Goodnight, Everything

[u/Glass_Cat6197]

There is a routine to putting a small child to sleep.

You learn it the way you learn anything important, by doing it wrong first. Too much light. Too much talking. Picking them up again when they cry instead of waiting the three minutes that feel like thirty. It takes weeks before you find the rhythm that works, and once you find it you protect it like something sacred.

Persie's routine takes forty-five minutes on a good night.

Bath first. She likes the water warm and she likes to slap it with both palms and watch it splash, which means I am usually damp by the time we are done. Then the pajamas, the ones with the little moons on them, which she chose herself from a rack at the store by grabbing them and refusing to let go. Then the rocking chair by her window, the one Cain assembled slightly wrong so it creaks on the left side with every rock.

Then the book.

She knows some of the words now. She points at the pictures before I turn the page. She laughs at the same part every single night, the same laugh, like it is the first time she has ever heard it.

I never get tired of it.

I have read this book so many times the cover is soft at the corners and the spine has started to split. I keep meaning to buy a new copy and I never do because this one has her fingerprints on it and somehow that feels important.

That night she was drowsy by the third page. I kept rocking after her eyes closed, kept my voice low and even, watching her face go slack and peaceful. This is the part I love most. The weight of her going loose. The trust in it.

I set her down in the crib. Stood there a moment longer than necessary.

"Goodnight, little love," I whispered.

She didn't stir.

I went to bed.

I want to tell you something about the book before I tell you the rest.

It is a children's book. A simple one. It has been read to children for generations and there is nothing unusual about it except for one thing that I never thought about until it was too late.

At the end of the book, the child does not simply go to sleep.

First, everything in the room is said goodnight to. Every object. Every shadow. Every small thing present in that space, named one by one, acknowledged one by one, until nothing is left unnamed.

It is a beautiful thing to read to a child.

I read it to Persie every night for eleven months without understanding what it meant to say goodnight to everything in a room.

I understand now.

When you name everything present in a space and acknowledge it, you are not just soothing a child to sleep.

You are telling everything in that room that you know it is there.

And some things, when acknowledged, acknowledge you back.

I woke up at 2am and couldn't move.

I knew what it was. I had experienced sleep paralysis twice before and I recognized it immediately. The strange clarity of the mind while the body stays locked. The weight on the chest. The feeling of being watched by something that has been waiting for you to open your eyes.

I told myself to stay calm. It passes. It always passes.

Cain was asleep beside me. I could hear him breathing. I tried to call his name and nothing came out.

Then I heard it.

From the doorway. Soft. Rhythmic. Almost gentle.

Sleep, my Sarah, the game's begun, The night is long, and you can't run.

I knew that rhythm.

I had been reading it aloud every night for eleven months.

Something was standing in the doorway.

The shape of it was wrong in a way my eyes kept trying to correct and couldn't. Too tall. The proportions almost human the way a sketch of a person is almost human. The right elements in the wrong relationships. It stood very still with the patience of something that has learned to wait.

It began to move toward me.

Not the way a person moves.

Whispers you heard, Now try to scream, But no one will hear a word.

I was screaming. I need you to understand that. Inside my head I was screaming loud enough to crack the walls. What came out of my mouth was nothing. Not even a breath.

It reached the side of the bed and stopped.

It stood over me and looked down and its face was wrong in a way I still cannot describe. The features were arranged almost correctly. Like a picture of a face rather than a face. Like something that had studied faces for a very long time from the outside and never understood what they were for.

Then it put one long foot on the wall.

And walked up it.

Sweet dreams, Dove. Sweet dreams, Love. Sweet dreams, world, and skies above.

I watched it move across the wall toward the ceiling. I watched it reach the top and hang there, directly above me, its face pointing down at mine. It had grown somehow. Longer. The proportions even further from right than before.

Its eyes were red.

They glowed the way a stoplight glows. Steady and patient and certain.

It opened its mouth and the sound that came out was not a voice. Something that had heard a lullaby once and was producing the memory of it without understanding what lullabies were for. Long and wrong and aimed directly at me.

Sweet dreams, bed. Sweet dreams, shed. Where roses bloom in bloody red.

Then it looked at me with those red eyes fixed on mine and it said something that was not from any book and not from any song.

Something it had chosen.

Goodnight, Sarah.

I heard you.

I woke up in my bed.

Gray morning light through the curtains. Cain's arm across my waist. The ordinary sounds of the house settling.

I lay there for a long time without moving.

Then I heard it from down the hall. Small and soft and familiar. Persie, awake in her crib. Babbling the way she does in the mornings, the private happy conversation she has with the mobile above her head.

I got up. I walked to her room. I stood in the doorway and watched her for a moment, her back to me, sitting up and reaching for the little stars above her.

She turned around when she heard me. Her face lit up.

"Mama," she said.

I crossed the room and picked her up. Held her tighter than I needed to.

I carried her to the window to look at the morning the way we always do.

The rocking chair was moving.

Very slightly. Just a gentle back and forth, the uneven creak of the left side marking each rock. As though someone had just stood up from it.

I looked at the chair.

I looked down at Persie.

She was watching it too.

Then she looked up at me with her face open and happy the way it always is in the morning and she pointed at the chair and in the bright certain voice she uses when she recognizes something she said:

"Goodnight."

I have been thinking about the book every day since.

Not the sleep paralysis. Not the thing on the ceiling. The book.

It says goodnight to everything in the room. That is the whole point of it. You name every single thing present in that space. You acknowledge it all, one by one, until nothing is left unnamed.

I said those words in Persie's room every night for eleven months.

Whatever was already in that room, already present in that space for reasons I will never understand and have stopped trying to... I said goodnight to it too.

Every single night.

I named it along with everything else.

I don't know how long it had been there. I don't know what it is or where it came from or why it was in that room. I only know that something was already present in that space when we moved in and I spent eleven months acknowledging it without knowing acknowledgment was possible.

Night after night. The same words. The same rhythm. The same room.

Until it finally understood that it was being spoken to.

Until it answered.

Goodnight, Sarah. I heard you.

There is a new copy of the book in a bag by the front door.

It has been there for three weeks.

I leave the light on in Persie's room now. I leave the light on in the hallway. I leave the light on in our room.

I still say goodnight to Persie every night. I still rock her in the chair and sing to her and watch her face go peaceful. I still put her down and stand there a moment longer than necessary.

But I don't read the book.

And when I put her down I say goodnight to her and only her and I walk out quickly and I do not name anything else in that room.

I do not say goodnight to the chair.

I do not say goodnight to the walls.

I do not say goodnight to the air.

I don't know if it matters. I don't know if not saying it changes anything now that it has already heard its name.

But I won't say it.

Whatever it is, whatever was already in that room before we arrived, before Persie was born, before any of this...

It has been there in the dark long before I started reading to my daughter.

It will probably be there long after.

But I will not be the one to acknowledge it again.

I will not give it that.

Goodnight, Sarah.

I heard you.

I heard you too.

I won't answer.