Bio

Kjersti Furu lives in Norway, where she wrestles polar bears and writes dirty words in the snow.

She was born a bookworm and used to hide behind the shelves at her local library.

Now she does that for a living, in-between jotting down the sentences she conjures up when she should be sleeping at night. Sometimes these sentences even make it to her blog: http://kissingpillows.wordpress.com/

Night Terror

I'm seven years old again and she tucks me to bed at night, making sure the duvet covers my toes and kissing my nose before she turns to leave.

It's dark and no clocks are ticking and no Peter Pans come flying through the window.

"Do you remember when we used to walk in the woods on Sunday mornings," I ask her and she smiles, the crackling of ice on the front porch, the pale yellow sun turning the blood in my eyelids orange, chunky scarves wrapped around her bald head.

Every night she'd wait outside my bedroom door, fighting off monsters with her tiny heart fluttering behind her t-shirt, always quiet so I wouldn't know she's there, but I could hear her slow breath trembling, her eyes fixated on the door, and after all these years she's still there, like a whisper just before I fall asleep.

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