My adopted Mom listens to everything I say except for one thing…there is something in the backyard. Something dark. Something ugly. It's down deep. Below the storage shed. Below the rabbit hole, she thinks I'm making up excuses to dig in so I can play with bunnies. I hear it rumbling, groaning, slithering its snake-like insubstantial tendrils out of the bottomless heat of the infinite abyss into the cool moist loam under the garden shed.
There was always something wrong with that spot. Just below the entrance to the shed. There's a ramp from the garden to the raised doorway of the shed. Mom put it in so that she didn't have to keep bumping the wheelbarrow up into the threshold. At some point, wild rabbits made their burrow there, placing the opening in the grass just off to the right side of the ramp. When you are looking at the front of the shed from the outside that is. If you were inside looking out, the rabbits are on the left side.
Then another hole opened up on the bare ground on the opposite side of the ramp and they all just assumed it was the rabbits. But I knew it wasn't. From the day Mom brought me home from the clinic (I had needed to have surgery before I was adopted) I could hear something. A growling maybe? An essence of malevolence and discontent that stuttered through my bones. It bothered me at first. It scared me, really. But like most things that grow slowly, I got used to it.
Mom spent hours the first night holding me while the sound that wasn't a sound trembled through my abdominal stitches. I stared out my new Mom's unfamiliar bedroom window to the butter-colored potting shed with a green roof whose walls seemed to expand and contract with heaving, rasping breaths. I was hurting, and scared, and no matter how much I cried Mom said she couldn't see what I was so afraid of. When she finally understood that the shed was scaring me, she drew the light gauzy curtains over her windows and the second heavier blackout curtains to block my view.
Eventually, I fell asleep. Shivering in the snug comforting arms of my adopted Mom, she petted my head and sang songs to me while I hid my face against her warm safe neck. That sound has given me nightmares for years and no one else in the house has seemed to hear it.
Despite that rough start, I love my Mom. I know, I know, most adopted kids say that after they've been taken out of an orphanage or children's home. No, I don't remember my birth parents whoever they are. And if I really had to think about it, I would say I don't want to know them. My Mom is the best. Even though she had a child before she adopted me, she loves us the same.
Mom's birth child, my adopted brother? He's amazing. My big brother helps me open the doors I can't reach and makes me breakfast on weekends and sneaks me treats when Mom isn't looking. Caleb plays games with me, goes walking with me, reads me bedtime stories, and tucks me in at night. We go on adventures together and spend every moment together that we can when he is home from school. Sometimes he lets me sleep in his room.
When the sounds start in the dark, whispering of their hunger for all living things, I'll knock on his bedroom door with my misshapen fingers and he will come to bring my little bed into his room so I can sleep on the floor next to his bed. Sometimes I think he hears the thing in the yard too. We lay in our beds, side by side, his arm draped over the edge of his mattress to hold my hand while staring at the shadows on the wall. Both of us feeling slightly safer because of the small night light illuminating us.