Good Day to Die by Stephen Solomita Page B

when I was usually depressed, anyway. Though I never lack for energy, I don’t sleep much and never have. Before my exile to ballistics, I used to walk the streets at night, sometimes looking for trouble, but just as often to soak up the available energy. Urban renewal of the soul is what I called it.
    New York, despite the popular misconception, does not cool off at night. No, while all those well-meaning, well-intentioned day people are sitting in front of their fifty-inch Mitsubishis watching the late news and wondering if they still have the energy for sex, the city actually burns.
    Most people equate light with energy. According to conventional wisdom, the world is supposed to slow down when the sun drags its fire below the horizon. But this is bullshit, and I advise all those who believe it to spend one night in a virgin forest without benefit of tent or lantern. If there’s nothing out there, why are you so afraid? You know full well those bats and possums roaming the night forest can do you no harm. That the only thing you inspire in their tiny brains is a desperate need to avoid you at all costs. That you are the great monster in their forest.
    So, why are you afraid?
    I was somewhere around six years old the first time I was exposed to that particular fear. The edge of the forest, a grove of fifteen-foot hemlocks whose branches swept the ground, came to within fifty feet of the house. I’d made a little tunnel into the hemlocks during the day (when I was usually free to explore while Mom scoured the town for booze or the money to buy booze) and somehow found it again one night when Mom went berserk. I seem to remember that her anger wasn’t directed at me, but at one of my “uncles.” They were fighting, but it wasn’t the kind of picky argument usually associated with that word. Mom and her lover of the moment were pounding the crap out of each other.
    I was already experienced enough to know that Mom was as likely to shift targets in midstream as she was to pass out on the bed. The door happened to be open, so I ran out of the house, but instead of standing in one of the elongated patches of light cast through the windows, I kept on going. I plowed into my little tunnel and came to rest in a small hollow where three hemlock trunks met the forest floor.
    It was funny, in a way. I was sitting on a scratchy mix of forest earth and dead needles, delighted with my narrow escape, when the lights in the house went out. Maybe it was Mom’s way of punishing me for evading her tantrum. More likely, she and her lover had decided to patch it up between the sheets and Mom had no idea where I was. Either way, I was stuck with the dark. And the noise.
    I spent the night waiting for the “cannibal injun” to come and get me. The cannibal injun was Mom’s invention, the boogeyman she used to control me when she was too tired or too drunk to use her hands. Seven feet tall and red as a fire engine, the cannibal injun came in the night to sink his glistening white teeth into the soft flesh of disobedient children. Like half-Indian me, of course.
    At five years old, with no one around to say, “Oh, Roland, there’s no such thing as monsters,” I fully accepted the cannibal injun. As well as my own badness. The forest is never really silent. The wind moans in the trees just like a monster yearning for the flesh of a tiny child. Small animals (mice, voles, skunks, rabbits, raccoons) stir the dried branches and dead leaves, breaking into occasional panicked flight at the approach of (who else?) the cannibal injun.
    Like I said, it was funny, in a way. (And from a distance.) The only thing I could do was sink deeper into the darkness between the hemlock branches, hold my breath lest the slightest noise lure the monster to my hiding place. I had to embrace the night and the life that came with it simply in order to survive. A life that, as I came to understand later, fed on me even as it sustained me.
    Do nocturnal animals