*Caterina*

When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark.

No, it was more accurate to say I was scared of the night. Mom used to tell anyone around how cute it was that her little girl was scared of the monsters under the bed and the shadows that moved across the walls, but that wasn’t what I had been afraid of.

Shadows didn’t scare me. They were friends that my father would puppet with his hands across the walls, making up stories together before bed. ...