The Most Horrible Blanket

Previously, I described my household's cursed couch. Now I will describe for you The Most Horrible Blanket.

Surprise: it's absolutely in my top five blankets in this house. Could be top three. I love this blanket so much. And it is awful. I asked to take it with me when I moved out and translated my dad's look of disgust and horror as an affirmative.

To start, the first thing you notice about this blanket is the color: brown. Not just brown. Light brown. Various shades of light brown. If you look more closely you'll notice that there's some faded and hidden pattern, aged by time and wash, but that might have once been an artist's attempt at really capturing the truth and spirit of a pile of vomit.

Due to its age and whatever horrible material of its crafting, the blanket is scratchy. It's managed to avoid puncture, even after all this time, but all the washes in the world have not softened it. The surface is rough and any dry spots of your skin will catch and pull and make the most horrible of cicada-like screams that tell the entire room that you have made this choice so that they can properly judge you.

As if the horrible color and material were not enough, let me dazzle you with this remaining factor: at one point during its invention, possibly shortly before fire was discovered, the wise creators of The Most Horrible Blanket decided that sleeping bags were all the rage, and they could make a fortune in selling a blanket that transforms into a sleeping bag. 

Yeah. 

This blanket has been around my family for a minimum of thirty years and likely much longer and in all that time I have never seen the proper transformation. I have, however, seen it attempted at least three times by various members of my family. Around the harsh edges are metal snaps, some male, some female. This means two things:

1. At some point in your lifetime of using this blanket, statistically more than once, you will catch a fingernail, cuticle, nostril, tooth, lip, few strands of hair (you get the picture) in the base of one of these snaps. Only for a moment, but long enough for the pain to sear into your memory and send flashes of warning signals all the way back to the time when your ancestors crawled from the ocean and discovered the pain of sharp rocks on land.

2. The temperature of the snaps is always significantly colder than the temperature of your body, warm within the folds of The Most Horrible Blanket, which means that should you shift position, a very chilly piece of metal will find its way against your skin, usually ribcage or inner thigh, and you will feel as though you have been pierced with the tinniest knife. Of course, you'd think, "Oh if I have a fire or something, then the snaps wouldn't get cold." No. They wouldn't. They'd get hot. And the sensation would be the exact same because your brain cannot tell the difference between hot and cold in that short amount of time. Pain doesn't need to last long to be traumatizing. I promise, it doesn't matter. I have never known these snaps to rest at room temperature. I expect someday to be contacted by a shadowy government authority, as they are certainly looking for this magic material that somehow escaped their custody and was melted down and forged into blanket snaps for safe-keeping and then through a series of hilarious murders, lost. Until now.

It rests where? Yep, on the back of the Cursed Couch. Because I'm the only one who uses the cursed couch, and I'm the only one who voluntarily uses The Most Horrible Blanket, but should you come to visit, I will make both available to you. One does not cancel out the other. Let me know the parameters of your testing requests and I'll get back to you. Right after this horrible nap.

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