Scaring Myself

 

What am I doing here?  How did I wind up with three teenage friends, in the woods of a local park, in the pitch black?

When we were walking on the sidewalk next to the woods, it seemed like a fun thing to do. Leave the sidewalk where the street lamps light up everything and venture into the woods, where the pitch darkness turns everything into something else.

I was shaking inside non-stop so much so that it felt like a group of mariachis were playing inside my stomach.  I was terrified on the inside but tried to act cool on the outside.  My three friends didn’t seem scared but I sure was!

I started remembering a story my sister and her boyfriend told me recently where they were going to walk into the woods at night but then something made them stop in their tracks.  They insisted that they saw the outline of an adult’s stomach lying on the grass, nothing else, just a pink stomach. 

Could they have been right or were the shadows and blackness of the woods at night tricking their eyes and minds? Had somebody just left behind a half of a watermelon on the ground from an afternoon picnic?  They didn’t stick around to figure it out. They were sure it was a person’s stomach cut away from its body.  They ran out of the wooded area and right back to the safety of their homes.

My mind started concentrating on the present again and there I was with my friends who had managed to creep into a darker part of the woods. Trails that were there on the ground to guide us in daylight had now become invisible like a bunch of ghosts hiding in a haunted house.  Invisible paths were playing hide and seek with us in a ghostly way.

We stopped and as I looked up toward the sky.  All I could see were what used to be tree branches but now looked like the long menacing tentacles reaching down to grab all of us and crush us to pulp. Every breath of wind made it seem more and more like those tentacles were bending down lower and lower to grab us.

Then we saw a threatening little man standing off to the side with a machete in his right hand. We stared at him for a minute unable to tell if he was a sinister criminal or not but this was the last straw for all of us. Was this man really just a tree trunk which took on scary shapes in the complete darkness or was a machete being sharpened and ready to use?

We didn’t stay to figure it out. All of us started yelling and screaming while trying to find our way out of those pitch dark woods. We all promised each other that we would never go back in the woods at night. As for me, I never did!

Ellen / Apr 2023