On the day when Brandon came home, it was cold. His parents had been bundled in their winter coats, and had wrapped him in a blanket that his grandmother had made.

“….CARE…SON!”

“<expletive deleted>”

As far as he could tell, the sounds originated downstairs — in the living room, the nexus of family gatherings, Matchbox-car rallies, space travels, and pitched parental battles.  These always left him uneasy, the morning after hearing them.  He often had a dream in which ghosts — clouds of gray smoke that vaguely resembled him — had taken residence in his favorite places; under the familiar wooden sideboard that was his Adventure Control Center; sprawled on the couch with the worn blue checkered blanket that scratched his face whenever he lay on it, reaching for a recalcitrant cat who had taken shelter from his relentless pursuit of fury tails; sitting in front of the aging black-and-white TV on which he (and sometimes his father) would watch “Mannix”.  And all of the ghosts were curled up into balls, whimpering, wherever he looked; in each play-sanctuary, in each hiding place, in each imagined fort.  And when he walked up to them, demanding that they leave, infuriated at the intrusion into his favorite places, they turned and stared at him with black, gleaming, insectoid eyes that were like daubs of fresh paint, and spoke with a whisper that became a giggling, rhythmic hiss:

not safe here not safe here not safe here not safe here not safe here not safe here 

And each time he would awake; at first, screaming, until his father’s irate, abruptly-awakened stomps toward his door and the spanking that inevitably followed taught him to lie still, clutching his blanket and a phalanx of stuffed animals, his heart racing.  In those moments, he would force himself to remember being in that room, as if changing a channel from a scary movie, and with a soft *click* it would become Christmas, with him and his cousin Justin running around in matching Star Trek foot pajamas, the floor barely visible under the scraps and ripped sheets of wrapping paper that they flung onto it in the frenzy of Getting Things.