Monday, March 19, 2012

Good Night Darling...

Mark and I had been living together for over a year. During that period, we had adopted a cat. Although adorable, she was a bit of a challenge. Life had made her a complete nervous wreck. Swift movements and great guttural laughs were a thing of the past in our home. All our efforts were focused on making her feel safe.

One night while we were all sound asleep; Mark had one of his typical nightmares. They use to scare me to no end when we first met. In the dead of the night, Mark would start screaming in that quivery spectrum of sounds made by someone attempting to scream yet only managing to make horrible creepy sounds. He would also reach out for something that he alone could see coming to him, making him look like a walking dead from the 1950’s zombie movies. The worst for me were the eyes. He would look at this coming danger eyes wide open in terror. I would, in turn, scream with perfect pitch while sitting bolt upright in bed wondering what the matter was while contributing my fair share of confusion. Most nights, Mark would not even wake up, other times; when he did, he would clearly show annoyance at my hysteria, he hated these nightmares of mine which woke him up. Either way, the night was over for me.

On that particular night, prior to Mark’s nightmare, we were a happy sleeping family like many others. Mark was to my right, by the window and my cat was curled up by my left shoulder. Then it all began. Mark had one of his sudden nightmares. I produced one of my perfect pitch screams, but this time, it was followed by such horrible pains that my screams morphed into hysterical laughers. Mark suddenly woke up and started screaming in hope of shutting me up; after all, we did have neighbors, to no avail. No amount of shaking or poking would calm me down. In order to shed some light on the situation, Mark got up and switched the light on. What he saw was pure carnage. There was blood everywhere. The walls, the ceiling, the bed, Mark and more importantly my face were covered in blood. I was disfigured. At first sight, I had been in a fistfight with a razor blade and did poorly. My nose had been slashed open down to the bone from the nostril to the eye; I had gashes all over my face and neither one of us could figure out what could have happened. Mark tossed me a towel; the bright white one of course, put a pair of jeans on and took me to the hospital. By then all the neighbors were awake, watching the scene assuming family discord. At the hospital, we still could not provide an explanation as to what might have taken place, making it highly suspicious. Poor Mark, on that night he lost his virtual good boyfriend gold star in the eyes of onlookers. By the time they finished the last stitch of my new facial railway tracks, we were free to go home.

As we walked in, the scene seemed more ghastly still than it had appeared an hour earlier. The sheets had been tossed aside, the blood on the walls looked like arterial gusts and paw prints were all over the window. The cat? The cat! Oh goodness gracious, the cat! It turned out that when Mark had his nightmare the cat jumped in panic, landing on my face, struggling to get a good grip to bounce off the bed.


Nowadays Mark does not get that many nightmares anymore. It may have something to do with the cat relocating her sleeping grounds nearby his shoulder. Either way, we sleep much better than we used to.