The next night, or a hundred nights down, I had a dream.  My heart was being pulled from my chest.  When you're young and learning about the things God has done for you it fills your heart so much it might burst.  When you learn about the things God will do it stiffens or it gets pulled away.  I could never decide which I wanted to happen.  I didn't want the rapture to happen and take me away before I got to grow up, or take away my Mom and Dad before they got saved.  Guilt was a pale horse, and it's name it said on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

I awoke clutching my chest.  I couldn't breathe.   The fibrosis was taking hold.  I could feel the tendons stretching to break, to snap and collapse me.  And when I looked down I saw, sitting like the Reaper on his steed, a cricket sitting on my chest.

Scream.  Or don't.  I can't remember. 

But what we all do is swat and swat to push it away without rhythm or direction or purpose.  I followed my natural instinct and by the time I was vertical at the bunk's bottom bedside I had tossed the cricket somewhere into the blackness.  The tendons started to relax and I began to inhale and exhale, and things were collected.  I turned back the covers.

And beneath those covers lay a thousand crickets.

When I watched Looney Tunes or old movies I laughed when characters fainted.  I thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world.   How can a person be so distraught or shocked that their body thinks to shut off like a dehydrated runner at a mere thought or instance?  Old women with big butts in fluffy dresses holding glasses to their face with a thin pole.  Well I never!   Thump.

I remember the way down.  I remember the dream, and the crickets, and the way down.  They were on my legs.  Up to my knees.   A hundred more crickets crawling across my skin, making their way into my underwear, jumping and chirping and falling with me.  I fainted so hard that I remember the thump. 

My Mother found me in the floor, motionless.  I was bleeding from the head.  Profusely as I remember it, barely as it happened.   I told them about the crickets.  I told them about Kevin and the turning and the popping and of my covers.  My Father investigated and found nothing.  Bread crumbs or a piece of lint.  I wanted to faint and die.

I didn't let that terror go.  I made my Father keep watch over the next few nights.  And to his surprise he did find a cricket.   He found a few.  There was a hole in the foundation beneath my bedroom floor and the insects came up through the cracks.  I may have had a few in my bed after all. 

And if there were a thousand, I deserved it.

I never understood crickets.  Nobody understands crickets.  You gotta know what a crumpet is to understand crickets.

Next.