The Writing-Practice Journal

Nocturnal, velvet, mist, firefly, shadow

This prompt is picked from an FB question by WdC, asking five different words.

Bedtime Stories

A nocturnal creature lives inside my head, opening its wide wings in a velvet mist. Its mouth is a sword glowing like a firefly. It rises from the shadows of the bedroom and says, playfully, “Shut up and go to sleep. Don't think so much.” I tell the creature, it isn’t me but it is him who’s doing the talking. I’m not the one to listen to him while mountains of memories inch forward to close my eyelids and all the cities I’ve been to dance to a swirl of entertainment.
Then I, like a pagan god, submerge to one of those cities to wade into the muck of everyone’s laundry, to tell myself bedtime stories about other people, especially about the select few whom I have created to exist only inside my head, to keep the creature with the glowing mouth company.
I'm not going to listen to that creature's orders, for I have my own ways of lulling myself to the dreamland, where I can meet up with my old Home-EC teacher who has passed on many years ago or find a mirror that erases all the violent scars of aging or wade in a river where I can direct the current, my way.