YSJ Anthology 2015

attention. Beneath the sheen, it was clear she had secrets. Yet with
such beauty comes power, and hers sliced me open like a
switchblade.
Darkness had begun to fall around us but I found myself rooted to
the spot. I had begun to lose track of time, when all of a sudden, she
parted her lips, digging her front teeth into the lower one as if to
ready herself.
‘God save me from that thing,’ she whispered, looking past me into
the distance. I was not sure if her words were addressed to me but
all the same, I felt afraid of whatever had taken her eyes from mine.
As our eyes pupils reconnected, I found their lustre had faded and
her face clouded over. Still watching me from under lowered eyelids,
she mulishly kicked out at the ground between us like a sulky child,
uprooting the topsoil. I was struck by the change in her mood and
impulsively sunk to my knees, to patch up the void she had created.
With every mound of earth I pushed back to the ground, the more
violent she became as if she was lashing out at me. With steady
hands belying my trembling interior, eventually my impetus began to
fade and I stood to face her. Her eyes had morphed into black pools,
the pupils consumed by her irises.
‘Dark lady, dark lady!’ she hissed at me vehemently. In that instant, I
heard a crunching of leaves from behind me as if in response.
Reflexively, I ran towards a dense clump of pines and crouched down
behind the widest trunk. It screened both me and my line of sight,
cutting off my perception. The sudden silence was unnerving,
heightened by the sound of my heartbeat knocking in my ears.
Shivering from the cold and my inactivity, I looked down at my
watch, with no perception of how long I’d been here. I decided to
make a run for it. As I crept out into the open, a surge of nausea
swept over me. Dragging myself on, I came to the spot where she
had previously been, only to now find it completely deserted. In that
one moment, the serenity of nature seemed so sublime that I stood,
stock-still and allowed my relief to overpower me. As if on cue, drops
of rain began to fall in clusters and I ran blindly back through the
trees, steered by adrenaline.
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