The face it leers at me — the face on the wall. It is just a trick of the light, light reflected through bevelled glass on the front door, going through it in such a way to shape a weird twisting face. A face that greets me during the night, when the front porch light is turned on.
Thankfully those nights are rare, the porch light being on, because…just because. They just are. Often I turn it off so I don’t see the face when I go to the bathroom (which is adjacent to the front door).
In bed,with the porch light on, just knowing it is there gives me a small chill. That forever face with its V-shaped mouth and hard eyes written in 100-watt soft white light. No stranger to night terrors I am, childhood full of frozen moments where time leaked away slowly, body stiff, knowing the very air pressed itself against you with baleful intent.
They are old friends of mine, the quivering shadow against the window, the invisible presence by the bed, moving will-o-wisps out of the corner of your eye, cold LED lights blinking like eyes, goosebumps appearing like magic, rushing across the body as if propelled by wind.
Later, as I got older, these old friends slowed down and lost their power, only to be supplanted by the very real fears of not making a living, losing people, and not ever finding ones way through the world.
It takes a leering face in the darkness of the night to resurrect and transport these old, old fears, here to stop and say hello, why yes, we are still around. We just wanted to remind you of childhood and through that, remark on your adulthood, how the simple honesty of being afraid of the dark is sometimes the only sane thing to feel.








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