Light seeps in through the slivered gaps between the window shades, dripping littlesplashes of obnoxious sunshine right onto your eyelids. You strain to listen, but hear no sounds from the munchkin's room, so you stretch and turn over. Just for a few more minutes.
But despite the cheery transition from sleep to wakefulness, from shadowy night to revealing day, something unsettling tickles the edges of your awareness. You turn again. And then again. Is that a cry you hear? A faint, almost feline sound, too far away to be your daughter. Or is it? It sounds again, seeming to echo forlornly on another plane, a reality just barely touching your own.
Halloween: two days away. The truth is, I don't care much for trick-or-treating, or even for costumes, unless they turn my daughter into a Jawa. What I do like is a holiday or season that really embraces a certain atmosphere. This is the season for things that are unsettling. For things that make the hairs on your neck stand up (like my daughter channeling The Joker).
One of the best ways to make something creepy is to take something loved and make it just a little . . . off. Like snow-fort building.
Below is an excerpt of a project I worked on at film school, and it should be fine to show your kids, and hopefully it creeps the heck out of them too. They'll never look at Bambi the same way again.
And let me just say, planning scenes that involved untamed predators is no simple task. You've just always got to keep a few first-year film students on-hand to feed to the beasts when they get restless.
As Halloween approaches, Lindsay and I have been asked how we're going to dress Addison up. In some ways, it seems she might like to try "psychopathic killer," but we've been keeping pencils away from her for a while just in case.
Posts for the next week are going to be Halloween themed. Mostly because Halloween is a pretty great holiday. I don't mean in the Friday the 13th or commercial aspect, but more like if you take spookiness in a more literary direction, along the lines of Edgar Allan Poe or Coleridge or Hawthorne or more recently, something like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Before I lose my train of thought and start talking about books (that's what my other blog is for), let me just get to the point:
My toddler just starting asking us about death. Perhaps it's because the house next door has a pretty intense Halloween setup, full of mummies in caskets with separated limbs, and huge spiders, and skeletons and gravestones. What am I supposed to say when she points to each and says, "What's that, dada?" I'd like to start in on The Raven or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but something (my wife) tells me she's not ready.
She might also have learned the "death" concept from her Gramps, who reads her stories like Snow White and says "the dwarfs thought she was dead," instead of "the dwarfs couldn't wake her up" or "the dwarfs wanted to help her because they thought she had an owie."
In any event, here she is, asking her question, which she finishes off with a very emphatic declaration that she knows what she's asking and she will NOT be put off with half-way answers or chuckles and a bait and switch:
My wife fielded the question, which involved saying that "dead" is when a spirit leaves someone's body. Reasonable answer, and it didn't involve dessicated bodies unearthed from thousand-year-old tombs, or decapitated grinning skulls (she already gets enough of that from watching Fantasia). In a few years, however, I do look forward to introducing her to the concept of mostly dead. Quality entertainment will be had.
Since that conversation, we've been selectively pointing out things that are dead. Today, it was the tarantula at the pet store. It was curled up on its back, legs pulled in tight like the clenched fist of a skeleton. At dinner Addison told me, "That 'pider at the pet store was dead." Then she turned her sad little eyes up at me and said mournfully, "I yuv that 'pider so much."
I wonder if it would make her feel better about how many living 'piders there are in the world if I explained how many crawl over her body at night. Shudder. My protective fatherly impulses feel impotent when struck with the reality that 'Piders. Are. Everywhere. 'Tis the season to be creeped out.
After our trips to the gym, Addison and I usually stop in at the health food store next door. It's where we sometimes buy soy milk for a treat. And they have samples.
Addison lives for the samples. She expresses roughly the same amount of glee about samples as she does Disneyland. When she's being a pill about getting in the car for some reason, all we have to do is mention "Trader Joe's" and she flips emotions on a dime. She runs in circles shouting, "Yay! Trader Joe's! Samples! Trader Joe's! Hooray!" Which still makes it hard to get her in the car, but glee is better than belligerence.
I'm pretty sure my sick days would coincide with Addison's sick days. If I had a real job.
Addison snuggled with me through two whole movies while I stroked her hair and rubbed her tummy. Most productive use of my time in months. Hope she feels better tomorrow, though.
Your feet slap the concrete, a staccato beat overlapping the in-out rasp of your breath, which in turn overlaps the hammering of your heart. You inhale as one foot goes down and exhale on the other, just like they taught in high school track to fend off side stitches. Your arms pump at your sides, pistons in a regular motion, kidney punches to an invisible opponent. The whole coordinated operation is a series of layered rhythms which, when everything's working right, strike together in the athletic equivalent of an "amen!"
Finding these agreeable rhythms is a breeze for some people. For them, every run offers a smooth, reliable avenue for scoring hits off of their internal endorphin machine. I am not one of those people.
