The Boogeyman

The child, S-shaped and sleeping, sucks her thumb in honeysuckle dreams. Tomboy hair, mussed by her mother's hand. She wakes.

"Honey, don't suck your thumb. You're too old."

What did the shrink call it? An "oral fixation," I think. The shrink, the pant-suited talking head that reeked of chimney soot. Was it that box of little white sticks that kept her happy?

Her brother teases: "The boogeyman comes for kids who suck their thumbs because he knows they'll never grow up."

She searches for the boogeyman her entire life, inhaling the embers of a slash-and-burn childhood. Her exhaust pipe face spewing the chemicals, hoping to catch the boogeyman's outline traipsing through her mist.

One day he comes. He comes and steals her breath, clamping down on her throat, squishing her lungs to bleeding black between his alien fingers. He comes from behind; she never sees his face.

The woman, S-shaped and sleeping, sucks her thumb in honeysuckle dreams. No tomboy hair, a bare scalp, traced by her mother's hand. She doesn't wake.