Just a few weeks ago, I encountered a disturbing, repeating experience that makes my stomach churn when I think about it. One night, I was lying in the dark, but my body wouldn’t let me sleep. I tossed and turned, eager to plunge into the peaceful silence of sleep. My eyes were drooping ever so slightly, and, as if far away, I heard the creaking of my door. Reality jerked me awake, and the growing crack of the door opening freaked me out a little. My parents were gone for the month, and my adult sister Arianna never visited me while I was asleep, but I saw Arianna slowly inch into my room. Her eyes were closed, yet sometimes fluttered open a little. She finally made it into the darkness, holding something shiny and metalic. I could tell she was sleepwalking. As she got closer to my bed, I saw she was holding a knife.
It felt as if my heart had dropped in my stomach. I couldn’t wake her up, because that could kill her. Instead, I slowly and quietly crawled out of my bed, and into the corner of my room. She, very slowly, got to the foot at the bed, and stood there for a while, before she stabbed the knife in the mattress. She tugged the blade out of the bed, and, very slowly, walked out of the room.
I stood at the corner of my room for a while, too paralyzed to even move, but after a few minutes, I gathered up as much courage as possible and lied on my bed, not sleeping for the whole night.
The next morning, Arianna seemed her normal self, happily chatting away about her job, with no memory of that night. She told me I looked ill, and made me stay home from school. “Pretty little thirteen-year-old girls like you need their beauty sleep,” she joked cheerfully. I smiled weakly, but didn’t tell her I was more afraid to fall asleep at the moment than death. When she left for work, I set a kitchen timer for twenty minutes, and slept in shifts, until I heard my sister open the door.
That night, she went into my room again, this time with a kitchen skewer. She repeated this for many nights, each with a different weapon such as a fork, a pair of scissors, And a scalpel. When she discovered I had been in the corner during the night, she started stabbing the wall where I stayed when she went into my room. I set up blankets and pillows in the bathtub of my bathroom and locked the door, but she discovered I slept in there, too. She would repeatedly stab the bathroom door a number of times before she went back to bed. The bathroom door won’t hold much longer, the holes have made it not sturdy.
One of these days she will get me, and I don’t know how to stop her, but I do know that I will never have the heart to tell her the horror she has caused me.
