that in-between place

My old house was on a very busy road in a small town of a state that was too far north.

Across the street was a graveyard. My bedroom was located in the front of the house and had a view of commuters rushing this way or that, always going too fast for my taste, always making that seaside whooshing noise that started with a hum and ended with an echo. But if I looked past the two-lane highway, I saw a metal fence. Through the metal fence were gravestones. Beyond those gravestones were more gravestones, a few obelisks- for policemen or town officials said their inscriptions- and plenty of sunken pauper’s graves mixed in, their edges eaten up by grassy weeds.

But there were no ghosts in there. And if there were, they never bothered me. In my home, what I thought were ghosts but couldn’t know for sure was the grumbling furnace that lived in our basement. It lurched on and off forcefully in moments of complementary quiet; volcanic, explosive-sounding belches that drowned out the television for a few seconds or the person on the other line of your phone conversation. Our furnace was a monster from a Stephen King book, always threatening to send us sky high in a ball of flames if it exploded, making me an unhappy Dorothy with no Toto for comfort.

But the house was too big and drafty to substantiate its removal. We needed heat. Everybody needs heat. We are human.

The door to the basement was in the dining room. It was locked at all times and led to short steps made for people with very small feet. The house was more than a hundred years old; the people must have been smaller in the 1800’s, or else maybe there was a shortage of wood and short, thin planks was all they had left when it came time to put in the basement stairs.

“I hate going down those stairs,” my mom would say whenever we lost power and the circuit breaker needed to be reset. Her biggest fear was of falling down steps and hitting her head. It was not my biggest fear, but I doubt I would enjoy it.

When you were alone in the house, you never felt alone, and it laid the backdrop for paranoid thoughts and overambitious childhood fantasies of scary stuff.

One night, I was lying in bed. I couldn’t sleep. My brother was asleep. His bedroom was directly across the hall from mine and his door was closed. My mother was asleep; I could hear her snoring from her bedroom at the other end of the hall. My father was not home, but working a night shift.

I closed my eyes. I opened them.
I closed my eyes. The furnace boomed and woke me.
I opened my eyes, and decided I needed to use the bathroom. I pulled my blankets off, releasing myself from their weight and their warmth.

When I entered the hallway I noticed my mother’s bedroom light was on; a yellow glow peaked out from behind her closed door.
Reading. She must be reading, now. I did not hear her snoring anymore.
I will say hello, I thought, as I walked past the bathroom and headed toward the yellow.
I knocked, and started to turn the handle before she could reply.
Inside her room, she was lying in bed. Without looking in my direction, she said, “Hello, sweetie.”
“I can’t sleep either,” I said, noticing suddenly that the yellow light did not come from her lamp, but from a television set in the corner of the room.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said my mother as her lips widened into a thin, uncomfortable smile.
And then I remembered.
My mother didn’t have a television set.

I’ve had dreams like that all my life. Dreams where everything is the same as my reality, save one, small thing. The presence, however, of this one small thing sends a shiver through my sleeping self, and I begin to try to waken.

Every sleeping second after that becomes a race to escape the realization that I am not awake, but asleep and dreaming. The fear comes from the knowledge that in dreams, anything and everything can happen.