Usually, I like to let my feet hang over the bed while I sleep.
Occasionally, I like to let my arms flail about during sleep as well. But all that has changed.
One night, I felt a light breeze on my heels, gently puffing on them as if a gust of wind blew by. So I drew in my feet and fell back asleep, dismissing it as being from the broken window.
This is the closest thing to what I saw that night.
The next night, it happened again. Somewhere in the middle of a pleasant dream, I was awakened by the sensation of someone breathing on my feet, ever so softly, ever so gently.
Irritated, I drew them in once again under the blankets and fell into a terrible sleeping pattern.
The next night was when things got strange.
I woke up again, my eyes barely able to open, crusted over by sleep-dust. In the half-light, I could barely make out a figure poking through the slates in my bunk-bed. My befuddled mind tried to make sense of the shape and finally rested on an animal that had somehow broken into my house.
It was not.
Soft, porcelain skin shone in the darkness, framing two large, pale black eyes. It was breathing on my feet.
I froze with fear; remember I could barely see, it was 2:00 in the morning.
"Does it have small feetsies?" came a tiny voice, soft and child-like.
“W-what?” I stuttered. I couldn’t move now, I was too scared.
"Doth it have feetthies?” the thing repeated, a little louder this time. I could now make out that whatever this thing was had some serious speech impediment.
"Look,” I grumbled, “You better get the fuck out of my house, before I call the cops.”
That’s when it responded by opening its mouth. By this time, I was fully awake.
I wish I wasn’t. Inside its mouth were rows and rows of sharp, thick teeth, lined all the way back to the cavernous hole of its mouth.
Strangely, the story I read once called God's Mouth suddenly came to mind.
Its mouth was wide that I knew this was some kind nightmare.
It chomps down on my foot, and I feel a piercing pain on my left three toes.
I shriek into the night and the night inhales me.
****
Sometime in the morning, I wake up to my parents sitting over me with frightened expressions on their faces.
Apparently, I had woken them up with my screaming and they rushed into my room. They found me passed out with my foot crudely cradled in my arm - I had somehow held on to it during the night in an awkward fetal position.
Upon inspection of my toes, I found nothing wrong except a few faintly visible marks lining the skin around the nails. It was slightly clammy, like I had dipped my toes in a vat of water for too long.
My parents insist there was nothing in my room that night, and that I had suffered a series of night terrors.
But I know better. Oh yes.
I’m never sleeping with my feet out again, lest that freak come back here.
No siree.