Watching the news

I distinctly remember being invincible. My body was small then, it took two hands to manage a quart of milk, my feet were barely the width of the stairs leading to grandma and grandpa's room.

Back then I had an instinctual ability to ward off evil. I knew, for instance, that if I crossed my pinkies and sang "Mares Eat Oates and Does Eat Oats..." during the last, pitch-dark stretch of the bike ride home from Marney's, the razor-toothed gutter trolls that lived in the drainage ditch couldn't lay a finger on me. Nobody taught me that, I just knew it. And it worked every single time. Just like no one taught me that the thing in the closet couldn't open the door from the inside, or that direct light, even indirect light from the hall, rendered all stray boogeymen totally powerless.

The little me had the ability to govern everything, to the point that I would actually create things to be scared of for fun, a hand puppet on a candle-lit wall, a horror-house in my friend Herbie's basement. I would allow myself to be scared, and stop it whenever it became bothersome or boring.

I don't remember when I ceased being invincible. It's like one day I was, and the next day I wasn't. But I was, once.

Posted by Antigeist at March 19, 2003 06:19 PM