Sunday, August 09, 2009

The scream

Last night the hungry crocodiles under my bed started to sidle out. They thought I was asleep, and wanted to eat me. They were particularly interested in my legs. I KNEW we should have had taller beds. Why did we have to be in a swamp anyway? Everybody had said we'd be safe, but the bed was too low.

Making myself small in the middle of the bed was not working. One crocodile, not even a very big one, had started to climb up. It lunged at my leg. I managed to scramble out of the way, and bashed it on the nose. It fell back, but started to come towards me again, enraged, and then I remembered something someone told me once – that if you screamed right in a crocodile's face it would run away.

It was a huge effort, but I took a deep breath and screamed right in that crocodile's face.

The crocodile reared back, looking appalled. It worked! But my scream also alarmed The Man, who woke up and grabbed my hand, which woke me up.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

Although the crocodiles were beginning to fade into absurdity, I could still see that horrified, toothy grin, and I didn't want to move, because YOU NEVER KNOW.

And for some reason the whole thing was really, really hard to explain.

6 comments:

Shammi said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Shammi said...

They werent real crocs, so yours werent real fears either - they were just "crocodile fears" :D

kenju said...

I'm surely glad it was only a dream.

Badaunt said...

Shyam: I hadn't heard that expression before. Crocodile TEARS, yes, but not crocodile fears... did you just make it up? I like it! (Wish I'd thought of it first, actually - it would have made a better blog entry title than the one I used.)

Kenju: You're not the only one! Funny thing, though - I wasn't really scared, mostly just very, very angry and indignant. The scream was a tactical one, not a frightened one. And it worked!

Shammi said...

Made up, ofc :) And I felt really rather clever too!

Nil Zed said...

oh my goodness, this was my childhood nightmare! except they were alligators (I lived in Florida).

There were alligators in our zoo. Not surprisingly, confining them and feeding them well resulted in lots and lots of alligators. Sunning themselves in heaps in the alligator enclosure. I dreamed, regularly, that they were all over our floors at night, sleeping.

Having to get up to use the toilet at night was the worst. It took forever to get up the nerve to run, across their backs, lightly and swiftly so as not to wake them!

You'd think the trip back to bed would be easier, but it wasn't.