Aurora Magazine 2019

Curtains

S. Michael Simms

They say you outgrow things like The Boogeyman, mon - sters, ghost stories, scary movies, and all that crazy stuff you sincerely believed when you were a kid. Plenty to watch. Plenty to ponder. Plenty to fear. Was there anything more thrilling than sneaking out in the middle of the night, maybe with a friend who’d slept over, and running around the neighborhood - or sneaking into places you weren’t supposed to be and sometimes getting caught - your heart pounding as some grownup chased away you pesky kids? Zoinks! That was the good kind of fear – the kind you will spend most of your adult life trying to recapture – watching old scary movies, telling ghost stories to your kids, riding the haunted house rides at amusement parks…and then there’s the bad kind. Maybe it was all those supernatural horror flicks like The Exorcist and The Omen; maybe the TV preachers (or real preach - ers) took their toll. But if you’re like me, something got it stuck in your head that there are real demons. Whether you’ve shared this experience or not, believing in real demons and not being reli - gious? It sucks. You don’t have that “power of Christ” to compel them, you just have your own wits and mental fortitude, and whatever mea - sure of disbelief you can muster in the face of true terror – more than any you ever needed for movies or fiction or getting into trouble as a kid. It’s in this context that I’m going to tell you about Makanimit. Don’t ask me how he got his name – maybe it’s not even a real name but just something a terrified kid came up with on the fly that seemed to fit. I do know that I wrote it down,

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