January 2012 Blog Chain: Winter Nightmare

Oh yes, friends, it's time for another blog chain post! If you missed the last one, here's the deal: I'm on AbsoluteWrite, a website for writers and wanna-bes like myself, and one of the many writing exercises is the blog chain. Participants choose a theme for a month, and everyone writes a blog post on the subject. The links below my post are to the blogs of other participants. Check 'em out, they're awesome!


My winter nightmare includes three of the acronyms listed on the right side of this page: MO, NY, and USN. In the spring, I paid a visit to my long distance boyfriend. He was in the United States Navy, and we lived a few states apart. That boyfriend became my fiance that same spring, as well as the daddy-to-be of the little Kidney Bean stirring around in my belly. With a smile on my face and one suitcase, I graduated college that summer and left behind everything and everyone I knew in MO for the dark and scary world of NY.


I had never been to New York, and the way I imagined it was like a dangerous, more portably hostile place than Texas. I mean, Texans carry guns everywhere, or so the stereotypes say. But they also have that Southern charm, and only use the guns on evil doers who deserve it. Basically, Texans are superheros. But New Yorkers? In my head, I pictured a city covered in trash and graffiti, where even small children walked the streets with knives on their person and would shank you if you stepped in the puddle they wanted to stomp in. A very scary place, indeed.


The summer passed with no shankings, though I still worried. In the fall, I married the poor man who still comes home to me every night that he can. And then we come to winter.


In winter, I was eight months pregnant. I still did not know anyone other than my husband in the area, and was so thankful for how he took care of me. But then his work took him from me. He began working 12 hour rotating shifts, and I only saw enough of him to kiss him hello/goodbye and hand him his bag of food for the day. I was in full panic mode, because I am terrified of being alone at night. I couldn't do it back in MO, and thinking of being alone, in an apartment with no other tenants in the building, set back from the road where it was barely visible, surrounded by trees, next to an empty lot, in New York...I was a mess. Oh, and remember that story about the woman who had her baby taken from her, and the kidnapper fled to NY? That's when I was in NY. My level of terror went up 100%.


One night, I was in the bedroom, and I was trying to fall asleep. It was about 2am, and I had barricaded the bedroom door like I always do. Told you I was scared. Now, the bedroom shared a wall with the kitchen, and the bathroom was on the other side of the kitchen. Yeah, it was a strange set-up. But in the kitchen, I heard a noise. Instantly awake, I listened, and heard it again. It sounded like someone was in the bathroom. My husband wasn't due back for hours, and he would have come in to tell me if he was home early. The noise continued. It sounded like someone had broken in somehow (through the bathroom window, I imagined) and was going through our belongings in the bathroom. I got online and a friend of mine was on facebook. I told her what was going on and that I was scared. She told me to call the cops, but my phone was on the charger in the living room. To get to it, I would have to expose myself to whoever was in my apartment.


The noises moved to the kitchen. They were right next to me now and I was shaking. I had difficulty typing. I had no weapons, and the only thing blocking the door was a metal fan and a pile of empty suitcases. At this point, I wasn't worried about me, just my baby. They could rape me, steal everything I owned, whatever they wanted, as long as they left me alive enough to have my baby and let him be safe before I died. The story of the kidnapped baby lurked in my thoughts: what if this person wanted to cut the baby out of me? What kind of life would my child have? Would he be abused, or well cared for? I couldn't take the chance of him being mistreated. If I was confronted by the stranger in my home, I would do my best to make sure my baby and I survived together, or died together. I would not let him be taken from me.


My laptop charging cord slid off the bed, the large part (what is that called?) hitting the floor with a loud thunk. I froze. Up until then I had been silent but for the clacking of my keyboard. Now, they knew I was here. I waited for the bedroom door to fly open and throw me into a world of pain at the hands of some maniac.


Nothing happened. The noises stopped, and didn't pick up again. I stayed awake and online with that friend for hours, not wanting to leave the bedroom even though it seemed like the danger was gone. When I heard my husband's tires in the driveway (POS car in a gravel driveway - I knew it was him) I almost cried I was so thankful. I heard him walk in and cleared away everything from the door. I told him what had happened, and he walked through and inspected everything. Nothing seemed out of place, and the only exits had been locked from inside. There was no way anyone could have been in the apartment. We both started to think that maybe being alone so much was starting to get to me.


The next night, I decided to go to bed while it was still light out, so I went to the bathroom for the last time. As I sat on that toilet, I worried that tonight I would hear noises again. Was I having auditory hallucinations? Was it our landlord, creeping through our stuff and locking the door behind him when he left? Would they come back tonight, and finish what they had started? So many thoughts slid across my brain and set my heart to pounding. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement by the door of the bathroom.


My heart stopped. I was afraid to look. I couldn't even finish urinating. My entire body just froze. Slowly, I turned my head, scared I would see a muscled man with scars on his face caressing a knife and smiling a promise of pain. I saw nothing. But then, movement again. My eyes drifted down.


Ladies and gentlemen, the cause of my ten hour terror, the thing that made me think about killing someone, forced me to confront my own helplessness and mortality, the reason I made the heartbreaking decision to take my son with me if I was about to die....was a mouse. Yes, it was abundantly clear that the mouse (well, mice, as I later discovered) had been the source of all the commotion in the bathroom and kitchen. What I had heard was the mouse/mice knocking into shampoo bottles that hit the walls, wobbled, and fell to the floor. In the kitchen, they ran through my strainer of clean utensils, jogged laps in my pots, and knocked my non-perishables off the table (the only place to store them - small apartment) to the floor.


My winter nightmare has a rather humorous ending, I know. But at the time, before I knew it was just a creepy rodent, I truly feared for my life. Definitely one of those "look back and laugh at it" stories. Now, head on out of here and check out these other blog chain participants!

Participants and posts:orion_mk3 - http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to this month's post)
MamaStrong - http://writingofme.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
pyrosama - http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
Turndog-Millionaire - http://turndog-millionaire.com/ (link to this month's post)
Alpha Echo - http://aprilplummer81.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
LilGreenBookworm - http://themayhemofwritingsahm-style.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
Domoviye - http://lets-get-happy.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
writingismypassion - http://charityfaye.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)kimberlycreates - http://www.kimberlycreates.com/ (link to this month's post)
Suzanne Seese - http://viewofsue.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
Diana Rajchel - http://blog.dianarajchel.com/ (link to this month's post)
Ralph Pines - http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ (link to this month's post)
Alynza - http://www.alynzasmith.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
Literateparakeet - http://lesliesillusions.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
in_one - http://quirkythomas.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
Tomspy77 - http://thomaswillamspychalski.wordpress.com/ (link to this month's post)
Inkstrokes - http://drlong67.wordpress.com/ (link to this month's post)
kiwiviktor81 - http://storygenerator.net/ (link to this month's post)