Freddy
Letitia Trent
In K-Mart, Mother said don't leave my side, remember that program on television? I did. It was an ABC Special called Eye On Our Children. In it, Diane Sawyer told of a little girl gone to the bathroom with a friendly woman who stripped her of her dress, balled her blond hair under a baseball cap, and led her out quiet by the hand. Two weeks later, the girl was found in a ditch outside of Salt Lake City. In the eighties, all of the children were dying. John Walsh, host of America's Most Wanted, once had a son named Adam, then absence. In 1984, Freddy Kreuger was created. He wore stripes and tight pants and was burnt to death in his little house on Elm Street. But he would not die, unlike the children. Or rather death had made him something different—his hands switching scissors, face ribbed like water damage. The children usually stayed in their graves and pictures. Mother told a story, over and over, of a man at an ice cream stand who had wanted to take me away with him, I was such a pretty baby. In the eighties, McGruff the Crime Dog said we weren't chickens if we ran from men skirting the playground fence or our peers in backward caps holding suspect, hand-made cigarettes. John Walsh's son, Adam, my age exactly, was nothing but identifying orthodontics by the time they found him. I imagine Adam, instead of Freddy, occupying the place between sleep and waking. He's whole and grown, a man I might have met, if he had made it to the age I did. He's angry, survivor, he spits, and I wonder how his head found his body again as he's saying tell me everything that I missed and did you ever dream about me?