and no other creature dares do that unless we give them a chance.

My eyelids are stuck together and heavy, as if I haven't slept for days; I have to push them apart with my fingers. Literally. First, one eye is a narrow slit, and something cloudy and whitish slips through it, then bounces back. Without my glasses, I can't see which of the creatures came so close to my bed this time. It's easier with the second eye; now that at least the first is open, the creatures understand that opening the second is only a matter of time, and theirs hasn't worked out. At least not tonight.

There are three creatures in the room? Five? I can't count them without my glasses. I have to get up—they instantly rush to my feet, rubbing their backs with thin, cold skin against them, like huge, dead Sphynx cats. It's disgusting. The creatures purr and babble, in fact—the creatures want to devour. But who will let them? They rub because they know that their touch is terrifying and disgusting, and they eat the one from whom the warmth has left. They probably run on all fours because they know that it's more frightening for a person when another person runs around on all fours. And they look like people. I kick one particularly disgusting one, with a damp and slimy body. I can feel the ribs and spine through the skin under my bare foot, I immediately pull my leg away, I don't touch it a second time. It's like sticking a foot into the fresh corpse of a person who died of starvation. The creature coughs and giggles, rushes to my feet again, rubbing. 

It's only three steps to the table. It's too long to describe, but in reality, it's only three. That's the only reason I didn't ask my brother to move the table closer, so I could grab my glasses without getting up. And also so I could walk, so those creatures would know that neither my brother nor I were afraid of them.

But they're afraid of a direct look. When I put on my glasses, the creatures jump back, run away, hide—there's the hand of one of them sticking out from behind the chair, its fingers twitching restlessly like cockroach legs, and there's the other one peering out from under my brother's bed. We sleep in the same room, in fact, there's only one room in our apartment... By the way, my brother never woke up. He's a sound sleeper. The creatures rarely manage to wake him with their whispers. Whispering, as I call it.

The creature under my brother's bed—the same one I kicked. The same one that's come back to rub against me again. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't have paid any attention to her, but instead, I bend down and watch her writhe, whine, and crawl as far away as possible into the darkest corner. They don't like being watched. Bitches.

"Bitch," I say, kicking the bedpost. It's actually kind of creepy, even though my brother and I are used to them; after all, they've been with us since childhood. Like when my grandmother died, when my brother was six, it happened to us. But you can't show it, we figured that out even as kids, so you have to swear and speak loudly—they hear fear better in a whisper, maybe because they only lisp themselves. And they've forgotten why I swear. They died a long time ago, after all. And some of them, maybe, weren't even human.

The creature whines, and my brother wakes up, grumbles discontentedly, then says:

"Alka, what are you doing? Go to your kitchen already!"

 Opening the door to the hallway is also a little scary—the darkness sloshes beyond the threshold. Sometimes it seeps into our room like blood from undercooked meat. That's why my brother sleeps closer to the door than I do; he's better at dealing with it than I am.

But you can't tell the darkness you're afraid of it. It's just waiting for its chance, just like the creatures. So I go. Get a drink of water. I don't turn on the light, and on the way I slam the bathroom door, where something scratches and squirms in the mirror—something my brother and I haven't yet come up with a name for. Maybe we'll come up with one.

And then back to sleep. They won't come out until morning; they'll be afraid. But I'll probably still put my glasses on the windowsill where my bed is. I don't want to wade through those creatures again, in case they wake me up again. I just don't want to. Don't think I'm actually afraid of them.