A Party Favor

He brought it home from a birthday party – a party favor.
Not to her.
He’d seemed delighted with the thing.  It lit up, smiling its leering smile, its toothful grin shining onto the wall opposite the bookcase that was its new home.

And its eyes.
Its eyes.

“Good night, Mother.”

“Good night.”

She opened his bedroom door, glad to leave him to it.

“Mother?”
“Yes?” She did not turn to face him.
“Bobby said he bet I couldn’t sleep with it turned on all night.  He said I’d be too scared.”

Her back went up.

“Did he?”
“Yes.  I don’t want to, but I think I have to,” his voice tightened with every word.

She hated Bobby then.

“Do you?”

She turned a little.  Just enough to see the unoccupied twin bed that had been meant for sleepovers.  (There would be no siblings.)  But the sleepovers never happened.  This, too,  had been mutually agreed upon when she and her husband understood that their son’s only friends were the girls in his class (“Could Suzie…could Holly…could Jane come over?”), making the twin beds unsuitable.  In response to an invitation to a boy’s birthday party “no” had been on the tip of her tongue and on her face – Bobby being unknown to them – but her husband countermanded both.

“Of course, you will go.”

And so, he had gone and there had been that awful party favor and a bet that she knew would come again.  Another and another bet as brutish as the boy who made them, taunting, ever more vile.

“Mummy” softened her where she stood, much against her nature and her will.  “Will you stay with me ‘til I fall asleep?”

She went to the unmanned twin and lay down facing the wall.  Better the light-driven shadow than the thing, itself.