The Lion Blanket
Morgan Sanders
I can’t remember when it started, my fear of the dark. When someone asks about it, I usually just tell them I’ve been afraid for as long as I can remember. As an adult, armed with logic and reason, it’s a fear that’s grown more manageable. When I was a kid, though, the dark felt like a bedsheet on a humid night; it clung to me, entangled me in ways that felt impossible to escape. When the sunset and the lights shut off, nothing in my room ever looked the same. I couldn’t trust my own eyes.
In the small room we shared in South Carolina, there was a nightlight that they would leave on for me every night. After I would fall asleep, one of them would turn it off. But when I would jerk awake from a nightmare, tears in my eyes, finding myself trapped in the dark was terrifying. Together under our blanket, my sisters tried songs and quiet games to soothe. Nothing ever worked quite as well as a bedtime story. I couldn’t trust my eyes, but I could trust their voices. Even when it was so dark that I couldn’t make out their faces, their voices reminded me of the light.
It no longer mattered that the dollhouse in the corner of the room looked like a crouching monster. It didn’t matter that the void under our yellow bed felt like it would suck me in at any moment. The second my sisters began their stories, I was safe. I was home. Even in places that would never really feel like it.
For my fifth birthday, I wanted to spend the day at the beach. Myrtle Beach was too far from our place in Greenwood for a day trip. I had never slept away from home before, but just the idea of an adventure was thrilling. We spent the day running from the cold May tides with salt spraying into our hair. The smell of the ocean clung to our noses, and sand buried itself beneath our fingernails. When we settled into the motel room, I could still hear the waves crashing behind me. All the excitement kept me awake, even as my parents snored in the queen bed beside my own.
In the dark, in this strange room, nothing was familiar. The sheets scratched like sandpaper, and the room smelled of lemon pine-sol. So different from the cotton of my own blankets and the lavender my mom used to cover the scent of vinegar whenever she cleaned. Panic rose in my throat, when would the sun rise?
Even though we weren’t in the warmth of what we called the ‘lion blanket’ (named for the lion that lounged across it), my sisters and I still slept together. Slept together on a mattress so hard, it made the floor feel welcoming. It wasn’t too hard to wake my sisters up. Sissy, at fifteen, had developed a sixth sense. If you stood over her, even for a second, she always woke up. After whispered begging, my sister finally agreed to tell me a bedtime story. Jenna was only ten, still obsessed with stories herself. At the mention of it, she woke up too. We pulled all the sheets and pillows off the bed and set up a makeshift lean-to as if we were camping on the beach.
“Once upon a time,” the stories always began, “there were three sisters who lived in a castle. But they were no ordinary princesses.”
The Christmas after my birthday at Myrtle Beach was the last that we spent in Greenwood. All our belongings were packed in a U-Haul before the tree was down; we were bound for Jersey. Another exciting adventure. Our new house had enough rooms for each of us sisters to have her own. After spending so long settling and compromising on space and wall color, I couldn’t wait to have a room to myself. A bed to myself. But when it came time for sleep, even the Little Mermaid calendar on my closet door looked different. Sinister. It was then that I would find my sisters, and they would pick up where they left off.
“No ordinary princesses for every morning, their slippers left their parents baffled. Each morning, when the King and Queen would come in to wake their sleeping daughters, they would find the girls’ slippers worn through completely. Holes where the soles used to be.”
Secrets between sisters, I knew. Something that was a part of me just as much as the blood we shared. The stories would remind me that my sisters were there even in the dark. Even when I couldn’t see them. When the days of performing ‘Cartoon Heroes’ by Aqua ended, the music could still go on in my dreams.
There were nights when the new sounds would overpower that music. The silence of my days in the country– when my only nighttime neighbors were the owls and foxes of the night—was long gone. Instead, there was the blaring horn of the 7:48 train pulling out of the station. Those nights, we would camp out in the dining room. Using every spare blanket and pillow, we would sleep under the table, in between the legs. A sheet would hang over the round tabletop, falling like gossamer walls. The world outside would fade away.
“One night, after the girls had gone through hundreds of shoes, their parents decided to follow them. When the three sisters thought no one was watching, they would silently put on their slippers and sneak out the tall window that looked over the garden. From there, they would escape into the woods. The walked hand in hand, and their laughter rustled the leaves like a wind. They were sure-footed, the path familiar to them in a way it wasn’t for their parents. The King and Queen soon lost sight of their daughters and fell into a panic. Giggling led the way. The sound shifted to music, and their parents soon found the girls in a field. Surrounded by flowers and lights hanging from the trees, the girls danced hand in hand in their beautiful sanctuary.”
Like most good things, the bedtime stories came to an end. Sissy moved out for college. After a while, Jenna decided I was too old to need bedtime stories. Maybe she was right. But those nights when I would wake from a nightmare to find myself lost in the possibilities of darkness, I remembered those stories. I let the memory of their voices wrap around me like that lion blanket and ease me back to sleep, to the safety of home.
Morgan Sanders graduated in January 2021, finishing with a Bachelor of Arts. Morgan has plans to further her education at one of the Rutgers Graduate Schools.
Morgan wrote this piece in Paul Blaney’s Creative Non-Fiction course. Blaney selected the piece for inclusion in WHR.