Estelle had been waiting for this moment to come for a very long time.The moment of victory, when she would feel a sense of triumph that she had hoodwinked her parents into thinking that she was having a sleepover at Tracy's, when she was actually going to explore the old, abandoned house in the neighborhood. Instead, all she felt was fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of spiders. In other words, arachnophobia. As she looked up at the cracked, dusty windows, she spotted at least five cobwebs of different sizes and shuddered with disgust. Should she go in or not? Should she sacrifice all of her hard work, deceiving her parents and lying to friends, just because of a few tiny spiders? Of course not. She could handle it. How hard could it get? She took a deep breath of the pure night air, took hold of the old-fashioned door handle in front of her, twisted it, and plunged into the darkness that lay beyond it.
Estelle quickly took out her torch from her bag pack and switched it on. Blinking her electric blue eyes in the sudden bright light emitted from the torch, she peered around what she supposed was the hall. Her throat suddenly seemed to close up and she broke out in a cold sweat. Spiders. Dozens of tiny, black spiders were scuttling right towards her! She was going to get poisoned! As her legs slowly got rid of the numbness caused by the spiders, a sick feeling built up in her stomach. All she could think of were deadly spiders and what would happen to her if she let even one of them come anywhere close to her.
She ran for it. She turned around, somehow got the door open with her violently shaking hands and ran for it. She would keep running until she reached home. Home, which was free of spiders. Home, with family.
Damita, this is absolutely brilliant! Ask your mom. I don't praise lightly. The evocative scene, the use of metaphor, the imagery have all tied together beautifully to bring that fear of spiders alive. I do hope you'll continue to write. You have a gift! I'll be more critical as the days progress, so get ready for that. But, this one, as I said, brilliant!
ReplyDeleteThanks Aunty, you are being too sweet! I read your post(Abundant) and it was much,MUCH more brilliant!
ReplyDeleteVery interesting.If you had thrown in some lizards also Patti would have jumped
ReplyDeleteHaha that's true Thatha :)
DeleteMaybe I will pick that theme for another one...
Dear D - Wonderful note. You built the suspense .. Estelle started on the wrong note & the right finally prevailed. So a moralistic end as well. Well done
ReplyDelete& you should also see the movie with the same title
ReplyDeleteThank you Sukupa!(Special one)
ReplyDeleteYes when I was researching I found the movie also and thought it seemed interesting…little scary though :)