Ruth

Age: 6

Adira rolled over in her bed, muttering unintelligibly. Ruth frowned at her from in her rocking chair.

"Adira, honey are you all-"

The little girl bolted upright in her bed like she'd been doing more and more often recently. She breathed heavily and rapidly, heart pounding like a jackhammer. "Ruth?" She looked around, alarmed. The old woman had never left her side before when she was sleeping. Especially since the nightmares had started. "Ruth?" She began to tremble.

Adira rolled over to the left side of the bed, ready to stand up and hesitantly walk to the light switch (even though Ruth had always been there to hold her hand) but when she looked over the edge of the bed, she shrieked.

Needle-like teeth grinned in an eerie smile that reminded the little girl of a much scarier Cheshire Cat. There was no body attached to the creepy grin, just the pointy teeth and bright yellow eyes that were filled with malice.

Adira screamed again and scrambled to the other side of her bed. She heard a faint whisper of breath, like the sound of an overly prolonged sigh. A cold feeling prickled at her from in the pit of her stomach and began to spread outwards. She couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't think

"-alright?"

Adira gasped and whirled around to the source of the voice and sobbed with relief. "Ruth!" she wailed and buried her  face in the old woman's shirt.

"What's wrong,  Adira?" Ruth asked. Then her eyebrows knit closer together. "Weren't you just over there?"

"What?" Adira sniffed.

"You were just asleep...." Ruth felt a tingle of fear shoot down her spine.

"That doesn't matter, Ruth... oh, it was just awful!" Adira cried again and hid her face in her friend's flowery house dress. "There were these eyes, and this horrible smile...." she burst into renewed sobs.

"It's okay Adira." Ruth stroked the little girl's hair gently. "I'm here now."

She suddenly broke away from the contact, her watery eyes now full of anger. "But you weren't when it happened."

Ruth's heart broke, seeing her cherished Adira look at her with such fury. "I'm sorry, sweetie but it was beyond my control."

"You promised you'd always be there to protect me from the nightmares," Adira said coldly.

"Adira," Ruth began, but she realized there was nothing she could say. Adira was only six. Ruth surely couldn't tell her the truth, and her mind couldn't scramble for an excuse fast enough. "I'll... you'll understand all this later, I promise." She winced internally at how pathetic her response was.

The little girl exploded. "That's all anyone ever tells me!" she shouted. "You were always the one who told me the truth, why are you stopping now?"

Ruth slowly said," Because you don't want to know the truth, sweetie."

"Yes, I do."

It killed the old woman to have to do this but she stared Adira right into her eyes and said, dead serious, "No. You. Don't. Trust me."

"But-"

"Adira," Ruth put as much force into her words as she could, "go to sleep."

The little girl began to get that indignant expression again, but then she swooned, overcome with an overwhelming sense of drowsiness. She collapsed into the old woman's arms immediately. She was tucked into her sheets.

Ruth went to the kitchen and grabbed the sage leaves from the spice cabinet. She sprinkled them into a circle around Adira's bed. Then she grabbed a lighter and touched the soft orange flame to the sage circle. The entire circle dissipated into strong smelling smoke that briefly hung in a perfect cloudy circle before swirling around and sinking into the carpet.

"There you go Adira," Ruth whispered. She found the candle she always used and lit it with the same lighter. She cut off a gray bit of her hair and set it in the flames where it vanished into a puff of gray smoke.

Once the world had stopped spinning, she followed the familiar path and inevitably arrived at the worn gravestone. She pulled the sage bottle out of her pocket and emptied the rest of the bottle in a much thicker, wider circle around the grave plot. She barely had enough sage.

When she was done, she tucked the empty bottle back into the deep pockets of her green, flowery dress and dusted off her hands. "Can't bother me now," she said triumphantly. As she turned around to leave and return to her house, the almost undetectable wind picked up subtly, rustling the leaves and shaking the branches. It made Ruth's wispy gray hair flutter around her weathered face.

When the wind came, her face blanched and she looked a hundred years older, like she was about to crumble into dust at the slightest disturbance. "Stay where you are, Frank," she spat.

The wind angrily hissed through the branches. Ruth trembled.

"You know you don't want to anger me," she whispered. She forced her fear down. "I saged you, you're stuck."

The wind began to howl fiercely. Ruth's dress flapped around her ankles and her hair fluttered wildly about her face, getting in her eyes. She tried to push it away, but it was pointless.

"You would never," she growled. "Who would ever agree to help you?"

The wind died down to almost nothing but the faintest whisper.

Ruth's stomach dropped and she sprinted back down the graveyard path, becoming more relieved with every millimeter of distance she put between herself and the old gravestone.