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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Partners in Magic

I want to write something with a magic system that requires cooperation. Could be that it's in couples, but I feel like that would too strongly promote the idea of hetero-normative-monogamy, so I was thinking about trios to start. Would they be three parts of a whole? A battery, a channel, a focus perhaps? Do the groups come in different sizes? If they did, it argues that the battery is in all of them and some kind of connection is needed to make the magic in that case. Unless different batteries access different types of magic. A weather mage, elementalist, telekinetic, pyrokinetic, animal communicator, etc. That, too, argues that they wouldn't be so much destined for one another, you know? If they could switch out, maybe? Hmph. I would then argue that each battery needs a channel if that's the route we're going... I don't know. I can't decide! Too many choices and a lot of them lead to lots of different problems!! UGH. Anyway, here's a story I'm writin
Read more

And now for something completely different...

Crisp air stung my cheeks and tousled my hair. I saw others smiling as they bounced through the park, coats and mittens and boots shielding them from a playful chill, but to me it felt like a bully's torments. I couldn't help but glance over my shoulder every few steps despite the daylight and crowds and I hated even the momentary fog that blew from my mouth, corrupting my vision.  I stopped at the bush where the paramedics had found me all those years ago. The blood had long since soaked into the earth; not that there had been much of it. I'd been told over and over how lucky I was that the night was so cold, that I'd had the instinct to keep pressure on my wound. Instinct. Lucky. I took a hand out of my pocket and traced a finger down the long scar from just below my ear to the middle of my esophagus. It was thin, but drew stares. My voice had mostly healed; of course I could still hear the difference. I hated the winter. It reminded me of all I'd lost despite my
Read more

The Broken Hiatus

In the last two days, two friends have spoken to me about this story. Thank you. Thank you. Seriously. We were slow. I could feel the tension in Prevot like the threat of rain and did my best to remember her hasty teachings from the day before, but as lost as I was in the forested areas of the mainland, I was infinitely more useless in this merciless hybrid of land and water. Only a few hours into our travel, I deeply believed I would never be comfortably dry again in my life. I could barely remember the hot, sunny days of my youth when all of the students would run to the ocean’s edge, shedding our clothing as we ran, and plunge into frigid waves only to emerge shivering and gleefully throw ourselves into the sand to bake like fresh an’andi . Tiago did an admirable job for his age, holding his silence and obeying all directions without hesitation. I could hear Ele’s low but steady stream of curses behind us and Vana’s patient encouragement. Captain Dumas, too, kept her peace, but I
Read more