[chuchutrain]: 63.Contest Entries.Emotional Fear

((A/N: This is my entry for Flipside's contest Emotional Fear. I'm not sure if it follows criteria. Hope you enjoy ^^ I personally don't really like it.))

“Good bye, Ms. Jacobs.” she called as she walked out of the classroom and towards the door to the field where she would walk home. She had stayed to finish a project she had been working on for the past week. She was happy with the way things went and the finished product. She stepped into the October night as she shivered and her body immediately became covered in goosebumps. She shivered once again before starting her walk home. As she stood at the fence that closed off the field she looked around and saw the houses lining the other side of it. Among those houses was her’s. She adjusted her messenger bag as she began to walk across the desolate field.

She kept her head down in thought of random things. As she thought her mind finally settled down to think about the horror story her best friend had told her that day in class. She looked up at the sky admiring the stars and the clear sky hoping to get her mind off of the story but to no prevail. When she looked back down she was greeted by a silhouette of a figure off in the distance. It was running towards her, limping as if off balance. Her eyes widened as she stopped in her tracks and watched it come closer. She resisted the impulse to scream out as she shook her head thinking she was seeing things. When she opened her eyes, the figure was gone. She gave off a sigh of relief as she kept walking. The teenager was beginning to become more paranoid as she took each step. As she walked past a soccer net she heard a rustling as she looked behind her and in the net was a man staring back at her. He seemed to be caught in the net as he struggled to reach out to her as if to grab hold of her. She took a step back as her face drained of all colour and she stood rooted to her spot. The man was horribly grotesque as he was missing one arm, he seemed to be injured in one eye and his ears were bleeding horribly. She turned on her heel as she began to run towards her house. When she opened here eyes to see where she was going she saw it again, the silhouette of the man running at her as he limped was seen just a few meters away.

Her eyes began to tear up as she closed her eyes and shook her head trying to rid the image of the man from her mind. As she neared the other side of the field she stopped and panted as she looked behind her to see if the man was still there. There wasn’t anything, not even any evidence that the man had been there. She sighed and shook her head. “I need to stop imagining things…” she muttered to herself as she crossed over the fence and into the street where she looked back and could have sworn she had seen a silhouette of the man limping towards the fence where she had crossed over. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath as she looked once more and saw nothing. She walked home and had nightmares the whole night of a limping man chasing after her.



© Stephanie Chu, 2006