Escape from the Nightmares

Maariyah Ford, Opinion Editor

The wet soil feels like squirming worms between her toes as she takes each step through the cold chilly forest. She uses one hand to hold down her silky white night gown by her legs while the wind blows as if it’s trying trying to find a way to break free from the hold it has on her little body. She uses the other hand to drag along the heavy sack, which is full of all her nightmares. As she continues to move through the dark forest, pieces of her nightmares continue to slip from the sack and slowly creep away.

When she finally finds her destination, she drops the sack and pulls out a shovel. Starting with the softest part of the ground, she begins to dig. She digs and keeps digging even when it starts pouring rain and she hears the echo of thunder. It wasn’t until after two hours that she finally felt that she had dug deep enough and reached for the sack. It was then, when she had the sack in her hands, that it felt extremely lighter compared to it’s actually weight.

She turned around to investigate and automatically found what the the problem was. Almost every nightmare she had in her sack was now missing. Out of fear, she buried the remaining ones she did have in the sack and ran off as quickly as her little feet could take her, leaving the shovel behind. As she was running, she slowly began to hear her nightmares quickly gain on her, working as a team. She took a deep breath and pushed her legs to move faster.

No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t lose them, at least not all of them. After a while, she started to see her home just past the trees. Giving her legs one more push, she finally broke through the woods and threw herself at the door, opened it, ran inside, and shut it. After a few pants from her and a few bangs from the creatures outside, all the noises finally stopped.

She waited a couple of minutes to see if anything would happen to give her a sign that there still was something outside but nothing happened. She let out a sigh of relief before turning the lights on. Only then did she notice that each and every single nightmare she had ever had was now standing in front of her with sinister looks in their eyes as they started to charge at her. She let out a scream before everything went black.