Insomnia

When I was a little girl, nothing bothered me as much as being in that old Phillips house at night.

It was in that house where my dad had grown up in with his five brothers and one sister, in the bed that one of those brothers died. My cousin and I would cling to our plush horse toys and huddle together under the blankets, peeling away sunburn like snakes shedding their skin, and like those snakes, we were irritable and snappish towards each other.

That's how we deal with fear in my family, or any adverse stimuli. We drink, we abuse one another, we snap like twigs under the weight of sensations we weren't genetically equipped to handle.

My grandmother and grandfather died in that house. My uncle festered with AIDS during the early nineties, and would later break my brother's arm with a branch from a tree and rob us blind.

My father ran away from there when he was 16, out to join the army and fight in Vietnam with his brother. They were tired of breaking their backs drilling oil, tired of watching that bastard wolf-dog Duke tear into neighbors, ripping flesh, and chasing cops to the hoods of their cars.

Even at such a young age, even curled up with my cousin, my best friend until not very long ago, that tiny, three-room house felt so sad that my chest would ache.

In Texas, where all old houses feel like that, a wind kicks up at night.

It doesn't whistle or sigh through the canyons, it shrieks. It slams against the panels of the houses until the paint gets sanded to nothing, and a seven-year-old girl can get knocked right down into a cluster of goatheads, or mesquite thorns, that tear into the meat of tender young hands until they've embedded themselves into sleepless nights and make the owners of those tiny hands shudder into adulthood.

They were prairie ghosts, vengeful and bitter, as angry as a nest of rattlesnakes. On nights like this, when I can't sleep and the heat makes us all a little crazy, I watch old Spike Lee movies and gnaw my fingernails to the bone.

I think of how the wind would slam into the house at night, and no one would remember it but me.