Luk

There’s something to being afraid.  He wasn’t quite sure what it was, but it made his tummy turn about itself and his hands cold.  There are lots of perfectly reasonable reasons to be afraid.  Some fear insects, some snakes, some heights.  He was afraid, if you hadn’t already surmised.  But why?  It isn’t enough to say “yes, he is afraid.”  Fear without a source is not really fear at all, but rather a worrying that comes and goes as the summer grasses brown beneath the stoic oak, a trembling, a chill, a footstep across the ground where your grave may lie.  He looked down and shivered.  It was cold, but that’s not why he shivered.  His hands felt numb, palms covered in a sooty coat of dust and sweat.  He stared at the floor for a moment, studying the lone bloody footprint that screamed at the rest of the moldy old room.  Rust clung to big straight edged boxes made of hard stuff.  A strange sort of chair with wheels hung half out a dirty window.  He was there, that much he knew.  He frowned, afraid, but unsure of what.  He turned, looking behind him to see from where he had come.  There was no doorway, just a wall.

Why was he afraid?  What was he afraid off?  He reach up to scratch his arm and winced, fingers coming away warm and sticky.  He’d been cut.  Now when did that happen?  His thoughts were slow, careful, and clouded with what had been fear and was now…something less sure, worry perhaps.  He had no idea how he’d gotten into the room.  Wiping the blood on his shirt, he picked at his nose, as any young boy would do when an itch got to clamoring about in your nose, and looked back down at the bloody footprint.  Sunlight gasped mutedly through the dirty windows.  He walked through low, misting dust and looked at the bloody footprint and then at his own bare feet.  His were far too small.  The slowly swirling hushes of dust flowed around the footprint, but never over it, as the stone in the shallows of a farmer’s brook.  But he did not think this, for he had never seen a brook, or a farmer.  He did not know anything about such things, and was content to watch the dust move around the evidence that he was not alone.  Fingers played at the dirty windows, as the boy stared at the bloody footprint on the floor.  Hot breath slapped at the cracked panes.  You need a reason to be afraid.