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BOGEYMAN: 1950
He was out there running crazy with his red-hot bulgy eyes rolling around looking for dirty greedy crabby little girls like me, oh, just like me. I lay stark awake sweating bullets, afraid to look at the window: surely I would see his wolf-snout, his bawdy red tongue mashed against the glass. One night he did come, and stood at the foot of the bed while I stared and stared. He was a beautiful young man, romantically pale, and what a mouth, what eyes! When he smiled, what choppers, white as snow! (Was he "mad, bad, and dangerous to know?") I'd expected horns: and that he'd gibber, and bounce off the walls like an ape. Yet here he was, an angel-haired sexy prince, giving off heat and light like a blast furnace. He whispered: "Rise and shine, little queenie. Come to papa, do." His tongue, that red snapper, flicked between his lips, and he stood making loverboy eyes at me. I thought Trouble trouble trouble and I said "No no no!" He leaned closer, so that I could feel the hot corona of his curls, and spoke in a voice of burnt black sugar: "My lost Rosetta, my little stolen Ruby . . . you expected a monster mauler, you thought that somewhere there existed jiggly tutti-fruttis into which I chopped my pets. Yet here I am, mild as mother's milk: here is my kiss, of pulsing silk!" He paused, then added in business-like tones "I wish, shortcake, you'd open your eyes, and then you'd see my big surprise." Hard gold lamplight, screams: my cleanneck aunts swarm into the room, case the corners: but I'm alone. "Nightmares," they explain, "too much pepperbelly food," and show me the tight window, and night pure as a bunny: nothing out there but dippers of stars. What then do they make of me kneeling and putting my lips to the spangled glass and breathing blood red from the heart I will kill you if you don't come back.