Shitty First Draft

Bunk Bed

When my sister and I were younger, we were small enough to share the twin bed on the bottom bunk of the bun bed. My aunt claimed the top bunk. My mother’s sister, Julia, was 14 years younger than her. When my grandmother could no longer take care of Julia, my mom took her in at 11 years old. She was in high school in my earliest memories.

Julia was a slob. She would eat in our shared bedroom, and leave her left overs on the bedside table. Rotten apples would end up rolling under the bed. Pieces of gum in wrappers were stuck to the bed posts. Her brown sandals covered in mud and grass shavings left traces from the door to the middle of the room, where she left them for us to trip on.

I remember our room used to smell horrible. We had heaps of clothes bins, brimming over the top with clothes well lived in. And by that I mean doused in sweat and the scent of leaves and dirt. She would take us on trips to the mall to pick up scented candles to mask the ungodly stench. We went to the laundry mat every Sunday to wash our clothes. In the meantime, three active bodies filled those bins at an alarming rate.

I remember being afraid of the dark. The shadows moved in the night time. My brother would tease me, and call me a baby. My crying caused my mother to invest in a night light. It was M&M themed. Nevertheless, the small beam of did nothing to squash my fears. Finally, my mom realized just how dirty our room was. She lifted the bottom mattress and found an entire colony of black ants racing over trash and rotten food.

The year my aunt graduated high school and moved out, we spent the summer in the city with our cousins. We thought we would have our bedroom to ourselves. We thought wrong. While we were away, our family moved houses. Our new place was a two-bedroom apartment across town. My parents converted my brother’s beds into a bunkbed, and placed both beds into one room. The room wasn’t quite built for two beds. They were aligned parallel to the door, and every night before bed my sister and I had to crawl over their bunk bed to get to ours.

I remember the day we got roaches. We had just finished watching Chucky in the living room, when I left to go use the bathroom. I was feeling paranoid from the movie and couldnt stop looking over my shoulder. I left the living room to go to bed. At this point, my sister and I were still tiny enough to share a bed. I decided to climb to the top bunk to play with some toys we kept up there. As soon as I made it up, a roach crawled from under shits and down my arm. I screamed so loud I could have woke the dead people from the movie. I never climbed onto the top bunk ever again.

They appeared in the bathroom, then ventured into the rest of the house. While we sat on our bunk beds, bored to tears on summer days, My brother, ten years old at the time, would eat the dead ones to gross us out.