Back in OK in 2009, I had gone fishing with my dad. It was one of the rare occasions he wasn't being abusive and we had decided to go to a lake my father used to go to as a kid. We set up tents and fished all day, catching some small catfish, but as we settled in for the night, little 6 year old me got a bad feeling. I had never been camping before, especially not miles away from civilization, so my mom and dad had brushed it off as me being nervous. I, however, hadn't been able to get rid of the feeling of being watched. We got about half way through the night, everyone was asleep but me, and I had heard movement outside my tent. I could see the shadows cast onto my tent from whoever was out there. I had been sitting in a kiddie tent my dad bought me, it was next to their tent but I was still alone. Instead of yelling for my mom and dad like normal kids would have done, I froze up. I had always been afraid of the dark but now I had an actual reason to fear what I couldn't see. I sat quietly, being unable to make a noise, but as time went on, I began hearing grunts and huffs and someone going through our bags. Now I knew it wasn't just an animal. I began smelling blood, a really strong scent of blood that wouldn't have come from the small bucket of fish entrails, and that made me panic. I feared that they were hurt, or possibly had hurt someone else, and I started to hyperventilate. It was the first time I ever had a panic attack so I didn't know what to do, but as my breathing got louder and I started to wheeze, the noise outside had stopped. I eventually blacked out but when I woke up in the morning, I could hear my dad yelling and mad and my mom panicking, and as my grogginess went away, I realized my mom was holding me. She was panicking because my tent, sleeping bag, shirt, face, and arms were covered in blood, some smears and others entire handprints. My dad was yelling about how he didn't give a damn if I was dead or not, and that his broken phone mattered more than his own daughter. Physically, I was unharmed, but mentally, I may never heal. The blood had come from a gigantic fish that was gut outside of our tents, whoever did it must have used my dads hunting knife, and cooked some of it on the fire that had been left burning as we went to bed. We don't know who it was or what exactly they were doing, but it still terrifies me still even now that I am almost 17. I am still terrified of sleeping in a tent alone, just being in the dark scares me, even if I am just in my house. I forgot to mention how, on our way out of that area, we found a child's grave. It was a small boxed off patch of dirt with a small headstone and a few dolls and teddy bears and whatnot, stuff that would typically be on a child's grave, but it looked old, like it wasn't visited in years. I occasionally have dreams about that lake where I'm walking along the edge of some thin ice and a blonde girl starts hitting it from beneath and breaks the ice and I fall in and then I'll wake up. The dream is probably just something my mind fabricated after nearly drowning in a river when I was ten, because I don't remember how long I'd been having that dream for.
