I would wake to the reassuring sounds of clinking milk bottles and the grumbling of the milk truck, the all clear from things that go bump in the night. A call to all, that the monster threat had passed. The tink of the empties and the tunk of the full bottles, as they were swapped for one another, drove creeping shadows back into the closet and under the bed, where they belonged.
To me, as a child, the entire milk concept was almost magical, right up there with the Tooth Fairy, but instead of a tooth secreted away beneath a pillow, it was empty milk bottles left on the front porch. Milk bottles made anew, miraculously filled and 'pristinely' recapped at the milk factory at some time during the wishful hours of the night. The deep dark hours where teeth turned into money, wishes on falling stars became ponies, and prayers were answered in full. The hours when the trickery of light and shadow ate small children and picked at stained fangs with their bones.
At the age where death and closet monsters could be held at bay with carefully chosen words to God, or a strategically placed nightlight, we were at our safest and our most vulnerable. Even the drunkest of mommies and shittiest of fathers could stumble through the words of ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,’ or flip a light switch and slay the dragon. And most would gladly do so if it meant fifteen minutes of peace in which they could fuck. How many brothers and sisters were prevented, killed before conception, by a guttural growl from the wardrobe, or a well-timed slither from under the bed?
Failed parents, jaded and ruined by responsibility, their imaginations destroyed, unable to see piles of clothes on the floor for what they truly were, a demonic presence preparing to leap onto the bed and tear out the throat of a child, rarely bothered to look hard enough to find the beasts, the masters of camouflage.
As children we could overlook our parent’s flaws, their inability to see the truth, the evil in the world, we could put them to one side, and for the moment, forgive, ‘for they know not the dangers of childhood.’ Perhaps, one day they would understand, but by then it would be too late. They would learn the hard way. They would fret, as they sponge bathed the bloody corpse of their child, who’d been mangled in the wee hours of the morning by the entity that lurked in the shadowy area between an opened door and the wall, the clever geist who knew how to step over the thing that went, “boing.” Even then we’d forgive them, yet, forgiveness has an expiration date. Later, when we were older, we would use the shortcomings of mommy or daddy, and their sexual priority over the well-being of their offspring as an excuse for everything we fucked up in life.
I was very young when we had a milkman. In fact, it might have been some fable I fabricated to direct my life toward some sort of normalcy, to ward off death and mutilation. I don’t remember ever seeing the milkman, but I remember milk.
The things I remember most about bedtime is wishing away the Night Hag, who sucked at my breath and feigning sleep for Daddy-to-much-to-drink. I remember my dad sitting at the end of my bed, reeking of scotch, cleaning his rifle and telling me that tonight was the night he was killing mommy, the unfaithful whore that she was. The first fifty or sixty times he did this, I cried and begged him to spare her life, reasoning that we would be left to fend for ourselves, three drunken orphans. I reasoned that mommy would be dead and he would be carted off to jail, leaving us with nothing to eat and no other choice than to polish of his remaining Budweiser and single malt. “At least give mommy a fighting chance, make her sleep in my room, let the shadows decide her fate!”
Long about the sixtieth gun cleaning, I would just roll over and pretend to sleep. It was better to let the idiot cry wolf and get it out of his system. I would go to meet the Night Hag with the smell of scotch and gun oil in my nose. As long as daddy cleaned his gun, the monsters would stay put.
From the time I drifted off until the milk bottles pried at my eyelids, the Night Hag sat on my chest and sucked away my gun oil flavored breath. In the deep dark hours where teeth turned into money, wishes on falling stars became ponies and prayers were answered in full, I wrestled demons from my lungs and dreams. I conked them on the head with a milk bottle.
Celts and Kings: The story behind the mystifying disappearance of the Celtic Earls in 1607. The story of a lost love and Celtic Spirituality.
The story of a forbidden love going back 400 years.
The story steeped in Irish history, Ce
I would wake to the reassuring sounds of clinking milk bottles and the grumbling of the milk truck, the all clear from things that go bump in the night. A call to all, that the monster threat had passed. The tink of the empties and the tunk of the full bottles, as they were swapped for one another, drove creeping shadows back into the closet and under the bed, where they belonged.
