'Nolan County Banshee' by Brandon R. Garcia

Dreams never fool me.

Once my eyes are closed they’ll slither like vines into my bed and try to smother me without me knowing, but they’re not as sneaky as they think. I know they’re coming.

They squeeze themselves tight around my arms and legs, so tight I can’t move at all. My brain feels fuzzy and air that can’t get to my head blows up into a bubble in my stomach.

Sure, when I was real little it would scare me half to death. I would wake up, but my body wouldn’t. I’d try to scream but my lips wouldn’t move. I’d struggle to sit up but everything was still unconscious.

Now I know better than to get left behind. Now I just hold still and wait for the vines to wrap me up like a mummy and drag me down to sleep. It doesn’t hurt. Now it only takes a few minutes. I’ll snooze all night and wake up like nothing happened.

It was dumb of me to tell Baby about the vines.

“Pauline?” she whispers.

I don’t bother answering. I was trying to do a good thing. I was trying to help her go to sleep. Of course it comes back to bite me in the butt.

“Pauline?” she says. “Pauline, the vines are being nasty.”

I keep my head beneath the quilt, my face turned toward the wall. The nauseating light from the street lamp pours through our bedroom window and stains the wall yellow like sour milk.

“Pauline, the vines’re all icky and slimy and they’re touching me.”

“Shut up, Baby.”

My little sister’s real name is Betty but everyone calls her Baby. She doesn’t mind anyone calling her that except me.

“Mooom!” she yells.

“Dang it, Baby, shut up!”

I flip over to sneer at her. She’s sitting up in bed with the blanket curled like a funnel cake around her scrawny body. Her feet stick out off the edge of the bed. The bottoms of her white socks are smeared with dirt.

“Don’t call me—”

“Shhhhh!”

We listen to the wood floors. When the house is quiet they warn us of who’s coming and tell how close they are.

When we’re too loud, our older brother Mack lets us know by pounding on the wall. If he’s really ticked off he’ll march into our room and suffocate me with one of his pillow. He’s got two of them. He’s also got a full-sized mattress with a blue bedspread and a matching rug on the floor.

Mack is four years older than me, and Baby is four years younger. Mack is 24 years younger than Daddy, and Daddy’s four years younger than our mother. When Mack turns 18 in four and a half years I’ll get to have his room. Or sooner if he goes to live with Daddy in Big Spring like he says he is.

All I can hear is Frisky chasing cockroaches downstairs.

“Pauline, I’m scared,” Baby says.

“Boo hoo.”

I lie back down and try to think about something else — Mack’s room. My future room.

“Pauliiine …”

“Shut the hell up and get over here Betty!”

Baby’s retarded I think. Literally. Mother says she just craves attention but I honest to God think there’s a problem with her, a medical problem.

Take her fibbing.

One afternoon she busts through the screen door in the kitchen, screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Mama! A coyote took Frisky! I saw him take Frisky! There he goes!”

For hours Mack and Mother and me scour the ranch for any trace of our family cat. Betty won’t rest till she sees bones.

“Daddy woulda found him!” she howls all through dinner and on way past bedtime. “Daddy woulda saved him!”

After Baby finally cries herself to sleep Mack hears a muffled meow in the laundry room.

Mother’s door is shut for the night, so Mack and me go downstairs by ourselves and stay quiet and listen. Another meow, louder, like it’s coming from a cave. Mack opens the latch to the drier and Frisky fires out like a rocket, hissing at us on his way.

When Baby wakes up the next morning I yank her out of bed first thing and drag her down the hall by her little wrist.

I knock on Mother's door and wait. She always takes forever to open it.

“You're going to get the belt,” I tell her. Baby turns her chin up at me and says nothing the whole time.

Any normal kid would learn.

After Baby finishes getting spanked she runs, literally runs to the bathroom mirror. Is that me? she thinks. She doesn’t bother wiping her red swollen eyes. She leaves the tears burning on her face and does dramatic poses. I’m a movie star!

I was a year younger than Baby the last time Mother spanked me. I stole some Band-Aids while we were  getting groceries.

“Take that back inside, Pauline. Give it to the cashier and tell him you are sorry. Tell him you will never do it again. I’m humiliated, Pauline, humiliated. Hurry please.”

I handed the box to the cashier, but when I tried to apologize I just couldn’t find the words.

“I’m … I’m … I’m ...” I said. All I heard was “hurry hurry hurry,” over and over again, like a siren.

Baby’s blanket whips behind her as she rushes into bed with me.

“I’m scared, Pauline.”

“I heard you the first 10,000 times.”

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

Baby is scared of everything, literally everything. You name it: lightning, thunder, horror movies, opera music, wheelchairs, church, all the usual things that give little kids the willies --- but believe me, it doesn’t stop there.

When she runs out of real things to be scared of, she starts making them up.

It’s been about six weeks since the lobsters in the toilet started attacking her when she pees. Of course this only happens when she’s using the bathroom by herself.

“I’ve had it!” I say right to her face as I roll out of bed and put on my slippers. “This is the last time, Betty Iris. You’re so stupid!”

And since everyone's scared of rabies right now, Baby has to be twice as scared.

It literally hasn’t rained all summer. Mother says the wild animals are looking for water, and they’re passing the rabies to the dogs and cats and raccoons here in town.

Dalenette Dollins, this blond chubby girl in my class, got bitten by a dog she found poking around her alley about a month ago. She had to get two dozen shots, one after the other, right in her stomach. The newspaper wrote a story about it and put her picture on the inside page. She brought extra copies and gave them out in class when they let her out of the hospital.

“When you have rabies you turn in to a zombie,” I told Baby. “Your eyes get all sunken in and you get so thirsty you turn in to zombie.”

It was dumb of me to tell her that, I admit.

Three or four times a day she'll yell “rabies are outside!” in the same way people yell “fire!” or “run!”

“Betty Iris,” Mother says while rubbing her temple. “You’re acting ridiculous, just ridiculous. Stop.”

She hasn’t yet. Frisky isn’t allowed upstairs now, and as we found out, we can no longer watch TV shows with dogs.

To avoid another panic over Lassie, Mother took me and Baby to the movies last Saturday.

Baby insisted we see Darby O’Gill and the Little People, this kiddie movie about leprechauns. Mack got to stay home. Lucky.

The movie wasn’t showing here in town at the Texas, so we had to drive all the way to Snyder just to watch it.

The old theater there was musty and freezing cold, the exact opposite of the weather outdoors. I started to feel drowsy mid-way through the movie, and my chair kept getting cozier. The vines started tugging gently on my ankle.

Suddenly Baby starts screaming.

She’s literally twice as loud as the theater speakers. My heart flinches and the eight or nine other people watching the movie stare at us in utter shock, completely ignoring the creepy grim reaper on the screen, flying toward us and making silly ghost noises. My mother grabs each of our arms and makes for the door.

The afternoon sun is pure white and I’m totally blind by the time we get to the car. Baby hasn’t let up. She’s hysterical.

Mother grips Baby’s shoulders like a steering wheel. She’s gritting her teeth so hard she's crying. I can’t tell if she’s shaking Baby, or if it’s the other way around.

“What- what happened?” My voice sounds quivery. “What did she see?”

“The banshee!” she panted.

“ ... the what?”

“Banshee!”

Baby starts kicking Mother in the ribs.

“... 'banshee?' What's a banshee?”

Mother did not want to talk to either of us on the drive home. I meant to look the word up but never remembered.

Baby shuts her eyes for the night about 20 minutes after I take her to the bathroom. The vines come to get me not long after.

At first I think I’m still dreaming when I hear the ghost sounds.

Even after sit up and  put on my slippers, the room still looks fake, like it’s made of plywood or cardboard.

My hand wobbles as I turn the knob and peer into the hall.

The boos grow louder and farther away. The hallway twists into a dark knot. Miles out there is my mother’s door, half-open. I can’t see her or anything else inside — only the lamp in her room. It’s always bright but right now it looks like a furnace in there, and instead of red and orange the flames are pale and yellow and cold. That's where the boos are coming from.

She’s crying. Mother's crying.

I'm wide awake. I start to walk out the doorway.

Then I pause to think. And the more I think about it the more I think it’s something else that’s making those noises. They don’t sound silly or sad anymore; they sound sick.

Humans don’t make noises like that. They just don’t. They can’t.

Then comes the picture: My mother emerging from the door, naked and filthy. Clumps of red dirt are stuck in her wild hair. Her dried-up tongue hangs out of her mouth like a leather sock. She’s foaming at the mouth. And she's thirsty. Every inch of her body is thirsty. Water, blood, it doesn’t matter. Anything will do at this point.

I slam my eyes shut. I'd rather not know.

I close our bedroom door silently, hold it for a moment, choke back my scream and lock the deadbolt. I walk backwards and slip into bed as calmly as I can.

The vines quit coming to me. There’s no point anymore.

I can’t sleep with my ear on the floorboards.