Some nights, I can hear a sound. A faint sound emanating from the corner of my bedroom like the hushed breath of a shadow. At times, I swear I’ve spotted my curtains swaying to that same rhythm, the beating of breath. I’ll watch the corner very carefully, forgetting to blink, holding my own breath so I do not disturb my concentration. I’ll watch that corner with absolute certainty that someone was there. On the nights when I feel brave, I’ll pull down my bedsheets and rise, my eyes never leaving  those curtains, tiptoeing around my dresser to the cursed corner and finally, without daring to blink, I’d remember to breathe whence I found behind the curtain no more than a cracked window wheezing through its open maw. 

With a newfound sense of relief, I’d return to my bed and tuck myself in, reassured that no ghouls were waiting for me by the window. No sooner whence I would return to the comfort of my covers, however, would my thoughts begin to translate the night into an ominous presence, once more being persuaded to check the curtains for any discrepancies more daunting or horrific than your typical hanging cloth. On these nights, I was able to remind myself that the faint sound of panting could be explained easily as the soft blow of the wind from the windowsill, but this did not account for the peculiar way the curtains seemed to bulge and cover an unseen form, and it most certainly did not account for the leather boots poking out from beneath the curtain’s edge. So on the nights when I could not convince the terrors in my mind of any truth but that there was a man behind my curtain, I would arise from my sleep to investigate that which dwells in the shady corner of my room.  

Once again, I would be met with a simple yet obvious explanation like how the curtains would be slightly wrinkled or how I had left my rainboots sitting beneath the windowsill, which anyone with logic could point out with ease. So back to bed I would go, chuckling at myself in relief and annoyance at my own foolishness. 

Last night was no different—after I checked the window and for the wrinkles in the curtains and the placement of my boots, sure that I had enough surprises from the shadows in the night, I had caught a glimpse of a twitching eye peering back at me behind a cloak of darkness. In retaliation, I turned to my other side so that I may face the wall to ignore the worst of my dark fantasies. However, a child’s mind tends to emulate what it sees, so dark thoughts are known to be born from the womb of the unknown. Evil visions of the man watching me, peering so persistently with his small, gaping eyes. His nose, I’m sure, may be sharp and knife-like and angled in such a way where it could cut his upper lip as if his nose had been forged from steel. I suspected his grin to be uncanny and grotesque, harboring over a hundred oblong incisors where a typical man would keep no more than thirty-two. Every proportion in the creature’s body could very well reject all known logic of human anatomy, perhaps including a vast array of additional joints between his yellowed bone structures, or maybe his jaw could unhinge the way a snake’s might when it devours a duckling. 

These terrible thoughts are what gave way to my eventual temptation—my need to check the curtain a third and final time, just to be safe. Apprehensively, I pushed my covers from over my shoulders and turned to face the corner, tiptoeing around my dresser even softer than before, analyzing the wheezing from the window and the way the curtains draped, trying everything I could think of to quiet down my little heart out of fear that he might overhear it. There is nothing hiding in the corner. There is no man behind this curtain. Taking a deep breath for clarity, I took the cloth in my fist and forced it to the side in a singular motion:

There was nothing to behold.  

No man with a jackknife nose, no hundred teeth or unhinging jaw. Just a cracked window, some wrinkled curtains, and some rain boots.

I returned to bed after this excursion and never again left to check the window. I could feel myself drifting into darkness, and whenever my mind would attempt to terrorize me with baseless accusations, I would satiate it with my newfound sense of certainty and resume my dozing. Still, I never quite fell asleep—I swear I could feel someone dragging their nails across the bottom of my mattress.

Biography: 

My name is John Quincy Thompson, and this is my second year at Aims now; I intend to transfer to RMCAD for an illustration degree sometime after this upcoming fall semester. Art has always been an outlet that has allowed me to experiment and grow, and it is a gift that I would like to share with the world. In particular, I quite enjoy drawing faces and the human figure– it is comprised of non-geometric shapes and is, overall, quite lumpy. I like that. Parts of the human body such as the ears, the nose, the hands and feet, teeth and gums, and fat rolls all pose a different challenge of depiction in comparison to geometric shapes like buildings that require a level of mathematical precision. Our bodies are these very strange blobs of flesh that simultaneously hold a relatively consistent canon of anatomy while also having absolutely no consistency whatsoever. I like how each body holds its own identity through its form– for this reason, I am also rather fond of the shapes found in nature such as flowers, trees, mountains, and water. I believe that art should be easily accessed by the public and should incite curiosity and complex thought, though not all art needs to be so serious– art should be fun! I am influenced a lot by manga and manhua, and I appreciate artists such as Kei Urana, Shiro Moriya, Jung-Man Cho, Motoi Yoshida, and Kim Sehoon.