Short Story Collection

2. Innocence

I draw the darkness around me like a thick, impenetrable cloak, melting into the shadows. My heart is pounding so violently in my chest that I fear that it can be heard by the men beating the bushes looking for me.

If I'm caught, I'm dead. I know that for the cold hard fact that it is.

Not long ago, I was just one of many people in the streets going to their separate venues and children carrying baskets with enough candy to last them for days. Fairies, knights and princesses mingling with gargoyles and demons, all laughing and skipping along with glee.

It is Halloween, where innocence and depravity meet and walk hand-in-hand for a while.

My stalkers are closing in. The streets are deserted. Children went to bed to dream of chocolates and pirate costumes; everyone else is at an after-party somewhere. There are no more trick-or-treaters around, no more parents wrangling their young. All that remains are the night, the odd barking of a dog or two and streetlamps flickering as insects crowd their light.

I'm crouched among the branches of a shrub blocking a house from the street, making myself as small as possible, my heart a shivering rabbit in my breast. I ran so far that now my breath struggles from my lungs. I'm almost completely out of options. Soon, I'll be trapped with nowhere safe to hide. Panic is stirring in my stomach, a demon with stringy hair gnawing on my entrails.

I am afraid.

I know that from the sweat beading at my hairline and trickling down my back. Fear is a cold emotion, dark and numbing. I push through the paralysis, settling in my limbs, stumbling over tree roots in the dark until I'm crawling over pebbles and dropped thorns, forcing my body through the narrow gap between the unforgiving ground and the bottom of a Bougainvillea. The shrub is throwing its thorny vines up the nearest tree and parts of the house's wall, flashing pretty red flowers to hide how vicious it really is.

I can hear shoes crunching on the ground near me, and I shrink deeper into my hiding place, smothering my frightened whimpers with my hand, ignoring the sharp thorns, digging into my clothes, searching for my skin.

If I'm caught it's over. There will be no mercy. Nobody cares about innocence anymore.

I swallow against the bile rising in my throat, watching the hulking figure sneak past, gun at the ready. One bullet is all it will take for my life to be over. The man is swinging a flashlight around, casting an arc of blinding light into the darkness, and I hold my breath, pinching my eyes shut. The light burns on my hiding place for too long, and I wait for the branches to be ripped apart and for cruel hands to pull me out, but it never comes. The glare leaves my closed eyelids, and when I open them, I see the man moving away, still swinging his light from side to side, going further and further away from me along the street.

I wait a while longer, making sure that there aren't other dangers around, before I stand up straight behind the shrubs and slide along the breadth of the house, my back pressed against the rough wall.