Words

On nights like this, Una found herself wondering how she ever learned to sleep in the first place. It seemed a fairly simple task, fairly mechanical. Billions of people around this tiny planet do it every night. How easily, Una realized, its simplicity could be stolen away merely by a series of words. Words that, to any normal children out there, kindle and comfort until a friendly slumber blankets over them.

She remembered how difficult it was, this thing called sleep, as a child when she discovered the world outside the day. When the sun went down, the world became shrouded in darkness, and the night came out to play: Shadow and sound, tricks of light and shifting wind. And the fairy tales...

Una knew that somewhere out there (she suspected, like most children would, in the bushes) hid a man (or his workers) watching her from afar to later pass an annual judgment on her performances. Una thought that if she had been really bad, the coal would not only be placed in her sock, it might end up cracked against her skull, revealing a diamond fit for a hospital bill and leaving her permanently brain damaged and in dire need of some form of robotic limb for proper functioning.

For years, Una had worn a bike helmet to bed every Christmas Eve, just in case there had been some strategically placed spy-like cameras, and Agents' headquarters had gotten word about random acts of curiosity in the loo, a concept, her mother assured her, that was very naughty indeed.

Along with Santa Claus and his minions, there had been the candy house in the forest. This tale would haunt her for the rest of her life, hands jittering uncontrollably from the shock. When she discovered the place had been real, she declared Santa to be nothing more than a fabricated character made to keep children in line with promises of rewards for behaving like humans should (yet even as adulthood is reached, still do not). He was unseen, and therefore unreal. He was comparatively like the Boogie Man, another ploy to keep children in bed at night for fear of their feet getting eaten. Una had been up plenty of times for a glass of water. Regarding him as anything more than a personification of a hyperactive imagination was not an option. Rest assured, they were both purely fictional.

But this house... Una had actually seen this house. It was nearly a mile inside the forest that resides just aside her own home. She had discovered it on one (thankfully) sunny day as she played a game of hide-and-seek with her babysitter, though feeling quite a bit older than a baby, Una declared her to be one of her older, more sophisticated friends. Unknown to dear Una, the sitter, whose role was obscenely overrated, found Una's games to be quite trivial as well as just plain silly, though she would never use such a term out loud. She used this particular game to be rid of the girl for a little while. "Hide real good," she would humor. Those were the final words spoken to her for two days.

They found her cold, wet and unconscious in a trench built as though it had been dug by children. No one was sure if it had always been there (perhaps the neighbor boys were playing War) or if she had fashioned it recently and with haste in an attempt to make shelter after running away from home. In time, this trench would indeed be used for war games by local boys, and later would be made home by a convicted sex offender, but the children will have grown by then.

Nobody had heard the true story of the house made of candy. Nobody could. Upon viewing the structure and the horrific symphony within, Una let forth a blood curdling shriek only an Irish banshee could ever match. The scream went on with her as she darted through the forest with incredible speed, until she reached a trench at the exact moment her vocal cords decided to release a horrendous cracking sound and abandon her. The pain rendered her unconscious until the fifth day of her hospitalization. She awoke from her clouded dreamland and found herself with no sound in her throat and no one able to read the gibberish she scrawled onto paper that could have nearly resembled words.