In the middle of the night while not sleeping, I heard it

snagging on the floorboards as it crept to my bed,

slinking on gold toes until, with the sound of fine unraveling,

it leapt up and landed in a black tangle on my breast

where it settled its foul haunches and sat leering in the dark,

exhaling the sour pickle smell of it’s fetid, fungal breath.

The Sockubus had come!

Bringer of nightmares of unmatched pairs of casual and dress

eternally inverted, mud-caked, sweat-stiff and grass-stained;

of shoe-chewed heals and unknit holes where toes should be;

of elastic snares and nylon pills and sliding shapeless cuffs,

and the telltale bulge of the renegade hidden inside a pajama leg.

He mocked me with bawdy visions of mateless socks reproducing

with sybaritic abandon, wantonly flinging themselves limp and

spent into the lint and cat hair repository beneath the bed.

“Lord save me!” I gasped, crushed by the weight of loose threads.

“Fool!” the dark thing spat, cackling like the hellish rip of static cling,

“What help do you expect of a God who wore sandals?”

© Dana Hughes 1.16.15