Things might have turned out a lot differently if Jude’s freezer pillaging hadn’t already woken up our grandfather (“Pops”), who arrived just in time to stop his young grandson from sprinting out the back door that Jude had been trying to unlock with frantic determination.
Jude said that, to this day, he still occasionally has nightmares about something compelling him to crawl face-first into murky water and then feed himself to what looks like a large alligator with human skin.
There were a lot of similarities between Jude’s first encounter and mine: I, along with the bulk of my extended family, had been sleeping over at the Covington House after having spent the day there celebrating some summer holiday. Aunts and Uncles were granted the honor of sleeping on the massive living room’s assortment of plush leather sofas.
But the fifteen-or-so visiting grandkids had been forced to divide the 3rd floor’s two bedrooms, with a combined total of 3 beds between them, by gender. Being the youngest male there at the time, I remember that I had started off the night crammed against the far wall of “the boy’s room.”
I had actually been living with my grandparents for a few years at that point though (the reason why is part of a whole different story) and by then, I felt comfortable enough to wait for my cousins to pass out before grabbing my blanket and quietly tiptoeing down to the Covington house’s master bedroom, where my grandparents were currently sound asleep.