Seat of Our Pants

The lights had been out for three hours when a pop woke me from a deep sleep. Not yet awake but no longer sleeping, I lay on my side with my back to our window, drifting back toward sleep.

A cool draft slid over my exposed shoulder. Funny, I thought, the window was closed when I fell asleep. In that twilight sleep, where thought hovers between dream and reality, a draft could just be part of a dream – so I let it go.

That is, until I felt a sensation similar to something pressing down onto my bed. Still confused and not yet awake, I rolled over to find my window and screen open. Reaching through the window was an arm and a long stick. It was the stick that I had felt pressing on my bed. It was now pressing into my back.

“What the…” was all I could get out before the arm and stick withdrew into the darkness.

I lay frozen for a few minutes, willing myself to do something about the open window. Springing into action, I closed the screen. That done, I realized the window that I so desperately wanted closed was on the outside of the screen. Closing it meant reopening the screen and reaching my arm into the darkness, a place I was unwilling to go. At least not without some assistance from Martin, who lay snoozing on the other side of the room.

Crouched as low as I could get to the ground and still move, I inched over to Martin’s bed.

“Martin. Martin. Martin. Martin. Martin!” I repeated while shaking him, too scared for pleasantries. He woke slowly and tried to comfort me, thinking I’d just woken from a bad dream.

“Someone is outside. They were poking me with a stick. I’m really freaked out,” I said. My voice had taken on a quiver of one who was truly, deeply terrified.

“He’s there!” I hissed as a head appeared in silhouette just outside my window. Hearing my hiss, the head disappeared, only to reappear at Martin’s window a moment later and duck down again. Realizing the severity of the situation, Martin crept over to my window, assuming that would be the next place the head would turn up. Sure enough, it reappeared a moment later. Tapping into his Viking heritage, Martin erupted into a terrifying battle cry and lunged for the face that hovered in silhouette. The head disappeared and we heard the sound of someone fleeing.

Figuring it was a kid playing a prank, our fear quickly turned to anger. Who pokes someone through their window while they’re sleeping? How profoundly rude! We unlocked our room and stepped into the common area of the guesthouse in search of a security guard. Within minutes there was a team of boy workers scouring the area in search of the Poker.

Ten minutes passed and we heard a commotion. The Poker had been found and was in the process of receiving a whooping by the search team. Phone calls were placed and the police arrived, delivering a fresh walloping (I guess innocent until proven guilty is largely ignored in this part of the world). Away he went to jail and out we crept from our room to get the story.

This intrusion is apparently the fifth time for the man, not boy as we had assumed. The jail time for such offense is three days, so we can rest easy – the reaching arm and bobbing head will be behind bars for the remainder of our time in Miao.

It was a terrifying experience, but one not without lessons. Bars on the windows are put in place for a reason. The Poker would have had easy access to my sleep sodden self had they not been there. Secondly: he’s the most squeezable guy, my husband can be one scary son of a bitch when he wants to be. I’m pretty sure that whatever was on the end of that poking stick went to jail with soiled pants.

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