“Is anybody out there?”
The snoring was so loud, it drowned out the creaking floorboards, each cautious step falling in sync with the steady rhythm. There was a small, shadowy space beneath my mother’s vanity, and I crawled into it, imagining it was the gaping mouth of a dragon.
Looking back, that “dragon’s mouth” felt like the safest place in the world, close to a mother who often held me too tight, whispering things I didn’t understand and didn’t want to. The room was washed in gray, dimly lit by the faint glow from the hallway, just enough to keep the darkness at bay but too weak to reveal me. On a full-size bed covered in rumpled sheets, two forms lay tangled together, my mother and a man I didn’t know. Nameless people were her specialty. They drifted in and out of our lives, one unknown face after another, making her laugh, cry, and scream, sometimes all at once, as if she wasn’t sure which emotion to throw at them first.
I guess if I’d been older, I would’ve seen the signs.
Maybe not.
All I remember is the darkness and the dragon’s mouth.
It’s strange how bright the night can feel, how the worlds I created there seemed more vivid compared to the daylight.
Looking back, I think I’d hoped someone would save me from the dragon’s mouth.
I never imagined it would burn me.
