Creepy Laughs and Sweet Scents to the Face

I was sixteen when my niece came into this world. Children are a true blessing to this world, but a curse on a well-functioning household. Between sleepless nights, babyproofing slowing down your every move, and the most fun things in life being locked away or stored in completely inconvenient places the house had become a bit of a nightmare. I love my niece to death, but her presence had caused quite the disturbance in my life.

My first tango with child proofing left me frustrated for five minutes as I struggled with the door to the bathroom. The door handle had been encased with a plastic sphere that required pressure on two points to turn it. Seemed a simple task but I swore the handle had been coated in oil or it was simply defective because it seemed no matter what I did the handle wouldn’t budge, the casing just spun over top of it. Finally, my father, who had been watching from the end of the hallway silently, probably wondering where he had gone wrong with me, came up, shoved me out of the way and in one swift movement opened the door. “Try pushing it in next time dumbass.”

By time my niece was three and I had reached the ripe age of nineteen I felt I had mastered the various obstacles that came with a toddler in the house. I could open doors and cupboards with ease no matter the intricate system of latches placed on them, and baby gates were no match for me even with a handful of food and a hungry dog following my heels in hopes of falling scrapes. But even I was not immune to my own stupidity.

It was summer, and I had been working nights for the past few months. I had to keep my sleep schedule on track so my days off were either spent at the bar with my friends until two in the morning or in the case of that night, sitting in my air-conditioned room beating the heat while playing video games with the sound down low so as not to disturb anyone.

It was around mid-night when things went wrong, my game had frozen during a particularly amazing match for myself. Frustration over took me as the warning of a poor connection flashed on my screen. I threw my controller to the bed and headed to the living room in a rush. My fatal mistake was storming past the light switches in my rush to fix the internet with out throwing them on and bringing light to the darkened room.

I stepped over the plastic gate and into the minefield of a room. Toy’s littered the floor making it impossible to move freely but I didn’t care about that, I stormed through the piles of stuffed animals, books and dolls towards the flashing lights of the modem. Even the sound of the motion-controlled air freshener releasing a puff of scent that grazed the back of my head didn’t deter me. My mother had decided best to place it high enough, so it would catch the motion of everyone in the room, but her short height meant high up was face level with me the tallest person in the house, something I knew well and had made me very wary of being sprayed with very berry citrus, or watermelon summer scent. That night though, I had no deterrence from that or anything else, or so I thought.

A sound popped into the silence, a laugh, high pitched and unexpected. It stopped me in my tracks. An over active imagination had plagued me since my youth, and while I had over come much of it, there was no stopping it this time. I had seen enough horror movies to know what follows a laughter like that. My eyes darted back and forth searching the immediate area for the sound, but I knew in my heart it had come from behind me.

I turned, slowly, my heart pounding. The room was empty, but my fear had not left. The laugh rang out again, it sounded like a child giggling. A three hundred pound nineteen-year-old, as broad as a door way scared of what I would later find out was a toy bear that laughed when squeezed must have been hilarious, undoubtable why the world saw fit to play this cruel joke on me. I would burn the bear in secret a few days later, but in that moment I didn’t know what to do.

A third time the laugh rang out, and my eyes shot to the window, covered by closed blinds that cut off the world from the darkened house. I now know why people always seem to go towards scary noises in horror movies, no matter how much you yell at the screen, they’re compelled no matter how frightening it may be. I bit my lip and swallowed hard as I leaned over the pile of toys between me and the covered window. I pulled the cord and the blinds shot up revealing nothing but an empty street. A single street light illuminated the street corner and I starred at it, transfixed, waiting for a six-year-old in a white dress and with a pale ghostly face to appear before making this gorilla her little b***h and slitting my throat. After a minute of silence and the ghost of an evil child failing to appear, I took a sigh of relief.

I remembered what I had come to do and wanted to fix it quick, so I could go back to the safety of my room. As I turned though the laugh sounded a final time and I had had enough. “Screw this!” I yelled as I booked it for the door.

A pfft only I could hear and a crash the whole house heard, and maybe the neighbors too, signaled the end of my attempted escape. It was not a creepy ghost that caught me only my own stupidity. The very same air freshener I had always avoided for fear of taking a blast to the face and had apparently only narrowly avoided minutes earlier had caught me right in my eyes. I had never, and have never been maced before, but I suspect it was not unlike what I was feeling as I wriggled on the floor yelling out in pain as tears rolled down my cheeks. I would eventually write a letter to the company that manufactured the motion controlled air freshener and while I’m sure they had a good laugh I did notice a decline in advertisement for it and eventually I stopped seeing it on store shelves.

The light flicked on and I heard my father’s voice ring out “What the hell is going on!”

The scene of me flailing about on the floor, hands over eyes was no doubt confusing so I attempted an explanation “No internet, creepy laugh, air freshener, eyes burning.” I stuttered out between cries of pain.  

It took a minute for my folks to realize precisely what had happened. My father let out a laugh, and I knew he was once again shaking his head at my stupidity, while my mother in all her infinite glory said “Well at least you’ll smell nice.”

*

The End

Reviews

[Mary]

thank you for such a lighthearted story, (based on a real experience I imagine- I have seen the scenario you so well describe!) Love this. Especially in such sad times and in our often mean spirited world, we all need to smile more. Keep up the wonderful work!