Wood Witch
This one is totally random. I’m staring at the ceiling, striving to ignore insomnia. The wheels are turning and grinding in my head. Blinking slowly, I pretend my eyelids are heavy. I imagine fatigue, attempting to don it like a costume, but it doesn’t fit. My mind meanders in a moronic mode, switching tracks every other moment. I decide to focus on something instead. There’s a knothole in the wood above my bed; the Wood Witch. It has a dark pointy hat, two dots for eyes and a slight smile.
You’ve done this. There is a stain, a mark, or an anomaly in a pattern that looks like someone or something. C’mon, think about it. Look around. There was a design in the linoleum in front of the toilet in our bathroom while I was growing up. It looked like Fred Flintstone with the lump on his head he got when someone whalloped him. Wonder where the linoleum is now? There was a tree on the parkway going up Grandfather Mountain which looked like a howling wolf. A game of tic-tac-toe in the concrete cracks of the sidewalk trail between my dorm and the art building at ECU always caught my eye because the elements provided the X’s and O’s.
Small, comforting recognition provides a minute sense of order in the teeming chaos of our everyday runnings.
P.S. I put myself to sleep halfway through writing this. My writing, a new cure for wakefulness.