between the neck and knees

Date: 3/17/2021

I am one of two children in a very dark house. Is it night time? Our mother is near but I can't see her, just flashes of her white dress. We are running from the monsters we call Humanoids; up the stairs, into the bedroom, down the chute; a quite basement. I can hear the Humanoids panicking, looking for us, but they haven't found us yet. Our mother is here in the basement, I see her lying on a desert-y floor next to a shrub. She grabs our hands, and we run up the stairs and into the bedroom, to get into our winding sheets. "It's all my fault", I cry. [am I the mother now?]. I hold the children close to each side of me. There is complete silence for what feels like a lifetime. A concentrated heat starts making its way from the backs of my knees and up my thigh. It crosses my butt to meet at my lower back and continues up my spine. This line..it's so familiar. The pain it brings I can't reject, it's something I've prayed for? But silently I suffer as, for the duration of a second, the heat-line pushes my flesh apart to allow the very thing that threatens my life, into this world. The humanoid is standing over me. Watching. And waiting.