Blanket

He weaved the spell quickly, deftly, and completely unconsciously as he put her
to bed. He sang softly, wondering if his voice would carry over the monitor and be heard
by those still downstairs.
Daddys going to buy you an artichoke.
A billy goat, she corrected.
Right. A billy goat. If that billy goats too bony, daddys going to buy you a cart
and pony.
The blanket lay still. A good spell meant dreams would be less likely to spill into
the room through cracks under the doors and windows. But if the spell was too perfect,
there wouldnt be anything to eat.
If that pony runs away, he was still singing, daddys going to buy you a bale of
hay.
Another some day.
Right. He broke eye contact momentarily, and the blanket twitched. There it
was. A tiny hole, but it might be enough. Another some day.
She smiled and drew the blanket up to her chin. He kissed her and then at the
door spun and blew a kiss, first with one hand, then with both, and then held the two
hands together to form a heart with forefingers and thumb as he walked backward out
the door.
The final warding. Had he forgotten that-- and he never would-- the blanket would
have been promised a feast. As it was, it would have to be satisfied with what might find
its way through the tiny chink in the spell.
It was summer, so there was still light outside the window. The blanket felt it fade
from the room, felt the colors drain slowly as the girl stirred in the warmth of the upstairs
bedroom. It would be a hot night. The blanket might end up tossed aside, perhaps even
off the bed altogether. For now though, it was clenched firmly against the girls cheek,
soaking in the warmth that radiated from face and skin.
The blanket waited. It had been forged by patient fingers, fingers that had knotted
and looped a thousand coils of thread with a whispered prayer over each. It had come
into being slowly. It had spilled from the slow dance of knitting needles held by sure and
steady hands.
It could wait for darkness.
Within minutes the girl was asleep. Her breath came low and even. Colors left
the room completely, and the night breeze found its way into the open window.
The blanket raised one corner slowly, tasting that wind. Would they come through
the window tonight?
There couldnt be many. There might be none. The man had knitted the spells
almost as tightly as the blankets own body. It would not be like the evenings when he
was not here, when the dreams flooded out of the crack below the closet door, the
shadow behind the dresser, even the dark space at the edge of the bed. On those
nights, nights where the blanket was wetted with hot, saline tears, it glutted. Morning
would find it tangled, bloated, unable to move.
The blanket felt rain on the wind, but there was none of the electric tang that
promised a midnight storm. A storm would strain the spell. Bigger dreams might fall out
of a stormy sky.
The blanket settled back down and waited.
It was past midnight when prey finally appeared. It was a tiny, chitinous thing that
scuttled out from beneath the closet doorway on half a hundred legs. It would be a
dream of insects, of tiny crawling things that poured out from beneath a stone or a crack
in cement. It had the solidity of a tactile dream. The blanket could tell by the way it
carried itself across the carpeted floor. It would bring with it the panic of unseen bodies
swarming feet and arms.
The blanket held itself perfectly still, rising and falling only with the girls shallow
breathing.
The nightmare had reached the edge of the bed and paused. It felt the warding
spells. They crisscrossed the air over where the child slept, a pattern that almost
duplicated the interwoven threads forming the blankets own body. The dream pushed
against them questioningly. They yielded slightly and then held firm.
The weaker dreams would get tangled in the warding spells and linger until
daylight left them dry, desiccated husks. Those less coherent-- dreams of falling,
darkness, or cold-- might careen off the woven chrysalis and rebound into the night or
shatter completely.
This dream held together, arched its carapaced body, and began meticulously
feeling its way along the perimeter.
At the girls neck, the blanket tensed.
The dream had worked halfway around the bed when it found the hole. It was
tiny, and far enough off the ground that the dream had to sacrifice some of its
corporeality to reach it, but it did reach it, slightly frayed and a bit fuzzy, and pushed
itself through. It dropped to the bed beside the girls head.
The blanket struck.
It unrolled from the girls neck and whipped itself around the dream, crushing the
nightmares legs against its segmented body. The dream thrashed, and the fabric of the
blanket tightened like muscle tissue.
Sometimes the struggle lasted longer. Sometimes-- dreams of snakes, for some
reason, or dreams of unseen things waiting behind opened closet doors-- the prey might
tear the blankets fabric. The blanket would spend the rest of the night slowly stitching
the holes rent by eye-horn or nail.
But this dream, for all its tiny writhing arms, was already losing its physicality. In a
matter of seconds it was still.
They didnt take long to digest. Soon the dream was nothing but a sickly sweet
shadow, and then even the shadow was licked away. The blanket relaxed. It unrolled
itself and slowly slipped back against the girls sleeping form.
The girl shifted in her sleep, and the blanket stretched itself along her length. She
had gotten larger. The blanket used to be able to cover her easily from forehead to feet.
Now it could barely cover the top half of her body, and the bed was shared with other,
larger, unmoving coverings.
The blanket wondered what would happen to the dreams as the girl got older.
Would they get larger? More articulated? Would the warding spells be stronger?