The Dead Will Pull Your Leg Till You’re Standing

“Get your ass up.”

I’m tempted to drift back to sleep.  I feel spent, wind blown out and gone away.  It’s five a.m. and I’ve got to get up.  A busy day ahead.  I’m laying there, eyes open, staring at the ceiling, exhorting myself under my breath.

“Get the fuck up.  Come on.”

And there it is.

A tug on my foot. 

But no one’s there.  No one you and I of the flesh would be apt to see.

But I remember.

I’m a couple decades younger and five years old and a thousand miles away.  A midwestern house in the afternoon, dust dappled sun rays coming through the window just before mom pulls the shade down for my nap time.  My nap time and hers.  She’s tired, see, working non-stop for most of her life and I don’t even know it yet.

I drift off to sleep, the warm comfort of a make-shift womb return, wrapped up tight in blankets and away I go. 

Away I go.

And there it is: the pull on my feet.  And I am immediately awake and filled with a feeling of–dread isn’t the word.  But oh am I awake.

I lift up the covers slightly and look down the length of my body underneath the covers to the end of the bed.

An old woman’s face smiles up at me from between my feet.

Well, you can believe I pulled my eyes away, terrified, pulled those covers back down, shut my eyes tighter than tight, willing myself back to sleep.

Two decades later, it occurs to me that now my mother’s face has begun to resemble the face of that woman who pulled my feet, but that’s later.  Right now I’m still five and  when I wake up from my willed return to unconsciousness, I find my mom on the phone to the Old Country, speaking the old language.

In the middle of her own slumber, my mother heard the voice calling her name out, the voice of family;an aunt a continent away, yet a presence very close.

She had died that afternoon, my great aunt.  She’d come to say goodbye and pull a playful little trick on a little boy as he slept.

I’d heard for all of my five years my mother say to be careful. 

“Be careful that when I die I don’t come back and pull your feet while you’re sleeping.” She’d say it with a smile on her face.  I’d listen with my eyes bugging out and the air stuck in my throat. 

 That kind of thing didn’t happen, did it?

Oh, but it did.  And it does.

And so here I am, twenty and a little years later: just this week.  And just when I’d just as soon retreat back into sleep, will myself into a lazy unconsciousness, I feel the tug at my feet.  And that’s all I need.

“Thank you,” I say, as I get my ass up and make the start of my day official.

Thank you, my long-gone and long-present great aunt, my blood. 

Thank you.

We’ve got shit to do.

Thank you.