Ankle Snatcher

by Grady Hendrix

“Is that some alpha-male move?” she asked around her straw. “Extended eye contact to assert dominance?” “I saw it on the Discovery Channel,” I said. “Did it work? Do you feel like prey?”

I’d always thought we’d have good banter, but a crisis hotline wasn’t the place to find out,

“When I was six,” I said, “my dad killed my mom.”

“He told me that he was very sorry, but the boogeyman had taken Mom away.” “Jesus,” she breathed.

Sometimes people asked why he did it, as if there might be some logical explanation for why a husband would murder his wife and then tell his six-year-old son that the boogeyman did it. There wasn’t.

I never told them my dad said the boogeyman got Mom because she stepped out of bed without turning the light on first. I never told them that for the rest of my life I’ve never once gotten out of bed in the dark.

I’ve read enough about domestic homicide to know that every perpetrator blames his victim. Like every perpetrator, my dad had a big elaborate fantasy about his sad little crime. His involved the boogeyman, only he didn’t call it “the boogeyman.” He called it “the Ankle Snatcher.”

“We don’t have to turn into them. We can be our own people.”

wondered if I should bite those fingers around her ankle because the human jaw can apply 150 pounds of pressure, enough to snap a finger in two—thanks, Discovery Channel.

People like you and me, son, we have to be careful of the Ankle Snatcher.

What was in my apartment? How many people were under my bed?

my father was a liar, and I was not going to grow up to be like him. Turned out they were wrong on both counts.

I huddled on my mattress like a shipwreck survivor on a raft.

My dad was right. My dad was right. My dad was right. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe this was a delusion. Maybe what I’d inherited from him wasn’t a monster under the bed. Maybe I’d inherited some leftover murderous spoor,

Whatever the Ankle Snatcher was, my dad had told me everything I needed to know when I was six. It lived under your bed.

They never asked me a single question about Tess or what happened last night. They had no interest in me or anything I had to say. I wasn’t a person. I was a crime.

“You’ve seen it,” he insisted. “That’s why you’re here. We read about you in the papers. The Ankle Snatcher did it. The boogeyman underneath your bed.”

Like all his blood. That got your daddy sent to Kirkland. They’re real mad he won’t tell them what he did with Ernest’s body, but us inmates know. You and me know. The Ankle Snatcher got him.”

“You think you’re alone?” he asked. “You think you and your daddy are the only ones? Before they sent him to Kirkland, your daddy was writing to a guy in Vacaville who was in there because of the Ankle Snatcher too. Out in Utah, a guy named Jerry Warren lost his wife to the Thing in the Closet.

They live in our closets and under our beds, and after dark they come out when we break the rules. We’re serving time for the boogeymen’s crimes.”