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In kindergarten, a scrappy older boy I was playground friends with went off to get in a “fight.” His death was inevitable, so I enacted funeral rites for him, which involved ritually placing my palms on the surface of a perfectly still puddle of rainwater and chanting his name.
There was also the time I cut my fingernails into claws so I could protect girls on the playground from boys trying to kiss them; the months that I went to bed wearing a fleece neckwarmer to fend off vampire attacks (thinly veiled hopefulness there)...
...the time my parents were in the den downstairs with the door closed so I thought they had left the house and summarily been killed, so I collapsed to the floor shrieking in existential terror (how did I not get diagnosed with an anxiety disorder until college)...
...the sadistic multichapter illustrated short story collection of heavily Dahl-inspired tales of witches enacting revenge on people by elaborately transforming them, which I wrote in first grade “for class”
...the time that I had a friend sleep over and we played a make believe game that I ended by having my character sealed forever in a hopeless void dimension and my little buddy flipped out so hard my mom had to drive her home at midnight...
...the list goes on. I was a bizarre little admixture of Ramona Quimby and Lydia Deetz.
