The Rendezvous // Thomas Sangster

A Psychopath with Rope

I'm still frustrated as I walk aimlessly through the forest, annoyed at Thomas's behavior. Red walks behind me, skirting the trail. It really baffles me how one person could be so rude.

Sometimes I wish I were confident enough to sass a stranger I didn't know. Thomas obviously had no trouble speaking his mind. And here I was, short and weak, having no knowledge of how to fix my own truck, and having the inability to insult another rude human being. If you can't insult a random human being, what is the point to life?

The sun lowers in the sky, tainting the skyline yellow and orange. The shadows that the trees cast turn a misty blue, and the forest starts to become a little more ominous. The light that filters through the trees becomes less bright as the woods start to get darker. Moss covers the forest floor, so when I step, I can't hear the sound. All is silent.

I stop for a moment, Red pausing by my side and looking out at the alpine trees with me. The longer I look, the more the trees seem to fade together, making figures that dance around, taunting me. My throat closes up and I begin to feel afraid, realizing that out here, no one knows where I am. No one could find me. No one would come looking for me.

I wrap my sweater tighter around me as chills race up my arms and shoot down my back. I look at Red, "You'll protect me, right?"

He blinks slowly.

I roll my eyes, "Thank you, that was very convincing."

I glance at the sky, which continues to darken. I should be getting back.

I snap my fingers for Red to follow me as I set back down the trail. He follows me, sniffing at the ground as we walk back the direction we came. Red used to be a hunting dog - and a dang good one too. He could track down anything and everything. He was a lot more fun when he was young, but if I had originally spawned during the Triassic age like Red had, and lived to tell the tale, you could bet I would use that as an excuse to be a crotchety little turd all the time too.

As we continue our trek back, I hear a small rustling off to the side of the path. My gaze falls to my feet, and I see a pair of small, beady eyes staring back at me. I then proceed to lose my mind, when I see a scaly body, and a flicking tongue.

I let out a high pitched squeal as the snake starts to slither in my direction.

Whipping around as fast as humanly possible, I run the opposite direction. Red, who doesn't seem to understand my terror, chases after me, instead of getting the snake like a good dog would. I run as fast as I can for maybe three minutes, a voice in the back of my mind telling me that the snake was going to follow me and swallow me whole.

Now, to some people, my fear of snakes might seem a bit irrational. However, when I was a little girl, my incredibly kind older brother got mad at me one day, and told me he was going to catch a snake and put it in my bed. This didn't seem totally impossible, because we lived in the backwoods of Florida, however, me being eight, and him being ten, I didn't think he'd have the balls to do it. It was my unfortunate surprise one evening, as I was crawling into bed to hear a small rustling sound coming from my closet. I curiously walked over, opened the door, and low and behold, there sat a huge snake sitting right next to my favorite baby doll.

My mother was ecstatic. She yelled at my brother for an hour. After she'd taken care of the snake, of course. Ever since then, I've been mortally terrified of snakes. There was only one positive outcome from this experience, and that was that my brother and I had hardly ever argued since then, and it was pretty much blue skies for us from that point on.

For my baby doll, however, it did not end happily. 

I burned it.

Extreme? Maybe.