This is from my unpublished work called Viewings

I have my own room in the new house. This is a brand new house, just built, so nobody has ever slept in this room before. It’s fresh, and it’s up to me to fill it up.

I also have my own bed, a double bed. My brother, who is three years younger than me, still sleeps in a crib. He has his own room, too, but I don’t think he knows it. In the old house we were in the same room.

The furniture in my room used to be my cousin Nancy’s. She’s seven years older than me and my favorite cousin. My mother painted the bureau and the chest of drawers yellow. The wallpaper is mostly blue with little specks of yellow and dashes of silver. I guess my mother picked out the wallpaper.

Lots of times I don’t fall asleep right away. Maybe this is because the room feels so empty when the lights are out. I have a night light, but it’s still pretty dark. It’s good for shadow puppets, though, and when I can’t sleep, lots of times I make up stories with the puppets. The stories and the puppet people make it seem as if somebody else lives in my room with me.

My mother tucks me in every night and sits on the bed while I say my prayers. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, and if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Whenever I say this I see myself standing in a train station. I’m wearing a dark blue robe and I’m carrying my soul in a suitcase. There’s nothing else around me except for a gray, cloudy feeling, and I concentrate on holding tight to the suitcase because I’m waiting to go to heaven, and I’ll have to take my soul with me. I’ve never told my mother what I see when we say the prayer together. If I can’t fall asleep she tells me, “Think about something nice.”

One night when I can’t fall sleep, just after my mother leaves, I lie on the bed and stare at the wall across from me. It isn’t as dark as usual because the hallway light is on, so the light isn’t good for shadow puppets. I close my eyes and open them again, scrunch them closed, then open them again and again, trying to make the sleep come. There are sparks behind my eyelids. “Think about something nice,” I tell myself, as I open and close my eyes. “Think about something nice, think about the angels.”

I open my eyes; the sparks are jumping. It’s as if they jump out of my eyes onto the wall. They get mixed up with the yellow specks and silver dashes. Then a bunch of angels appeared on the wall. The sparks and the dashes and the specks come together to make pictures of angels flying in the wallpaper. They look like kids around my age, with round faces and curly hair. They wear long blue robes and there must be holes in the back where the wings can come through out of their shoulder blades. I think, “Someday I could be an angel, too. If I get into heaven after I die. After I die. I’ll have to die to become an angel.” I don’t want to die and now I’m really scared, more afraid than the time I lost my mother in the toy department at Kiddie City. The angels on the wall disappear; they fall off with the sparks and the dashes and the specks of yellow. I don’t want to die, even if it means being with the angels. I’m crying and hearing my bedtime prayer in my head like an echo. My mother comes into the room. “Mommy, I don’t want to die, I don’t really want to be an angel.” She pulls me toward her, smoothing down my nightgown. “What brought this on?” she says. “You’re not going to die, not for a long time.” Mommy hugs me, and I hold onto her as tight as I can, so I won’t lose her.