When I was ten years old, all the kids in my neighborhood would gather late at night to play a game of Flashlight Tag. You know what Flashlight Tag is, don't you? It's almost the same as Tag, except you play it in the dark and the person who is "it" has a flashlight to search for people. If they see someone, all they have to do is yell the person's name in order to "tag" them.
One night, it was really dark and the sky was overcast and cloudy. Most people had their curtains drawn, so the neighborhood was almost in complete darkness. It was a perfect time for hiding.
Behind the houses on my side of the street, there was a long stretch of woods. That marked the boundary for the game on that side of the road. You could run through any backyard, but you weren't allowed to hide in the woods. It was too difficult to find anyone in there and it was very easy to trip over tree limbs or end up with poison oak. Of course, this rule was frequently ignored when kids were afraid they were about to be caught. They'd just duck off into the bushes for a minute or hide behind the trees to avoid being seen and tagged.
Those of us who were hiding sometimes liked to spook each other in the dark by jumping out of nowhere and making each other scream, giving away our positions. I was hiding in a backyard two houses down from my house. The family that lived there had a little playhouse and a swing set for their daughter. I would periodically duck under the swings whenever I saw the flashlight's beam approach.
All of a sudden, somebody came around the corner of the house and pointed a flashlight almost directly at me. I jumped away from the beam of light and ran for the edge of the woods. When I got there, I waited in case they saw me and were going to yell at me for cheating. The beam of light seemed to explore the swing set, then came in my direction.
I wondered for a second if maybe I'd attracted the attention of the homeowner. Most parents on the block knew about our games of flashlight tag, but some people didn't like kids playing in their yard. I crouched down in the grass and waited to see who it was.
The person shined the light right in my face and I put up my hand to shield my eyes. The creepy thing was, they never said a word, just shined that light on me.
"You got me!" I exclaimed, hoping that if it was a homeowner, they'd realize I thought they were the flashlight tagger. Then I realized that two houses down, people were yelling and there was the "it" guy's flashlight beam chasing them around.
I stood up and tried to see who was shining the light on me. They just stood there, not moving, not saying anything. I felt a little freaked out.
"Sorry for playing in your yard," I said dumbly.
The person started walking toward me. Something didn't feel right, so I started walking toward the edge of the yard. The person just kept shining the light on me and coming toward me.
I ran.
When I looked back, the person with the flashlight was running too, and it was an adult, much bigger and much faster than me. I felt scared now, not sure why this person was chasing me. I was running toward where the other kids had been, but they were gone now. It just seemed to be me and the person with the flashlight. So I turned right and ducked into the woods.
I dropped to the ground, then wriggled under a ring of thick bushes and curled up. I could see the flashlight in the woods with me, looking around. I could hear the person's footsteps breaking sticks and crunching on pine needles. I didn't know who it was or why they were chasing me. I just wanted to get back to all the other kids.
Eventually, the person with the flashlight wandered deeper into the woods and I crawled quietly back to the edge of the trees, like a mouse. When I got up and ran toward the street, I was immediately caught by the person who was "it", but I didn't care. He yelled out, telling me that I was now "it" and I tried to tell him that there was someone else with a flashlight wandering around in the woods, but he took off into the dark shouting "No tag backs!"
