Sam Finally Sleeps

Sam snuck out of his bedroom, stepping carefully around the squeaks in the hallway floor. He slowly, carefully put his head around the corner of his mother’s bedroom door. He was holding his breath. The TV was on, as it always was when Mom slept. He waited until the scene changed so that the room lit to something brighter than dusk. He never had anything against Happy Days re-runs, but now he truly appreciated the old show.

Sam looked carefully. Mom’s hair was just hair. Just hair. He visibly relaxed, releasing the breath he’d been holding. Silently he turned away, avoiding the squeaks again, and slipped back into his bedroom. He shut the door as quietly as possible, which was pretty quiet. He had figured out how to use the WD-40, despite the push-button-nozzle having gone missing. Sam turned the light up and looked around his room.

No. It hadn’t been a dream. Mom really had taken all his spiral notebooks when she found him still drawing at 1:00 a.m. And that snaky thing was on the floor. Sam poked it with his foot. If it really had been alive, it was dead now.

1:00 a.m. was really really late for a fifth grader to be awake on a school night, he agreed with Mom about that. But he hadn’t known how late it had gotten. He was trying to finish a story line before he forgot it. That’s all. He just didn’t look up at his Sponge Bob digital alarm clock.
Sam sat on the corner of his bed. It was kind of low because the box springs were sitting directly on the floor. Right after Mom bought the new bed for him, he’d kept trampolining on it, and broke the box springs. Mom was starting law school then and hadn’t had the extra money to buy another box springs, so she put it on the floor and told him that was his punishment. He had to sleep that way until after she was through law school and could afford to replace it.

Sam wondered if the fact that she was in what she called ‘an in-between time’ had anything to do with what he saw. The amazing thing he saw. In-between to Mom meant that she’d sat for the bar but didn’t know yet if she passed. She kept calling the bar examiners ‘evil little trolls’.
Sam knew that when Mom was stressed she was much more apt to act like her Mom, the grandmother who passed away when Sam was only two years old. And Mom had classic stories of her mother’s insane reactions to situations.

One night, Sam saw his Mom go after the old cat. The old cat, Binks, was suffering from some sort of kitty dementia, and had bitten Sam on the cheek in the middle of the night. No one knew why. Everyone but Binks had been asleep at the time. Sam and his sister, Allison, watched their Mom as she woke, already in a dead heat running for her child who was screaming in obvious pain. Mom grabbed a broom and chased Binks all over the house, barely ever touching him with the ends of the bristles, but wailing some aboriginal scream that caused all the animals in the house to hide. Heck, Sam and Allison hid too.

Maybe that was the forerunner of the snakes.

Mom had joked about it before, but he hadn’t believed her. She joked all the time with him and Allison that when she was PMS’y or angry that she turned into her "real self", some Goddess who was sort of a mix of the outward characteristics of both Medusa and Kali. The three of them had laughed themselves stupid one night while driving in the car. Mom could make them laugh harder than anything sometimes. A smile played on Sam’s face for a moment thinking about how funny Mom could be.

When it first happened, Sam thought he was seeing things. Mom had crawled out of her bed and headed for the bathroom, and Sam tried to pretend sleep quickly, but she was quick this night. When she saw him, she probably wasn’t really awake yet, but there he was, drawing cartoon characters with language balloons hovering near their mouths.

She got taller. She literally seemed to grow. Sam would bet that when Mom was mad, she was at least 6 feet 4 inches tall, and not the 5 foot 7 she normally was. But that was normal stuff. That could happen on a sunny day in the middle of June, in the Wal Mart. That growth didn’t surprise him.

Sam poked the thing in the floor again. It was turning a funny shade of gray. He pushed it with his toe a little harder, until the things face was toward him. Snake. It had to be some sort of snake. And it had fallen out of his mother’s head.

Maybe if he hadn’t said "about 10?" when Mom asked him if he knew what time it was, she wouldn’t have gone over whatever cliff edge she’d stepped off of. Maybe. Or maybe it would have happened anyway. But when the word "ten" had come out of his mouth, Mom grew. This always sort of made him laugh because Mom was virtually harmless, making the growth pointlessly funny and not scary at all. Plus it reminded him of a peacock spreading its tail feathers. That’s what really made him laugh; thinking of Mom spreading her tail feathers, and strutting while she lectured.

As she grew though, she reached up to her face and rubbed it, trying to wake up more before she said anything. Her face rub turned into a hair rake, which is when he realized her hair looked more like snakes than hair. When a ‘chunk’ fell off, it wiggled and slithered, and showed its fangs before it laid still. That was disturbing. But then, Sam realized she was still rubbing her face, trying to wake up or calm down, he wasn’t sure which and picking up notebooks at the same time!

Four arms. Not two. Four arms. Mom was still there, but she was now in the body of a 6 foot 4 inch, four-armed, snake haired Goddess.

She never said a word. She just quickly picked up all of his notebooks, not just the one he was currently working in, shook her head "no: making the snakes wave to and fro, and walked back to her room.

He wasn’t sure what to do. He grabbed his cell phone and texted Allison. "r u awake? do u know about mom and snakes?"

He started pacing. Then he was afraid Mom might hear him. So he turned his light back down and opened his door a couple of inches so he could hear her if she got up again. He climbed under his covers and waited for Allison to respond. He was pretty sure she would be awake. She was in college, so she studied late a lot. He was just starting to feel like he might be able to sleep sometime tonight when his phone trilled. Allison’s response was "yes. lets talk tomoro. no danger. go to sleep."

Sam pulled Kleenex from the box and covered the snake. Then he put his phone back in his back pack, and laid down. Everything seemed okay again. The patterns of light from Mom’s TV played along the door of his bedroom. He could hear her snoring softly. Allison said it was okay, that there was no danger. So Mom was some freak of nature. Or maybe she really was some lesser Goddess of some archaic religion. Did it really matter? She was still his Mom and he loved her fiercely. Besides, if anybody ever messed with him, having a Mom with snakes for hair and four arms could come in handy.

Finally able to go back to sleep, Sam began to lightly snore.