Things I am Afraid of: Charcoal Sketches of People in Bathtubs

I am a rather jumpy, skittish person. I wasn't always this way. I use to be brave until about the age of six when I had a dream that my house was robbed (the robbers came to the front door and rang the doorbell. I am not clear to this day why exactly my family let them in . . . ) . After that dream I couldn't sleep facing my sliding glass door for fear robbers would enter it.
If this wasn't enough to make a small girl terrified of life, I made the mistake of reading a book called The Girl in the Box when I was in third grade. The book is about a girl who gets kidnapped and thrown into a basement with her typewriter. (The book ends and you never find out if you she gets out). That made me pretty much terrified to get the mail by myself till I was about . . . ummm . . . twenty-fiveish.
Anyway, those incidents combined with a general fear of the unknown and a distinct lack of a thrill-seeking gene have made me afraid of a variety of things ranging from the common everyday to the obscure. This is the first post in a (never-ending) series in which I will explore my fears. This is not meant to be therapeutic but rather an attempt to explain away my crazy.
Charcoal sketches in general are sort of haunting. There is something about the lines in charcoal drawings that creep me out. They aren't black, but they aren't grey (perhaps this is where the color charcoal comes from . . . ) they are just sort of an awful mix of black and grey. And the edges are blurry. I don't mind a blurry edge here or there but I don't like everything to be smudged into each other. I want some definition.
Also, when ever we had to do charcoal drawings in grade school, the charcoal will get all over our clothes and hands and floor. Everything you touched would have charcoal on it and it was hard to wash off. I was like Lady Macbeth in my elementary school bathroom. There is something completely disturbing about an eight year-old scrubbing her clothes at a sink that is unusually low to the ground while she mutters curses at the charcoal .
So charcoal used as an artistic medium, as a general rule, is just altogether disturbing. The eeriness of charcoal people combined with the super creepy feel of an ill-defined charcoal sketched bathtub is just enough to send me running for the door. I don't know that I have ever seen a charcoal sketch of a person in a bathtub when the person did not have crazy hair and creepy dead eyes. (I searched the Internet for an example but apparently charcoal sketches of people in bathtubs are not in vogue right now . . .). And the bathtub is always one of those claw-foot ones (which is another fear to be discussed later on in the series). There is something animalistic about such tubs and for some reason charcoal artists always like to exaggerate the feet so they look as if they could grab the person who just walked into the bathroom. I'm afraid of being grabbed by a bathtub, I'll admit it.
Getting back to the person now. They always seem to look as if they just came out of the drain of the bathtub and no matter what way you slice it a person coming out of a bathtub drain is scary (you don't even have to be as crazy as me to think that). There is something about their disheveled appearance that makes them look like they might eat babies or bit the heads of crows (also another fear of mine, crows not people who bite the heads of crows.)
In conclusion, it is the combination of the ill-defined charcoal lines, claw-foot tub, and crazy drain person combined with the fact that all of this can be hidden from me by a shower curtain which can be thrown open at any time while I am either washing my hands or using the toilet that terrifies me. No one should ever have to worry that all this horror lurks behind an innocent vinyl shower curtain. If I can trust anything in this world, it should be a shower curtain and now thanks to charcoal artists and their bathtub sketches I don't even have that.