The Den

The best room in the house is the den. Every day, Mama makes me have a nap-time there. I think she thinks I'm going to get mad, because I'm almost six now, and that's too old for naps. She says I don't have to sleep, I just have to go into the den for an hour and rest. What she doesn't know, is that that's the best time of the day. I can close the door on everybody else and be all by myself. I can do whatever I want, and there's nobody watching.

The den's got a rug with a pattern of lines on it. I make block-buildings, and the lines are the roads that connect them. They're straight like real roads, with corners for my block-cars to stop at. The rug has fringe on the edges. I braid the fringe, and and pull at it sometimes, and little soft pieces come loose in my hands. My Daddy's old black chair is in the den. It's not important except for sitting in, but the footstool that goes with it is a building. Its legs look like the columns in front of important buildings on TV, and even big dolls like Barbies can stand upright underneath it. There's a sofa in there too. I like to stretch out on it and read.

Daddy's chair sits against the doors to the closet (it's a very boring closet, with nothing in it except coats, and leftover winter blankets). The sofa is against one of the walls. There's a picture on the wall above it, that shows a sword with a bleeding head on it. My mother says it represents a scene from her family's history, something called a Family Crest. It means my family is special, and I'm proud of it. It also helps me learn how to read. I lie on the sofa and I look up at the slogan on the picture. If I read it one way, it says “KNIHT NO”. That's how I can tell if I'm reading in the right direction.

The other two walls have bookcases against them, and the TV's in the corner. One bookcase is brown and short. It's under the windows. I like to look at the stuff on the top. There are statues, and decorative after-shave bottles that my Grandma buys my Daddy from Avon, and an interesting thing made out of green glass with a tube at one end, that my Daddy says is a hookah. It's all low enough for me to reach it. I don't touch anything, because I know I'm not supposed to, but I make my dolls go up there, and it makes statues for them to look at.

The other bookcases are very tall, taller than I can reach on tiptoe. I need a step-stool to get at the top shelf, and I can't reach on top of the shelves even with my step-stool. Where there are gaps between the books, I make apartments for my dolls to live in. Or I have the shelves be mountains and my dolls climb them, and the decorative stuff up high is ancient civilizations that they discover.

When I get bored, I look at the books on the shelves. I read the names, and try to decide if they'll be interesting. There are children's books down on the bottom shelf. There's a set of red books with myths and fairy tales in them. The parts I've already read are usually worth reading again, but there's also lots in there that I haven't read yet. – Some of it, is still too hard for me to try. There's a set of encyclopedia that looks really boring, and another set called Lands and Places, that's so boring I've never even looked inside it. There's also stacks of magazines. I read the food parts out of the ones called Sunset. And I look at the pictures in the ones called Playboy.

On the shelves up above, are all the grown-up books. At first I don't read those, because they're for grown-ups. They're very thick, with little writing and no pictures, and they look hard. After a while though, I start to get tired of what I've been reading. I start taking out the grown-up books and looking at them. I find books full of girls with big, pointy boobies (those belong to my Daddy).

 I find a book called Fanny Hill. I'd like to think it might be full of nasty stuff, like the girls with the boobies, but I know Fanny's a girl's name too, so I don't bother with it.

I also find The Shuttered Room, which is THE SCARIEST BOOK IN THE WORLD, all about a girl who goes to a creepy old house, and finds something there that's so terrible no one can even talk about it. It's a grown-up book, so I can't read it all at once, and when nap time is over, I pull little bits of stuffing out of the hole in Daddy's black chair, and use them to mark my place until the next day. Without asking, I know my parents aren't going to want me to read this. The only time I let myself read it is at nap-time, when the door to the den is shut, and I know no one will see.

Later on, my Mama asks if I've been reading any of the things in the den. I feel guilty, so I say yes. I expect The Shuttered Room to be gone by the next time I take my nap, but instead it's the Playboys that go missing. Later on after that, I spend lots and lots of time, looking for a story that will come near being as scary as The Shuttered Room. I read adaptations from The Twilight Zone, and I look through the Fiction section in the library, and read all the Gothic novels I can find. Finally, when I'm an adult, I read Stephen King, and he's pretty good, but even he doesn't come close to the creepiness of The Shuttered Room.