Granddaddy liked to see what he was doing. i couldn't abide any light at all when i went to bed. i would look under the door if light was on in the hall, to see if the shadows came under the door. That let me know that he was coming. So i hated light, and night lights and all versions of light period when i went to bed. i always knew it was going to be a bad night if Granddaddy cut on my nightlight when i went to bed. It was one of those ones that plugged into the wall. Just a beige little fixture with a red bulb. It cast the room in an eerie red glow. i hated that thing. It was through the red light i finally realized that the boogyman was my Granddaddy. For a long time i stubbornly refused to accept this. In my head it was the red light man. Red man. i was scared of the red man. Not my Granddaddy. So little and all alone i couldn't cope with it being Granddaddy. i couldn't sit across from him playing checkers and think about the stabbing pains, the lack of air, the being convinced i was going to smother. Not and keep any kind of sanity. It was the red man, and it wasn't blood and cum in my bed. It was red man juice. That was all. my first trip to the basement came when i smashed that little red light to smithereens. i was 3. To this day i can't take red light at night. This is a huge pain in the ass, because most alarm clocks have red numbers. J and i have to look long and hard to find the ones with green numbers. Which is still hard for me, but much better than the red ones. Iris used to have a black light in her room. Which i really liked. But then she got this red paint that glowed under the black light and painted her whole room with it. She was 15. i couldn't cope with it at all. At the time, i didn't know why. i just knew it drove me nuts. So i took to sleeping on the floor outside her room to watch her. The idea of Iris laying asleep and vulnerable in that red glowing room drove me to the brink of insanity. Finally, she could take my insanity no more, and painted over it. Blue glow i could deal with. And, that was when i began to suspect that red light had some sort of importance for me.
