their porcelain hands.

walking to the refrigerator through the dark house is an affair. my slippers clip-clop down the hall past the empty living room and all i feel is eyes and arms. something like being watched but only as a footnote. the way you see a runner out of the corner of your eye while you lounge in a park or how you notice someone sit down near you while you read your book on the bus. the arms are the worst part. they are dainty hands with fragile wrists and slender fingers. it happens only at night after i've been at the computer for a few hours past everybody's bedtime. the screen at it's lowest brightness setting burning pink like i've been staring at a square sun. i meet the sentience with controlled breath and over-calculated footsteps. if i let them know that i know it's all over.
this isn't the only place i've felt them either. i remember throwing out the trash when we lived at the apartment in anaheim. i would try to throw the bags from the street over the gate into the *ideally* open dumpster. first you would estimate clearing distance, second you would pick up the bag by the knot and swing it back and forth like a pendulum gaining momentum enough to make a perfect arc over the steel doors that guarded the rolling dumpster. if everything went right you heard a satisfying metal clang, when things didn't there was still a sound, but one of bagged refuse on plastic coming much sooner because of the truncated airtime granted by a closed lid. this meant having to walk around the stucco enclosure whose floors were stained with soup de garbage'. once you had gotten around the fort built to hide the dumpster you had to build something to stand on. the lid was heavy for a nine year old and getting up on a sturdy box or piece of old furniture meant you could lift and flip the top with your arms and legs instead of toes and fingertips, it also meant somebody had decided that that box you were standing on, or discarded desk was too heavy to lift and properly dispose of. this way you could take a quick look in the dumpster too, make sure there weren't any mummy-shaped rolls of carpet. there they were, noticing and reaching. quick with the trash, making sure to avoid the trash juice now dripping from the bag damaged by landing impact and subsequent sliding onto floor. quick out of the trash place, they had gotten out of the dumpster. faster around the building and up the stairs you could see through horizontally, taking them two at a time because you can almost see their tiny white fingernails reaching from the other side of each step. into the house and SAFE.