*Be Not Afraid*

So the pizza guy was crazy. When he showed up at our front door, he kept glancing at the tattoos on my mom's neck, and he barely looked away long enough to hand us the pizza. It was clear that he was weirded out by her choice in body art.<br><br>I could hardly blame him. <br><br>My mom's neck tattoos depicted a pair of red words, written in elegant script, one on either side of her throat: *Be Not Afraid.*<br><br>The pizza guy asked her what they meant, and my mom explained that they were a protective prayer. He asked what kind of protection the tattoos offered, and she told him that *some nights, monsters roam the shadows, looking for afraid people to eat.*<br><br>I rolled my eyes in embarrassment, but the pizza guy didn't seem fazed. He asked what these monsters looked like, and my mom describing them in hushed tones:<br><br>"They are tall, gaunt, covered in horrible sores, and their smiles are impossibly wide. Their voices are mesmerizing, and their eyes glow like embers. They are devils, demons, and they are always out there, lurking just beyond the light of our campfires.<br><br>"The first time I saw one of them, I was a little girl. My father took me camping, and he told me that if I was ever afraid, I should just look at my hands. So that's what I did, and it worked. When I was little.<br><br>"Later on in life, I realized that this wasn't working anymore. I was afraid, all the time. And the devils notice that. They can *smell* that. So I got these tattoos."<br><br>I'd heard the story a thousand times, but the pizza guy was entranced. He asked what would happen if the devils got inside your head, and my mom said that if they did, you would kill yourself. You'd take a knife to your wrists, or you'd shoot yourself in the mouth, or you'd just walk out into traffic, looking neither left nor right. <br><br>The pizza guy asked if she had ever felt the devils inside her head, and my mom said yes, all the time. But she had been to a therapist, and the therapist told her a trick that would keep the devils away:<br><br>"When you're in bed at night, and you start to feel afraid, reach out and grab your wrist. Squeeze your wrist tight, and focus on how it feels. Feel the warmth, the softness, the gentleness of your own skin. That's where the devils can't go. That's the place where you're safe, and you're alone, and you're at peace."<br><br>The pizza guy praised my mom's ingenuity, but she waved him off and went to bed.<br><br>The rest is history.<br><br>My mom went to sleep around ten thirty, and died about an hour later. She died happy, smiling, with no look of pain or fear on her face.<br><br>It was a suicide, obviously. She'd shot herself in the head, and the police determined that it was self-inflicted, and that she wasn't forced to do it by anyone else. <br><br>But the police never found the gun.<br><br>And they never found my mom's head.<br><br>It was just... gone. The police said that it must have been blasted out of the house, but they never found any blood or anything on the walls or the carpet, and there were no holes in the windows or the ceiling.<br><br>The only clue was carved into the flesh of my mom's wrist, in red letters: *Be Not Afraid.*