"Click, click, click. Click, click, click."
I turn on the lights.
Over her bed the wall is green, green burlap. It was intended, in our teenage years, to be a place to pin posters and photographs and kissy lips love letters.
I can see it all from my side of the room where I'm sleeping on a matching twin bed.
There's a long tall window at the end of the room, showing only the dark of night, it's opposite the door. And there's two closets, one for each of us, framed out into the room. My chest of drawers' on my side, her chest of drawers' on her side. Also, there's a floor to ceiling bookcase for her and a floor to ceiling bookcase for me made by our older brother. Thus, we felt an invisible divide for private space.
But, I can't sleep.
"Click, click, click. Click, click, click."
Where's that sound coming from? So irritating.
I go to the window to peer out, and look all around the sill and trim. We live on a farm, and there could be 'coons, owls, possums, anything in the tree outside the window. Shoot, even our youngest brother could be teasing us with pecks of pea gravel on the window glass. You never knew.
There! I hear it again. Behind me.
Turning around, following the sounds, I'm led back to my bed. What on earth!
I look under the bed, around the bed, behind the bed, pull back the covers of the bed. Nothing!
"Click, click, click. Click, click, click."
The radio? Is it coming from the radio? I check the volume button, and the alarm, and the durn thing is all turned off but it's definietly got a clicking noise coming from it. It doesn't make a bit of sense!
As I'm giving this yellowed-from-age radio alarm clock a twist this way and that, turning it over doing detective things with my eyes and ears, those clicking sounds stop!
Out from the grille which is over the scrim cloth covered speaker comes crawling a ...... black beetle!!!
I was beetle juiced!
Humpth, I'll bet he was, too!
That speaker had amplified his night time activity!
"Click, click, click. Click, click, click."
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