When I Was Younger

     When I was younger, my father gave me a vintage Mickey Mouse radio-alarm clock. It had a knob that you could turn, and when turned it would play a different song at the sound of the alarm. I was always so interested in it, and even when it wasn’t sounding the alarm’s songs, I would listen to the cheery little tunes when I had nothing else to do.
Fast forward a few years, and I’m thirteen living in a new house in the middle of nowhere. The house is barely organized, but I’ve found my way in a nook of the house with my computer and bare essentials to being a lazy middle schooler with a lot of summer free time. Coke, my Gameboy Color, you get the point. But just a few days earlier, my dad had dropped a box full of random crap into my little computer room (which was already filled to the brim with other arbitrary knick knacks.) So, one day I was fed up with being so crowded that I took it upon myself to go through all of this stuff and sort out what I thought we really needed.

     I think you may be able to tell what happened next. I dug through the old junk, and eventually after rummaging around, I found my old Mickey Mouse clock. I pulled it up to my face, smiling at how silly it was. The arms on Mickey’s body were the arms of the clock, and it was obviously out of date, it being in storage somewhere for probably like, seven or eight years. Mickey’s arms were oddly shaped and cracked in the middle. Kind of disturbing, but I let out an uncomfortable giggle, though I didn’t know why. It looked like a fragment of my early childhood had been hit by a bus. I skimmed over the dusty plastic, and eventually found it; the little panel with all the songs it could play.  “When You Wish Upon A Star,” “It’s A Small World,” you get the idea. But the old knob to turn the song selection was gone. Just a piece of plastic, and nothing I put in to turn it would work. Eventually I took it out to the garage to grab one of my dad’s screwdrivers. There was an ominous feeling about the dark, empty living. I turned on every light as if that would save me from a masked murderer walking in on me as I played video games or ate a sandwich. When I got the correctly sized screw driver out, I unscrewed all of the screws from their little spots, and opened up the back. What the clock looked like on the inside shocked me.

     Absolutely nothing filled it’s dirty, plastic shell. I did notice it being lighter than what I thought it felt like when I was young. I screwed it back together, picked it up, and flicked the switches to play music. It didn’t play like anyone in their right mind would suspect.
My dad came home later that day. I told him about my afternoon, and he asked me to show him the clock. So I did, and he marveled at it, probably just as confused as I was. He told me that when he put it in the box, the knob was on the clock. We searched everywhere in the box, but we were never lucky enough to find it. He just put it on my computer desk.
       Later that night, I was at my desk playing one of those repetitive shooter games where you die a lot. So of course, I was dead and waiting to respawn. I noticed the clock again, and I flipped the radio switch just to distract myself. After flipping it two or three times, I jumped nearly three stories out of my chair when it started playing the little tune it could not ever move from. “Mickey Mouse Club March.” It was just like I remembered it. All prettied up with what would probably be high tech back in the day. Even as nostalgic as I was feeling, I still felt creeped to the bone. I opened it up again, and this is where it got really freaky. There was still nothing inside of it. But it played on, it’s once calming but now eerie tune ringing in my head. I put it on the shelf in my room before I went to bed that night.

     But in the middle of the coming morning, I was awoken somewhere around five, to the march I had earlier been so nostalgic about. Though, now the song played a messy, mucky, ground-up version of the earlier tune. I flipped the switch into off mode, and threw it under my bed where I could not hear it. When I woke up, feeling restless and sick of sleeplessness, I retrieved the clock, and it was no longer playing. I turned it back to the setting to play music, and it played perfectly fine. Nothing odd or eerie about it. 

     Later that day when my parents and I went to the giant trash dump on one of those garbage hills out in the middle of nowhere, I found the perfect opportunity to get rid of the clock. I decided upon this without my dad’s consent but I no longer felt it could ever become his problem. So while my parents were throwing out the old mattresses, I tip toed off and threw the clock. Good riddance was the only goodbye I could muster.
So we fast forward again, now to the present day. I’m twenty-three years old now, and it’s been a whole decade since the highlights of my story. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened lately. I graduated high school and college, found my own place. But one night after me and my friends from college had decided to go camping, we had all gotten into our tent and hit the sack for a night of comfy sleep. 

     I was awoken with screams from my friends, and that old familiar theme. The march from hell.  I turned on my flashlight, looking around frantically for the clock, and soon enough I had my light shining on it. The clock was right there. I grabbed it and threw it out of the tent, coming up with all of my first-grade baseball experience. It was gone and that was all that mattered then. I didn’t bother explaining it to my friends, I slammed my head back to my pillow and just went back to sleep. When I awoke, I checked my phone for the time and it was noon. My friends were gone, and they left a note that said, “We decided to head out early this morning. Sorry for whatever inconvenience we caused last night. Still don’t know where that shit came from.”

     The next day, I came home from work and checked the mail. In the mailbox was a package, its contents wrapped inside of a small cardboard box. I always take a nap when I get home, and so as I began to lie down in my bed I unwrapped the cardboard. Should I really have been surprised about what was in the package?