Ankle Snatcher

by Grady Hendrix

don’t know what woke me up,” I said. “I must have heard something in my sleep because I woke up breathing hard, my heart pounding. I didn’t call anyone. I just sat there in the dark, scared the way only a kid can be scared. They told me later that by the time I woke up they’re pretty sure she was already dead. After a long time, my dad came in. He flipped on the light and sat on my bed. He didn’t have any blood on him, but his eyes were crazy—spaced out and intense at the same time. The thing I remember the most is that he’d shaved off his mustache. That naked upper lip made him look like a stranger to me. Then he told me a bunch of crazy shit.” “Like what?” she asked. She’d turned her knees back toward me again.

Good way to intersperse dialogue in a way to keep attention describe other characters body responses to the information

It was so loud it made my back teeth vibrate.

heard little high-pitched whimpers in my bedroom, and I realized they were coming from me.

My whimpers were the only noise in my room, and then crackling, bony pops joined them, coming from under my mattress, like someone stepping on Bubble Wrap. No, they were coarser than that. They had a crunch to them, like someone crushing seashells, and seashells were hard because they had calcium in them, another fact courtesy of the Discovery Channel, and the muffled crunches continued, and I remembered what else had calcium in it. Bones.

Something under my mattress ripped a thick piece of cloth in half, and then came a juicy sucking sound like a toilet being plunged. I knew right away. The image just popped into my mind. They’d had a bunch of shows on Discovery about giant squid. I thought about those masses of squirming tentacles surrounding its hooked beak. A hooked beak for tearing and eating. Beneath me something ripped again. The wet, plunging, sucking sounds started again.

“Stop it!” I shouted. “Stop it!” But the Ankle Snatcher went right on wolfing her down.

They found a fragment of her tooth embedded in a floorboard. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. I didn’t want to think about any of it.

My mouth felt dry, and everything inside my stomach felt hot and liquid. I felt too full.

We’re serving time for the boogeymen’s crimes.”

His words hit me like a cold shower, and I woke up. This