By Ridhi Dondeti

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She enters the world of dreams only to find herself running away. Will she make it?

The air was cold. It almost reached her soul. It could easily be two in the morning, way past her bedtime. She knew the “I’m disappointed” talk would come soon. She’d give it 30 seconds, but she heard nothing. She looked up to see the sky. It wasn’t the dark-blue-but-nearly-black shade it always was. It was true black, a pitch black. Her mind kept ticking inside. Be scared, be scared, be scared, be scared. No one can help, you have to be scared. Come on, think of something scary you can think of something scary.

I’m not scared.

As if it couldn’t, she felt the sky getting darker. She moved her foot around to try and feel something. There had to be something about this place that was comforting. 

She felt grass up until her knee. There was something on it. A bug. No, a flower. Curious, she tried to pluck it in the dark, and brought it up to her face, making the flower nearly touch her eye.

It was purple.

Maybe it was a violet, she couldn’t exactly tell, but she knew it was purple. It was the only thing she could see in the gulf of darkness. She plucked a small petal out, and put it in her hair. She laughed. Finally, something comforting.

She sat down in the field, realizing she was wearing a dress. She didn’t have anything against dresses, but she hadn’t worn one in a long time. She felt older. She wasn’t the small little girl with her purple backpack, the one that got her d’s and b’s confused and had to write her name to figure out which was which. 

The dark greeted her with a sense of comfort. She could simply close her eyes. All her worries were gone from the world and she could finally think about nothing. A pillow and blanket fell next to her. She took the pillow and comfortably placed it beneath her after draping the blanket over herself. In the middle of what seemed like an endless night, she heard rustles from the bushes. 

Something was coming; something obscure. A leviathan? 

Except it wasn’t a leviathan. It looked like a tiger, but it must have been 20 feet tall. She jumped, the dark was no longer her friend. It could absolutely scare you. It ran towards her. She bolted, nearly tripping over the tall grass. She was so cold she felt like she was going to fall into ice. She wanted to curl into a ball among the blanket and pillow she left behind, but she had to run. Her entire life depended on it. She was moving fast enough to feel the grass prickling her skin. The violet she picked up was long gone, lying somewhere in the meadow. The cold was reaching her bones; she really wanted to lie down now.

She could lie down, right?

She heard the tiger behind her slow its pace, but she didn’t dare to look over her shoulder to face it. The more she tried to stop, the more her legs didn’t give in. She couldn’t stop.

The dark was feeding her so she could keep going. Perhaps it was feeding on her. 

But there was a gray area forming in the center of her line of sight. It started to grow brighter. There was something there. Her mind was racing like the rest of her. 

I have to go there.

The more she kept running the more she realized she couldn’t control herself. Was she the dark’s puppet; one of many playing into its daydream? Or simply herself, but helpless? 

She was almost there. But wait, where was the light?

She couldn’t hear the tiger anymore. She found herself starting to slow down. As she stopped, she began to turn around.

Darkness. 

The true deficiency in light. It made people feel lost (as if it wasn’t inevitable). There was evil in the air, and darkness was behind it. It was plotting something. Behind the evil she could feel Darkness’s anger. It wanted something to stay, but what?

Before she began whirring through the questions that formed in her mind, she felt Dark close in on her. She started to panic: eyes darting and hands grabbing the air to find a corner of the now familiar world that has yet to be consumed. The cold Dark slowly turned into a comfortable one. She stopped her movements as she welcomed an old friend with open arms. 

She was in her bedroom, a six-year-old again. The only light was from the glowing stars on the ceiling, reaching into the corners of her room. 

She was safe, right?

She knew it, but she still felt the Dark watching her, ready to take her in its shadow again. She slowly closed her eyes, shaking that thought as she embraced sleep. 

The next day she asked her parents for a nightlight. 

She slept with it for years, though the sleep brought her the same, cold Dark. On her tenth birthday, they left their shared past behind as it faded from her life.

Process

As I started writing for fun, I realized one way I could enhance my skills was to practice imagery, or the art of “showing, not telling.” With this, I began to write a series of dramatically written, imagery-heavy short stories such as this one based on stories I have read or movies I have watched.