Courting Tragedy

Courting Tragedy (1)

1

I could feel eyes on me. My skin was crawling and my heart felt like it was beating through my chest. I pressed my back against the wall of my kitchen and tried not to breathe. Then I peeked around the corner toward the garage, expecting to see a burglar or at least my dad, but there was no one there. I sighed, knowing very well that there was going to be no one there, after that I turned back to the kitchen.

The house was dark and quiet except for the sounds I kept hearing. My mom would probably just say that I was being paranoid and confusing the normal sounds of a house settling with footsteps and other creepy noises. That is, if she was still around she would say that. My dad would tell me to suck it up.

I pulled a bottle of iced tea out of the dark fridge and settled into a chair in the living room. It was sinister outside, stars scattered over the deep black of the night sky. There had been storms all day, and it had only recently cleared up. My dad had left for a business trip this morning, and I was going to be on my own until the next night, so no one had to deal with the poor attitude the storms caused. I'd been irritable and sluggish all day, and now that it was dark I wasn't feeling any better.

I watched the clouds that began to shift across the moon as minutes ticked by. Soon my eyes began to droop and I drifted to sleep.

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There was a loud creak and I sat bolt upright in my chair. The sky seemed to be rolling as the clouds surged forward. I could hear small, soft thumps coming form the kitchen behind me. I stiffened and then jumped as lightning shot across the sky. Then I stood up and knocked the bottle from my tea off the coffee table with my hip. The glass shattered against the marble tile near the fireplace, and my heart almost jumped up my throat.

"It's just a storm, Em. Don't be a sissy." I chided myself.

"Yeah, Em, it's just a storm. Don't be a sissy." A masculine voice said lazily.

I felt my breath catch as I whipped around. A guy was leaning against a pillar in our kitchen, his arms crossed over his chest. It was so dark that all I could see was his silhouette, and it wasn't reassuring.

He looked big; over six feet tall, but muscular and lithe. Terrible thoughts began to cross my mind in rapid succession, and I took a step backwards, away from him. The man stepped forward, clearly playing around with me, and I stood my ground.

Then there was a huge flash of lightning and a deafening boom of thunder. I jumped backwards, landing directly on the glass bottle I'd broken earlier. I felt my feet getting sliced open as the glass cracked under my feet. I slipped on a combination of glass shards, iced tea, and my own blood and hit my head on the fireplace.

Everything started going black, but not fast enough. I watched the man coming closer, and saw him smile as he pulled a knife out of his pocket.