Green screen.

I sit back and watch you stumble from room to room, face yellow with the pallor that has become you.

Mouth drawn, eyes rolled at half staff.

It makes my hair stand on end.

You're a cadaver-weaving with toxic legs.

I don't want you to go to bed, I'm afraid you may not wake up. I know at some point tonight I'll have to leave you to your hallucinations while I revisit mine.

I finally go home, lay in my bed with the lights out-feeling so completely empty.

I remember when I was just a little child I would imagine that there was a man at the end of my bed, in plush armchair, knife in fist.

I knew that if I would scream out to you, you would just ignore me.-I keep my mouth shut.

It was hard to sleep when you were walking the walls with your hands, reading your way through the house like Braille, knocking off pictures, breaking lamps.

You use to be strangely calm as you told me there was no one at the end of my bed.

Come to think of it, there was a night when you crawled into bed with me and described your fears to me as a child. You were drunk with prescription perdition, and you told me things no 8 year old should hear, much less comprehend. 

As you snore, there is a raspy, frightening sound. My heart raced because I was terrified you would die and the man at the end of the bed would get me. I would lay my head on your chest. You felt bone thin from drug abuse. There was no cushion where you breasts should have been, only skeleton. I would reach up and twist your hair with my thumb and index finger. It broke of in my hand, crunching under the weight of my tender touch.

Looking down, I could see that the man was motionless.

Expressionless.

Mute.

I'd drift off to sleep.

I don't remember how old I was when the man went away. I think it was the night that Nathan beat you and you were laying on the coach, blood soaked.

Hours later I would come back to you, awakened again by the incessant screeching of  your voice.

Second battle.

One night.

After I finally fell asleep, you gathered up me and Amber. She was in infinite slumber, unwilling to rise for you. We got to the neighbors and you told me that everything was okay. I was inconsolable, snot bubbly, hiccupping, bellowing shrieks.

That night you were sober with fear.

I next night I begged you to keep the light on, "Because the man watches me all night."

You were exhausted, took your apology in pill form, and passed out. The light from the hall glowed eerily against his face.

He never moved. Never breathed. Never spoke.

But this night he looked me dead in the face, whispering trial of tribulation, slow motion. Strobe lighted pictures flashing before me of my life to come; and empty house with no one there. Reels of tape replaying my future at 9,12,15,18. Me in the foreground, in front of a green screen. I watched fascinated, no longer fearing this apparition. Because the knife was not for me.

It was for them.

After his gaped-mouth silent shrieking, and what I can only describe as spontaneous combustion, he disappeared without so much as a smoke trail. There was a lonely pace at the foot of my bed. Empty, and vast. A puddle of tears where his chair once sat.

It would only be a few years into the future when I would realize that night was the night that I lost my best angel.