When we are young our imagination gets the best of us. We can imagine anything from driving race cars to going into deep space on the search of new worlds, having the largest cake in the world or being in a game. We can imagine it all but as we get older and we witness life’s true colors we lose part of that imagination but what if it’s not really imagination. What if we are able to see small worlds that adults are blind to. We all would more than likely love that but what about what we imagine in the dark.
There once was a teen who went by the name of Mark. He was more ordinary than anything else. He had ordinary parents, who had ordinary jobs, with ordinary pay, with an ordinary house, that was in an ordinary neighborhood but that was just how everyone seen him. Unlike like most of us, Mark never lost that spark of imagination which gave him much creativity. But no one knew about this because who would be interested in an ordinary and boring looking guy when you are having parties and sleepovers.
While other kids went outside to talk to friends he was in the house going through his imagination, his parents saw the behaviour as childish and immature for his age, they would beg him to go outside and make friends, to see what the world had to offer but he would only scuff at them. Why go and make friends when he had his imagination? Then one day his parents had went out on an unknown trip and Mark was left alone in the house. he rolled through his imagination for hours he went to the future, the past, met dinosaurs, and discovered new planets till it reached night-time and everything outside had died.
After a while mark noticed his parents weren’t back yet. It was unusual for them to stay long past sunset. As he went towards the window he saw movement out the corner of his eye. He turned to look and noticed a very dark corner at the back his room but he just dismissed it and turned to look back out the window. Then he heard a sound. He turned again and looked at the corner.
He saw someone standing there!
He rushed to his light switch and slapped it on. The light flooded the room and he saw that there was no one there but the letter I. He cautiously began to wonder how it got there as he walked up to it. He slowly stuck out his hand to touch it. It was cold. Then his back started to tingle like someone was behind him he turned around and was greeted by no one.
“I must have written that sometime today and forgotten it,” he told himself trying to get rid of the feeling that he was being watched. He went to the kitchen thinking that if he ate he would feel better. He hadn’t eaten all day. His mind had him preoccupied and now his stomach was punishing him for the neglect. He went to the refrigerator wanting something that would cook under five minutes. He reached for a TV dinner and threw it in the microwave. Not wanting to wait, he went to the living room and turned on the TV and was immediately bombarded by a preschool channel talking about the letter M.
Cringing he surfed through the channels when he found nothing of interest he settled on a music channel and went to retrieve his small meal. As he was taking out the dinner he accidentally grabbed the wrong part of the tray and was met by scolding heat.
“Ahhhhhhhh!” In his rush to pull his hand back he tipped the tray and it went down splattering the floor. Mark cursed quietly and went for a towel, as he bent over to clean it up he thought he could see a word. It looked like it said behind. He looked at it and smiled. ‘Behind’. He cleaned the mess and just settled for an apple he went back to the living room.
As he went to sit down on the couch he saw the word ‘you’ scrawled on the table.
“That wasn’t jus-” he stopped. He was beyond creeped out. His parents wasn’t home yet, he was seeing things, and there were words just popping up everywhere out of the blue. He wished he had friends who would comfort him, his imagination wasn’t exactly working wonders for him. He turned up the music on the TV and immediately the words of the song unnerved him;
“There’s someone standing behind you.”
He looked back and saw… a fleeting shadow of something large and dark.
“Ah imagination can sometimes be a pain.” He made a mental note to start making friends. He went to his room and turned on every light he had even the one on his phone and tried to go to sleep. He soon turned restless and his mind shifted to all the words he seen. He stood up and went to his desk and wrote them down.
IM.
That came out as ‘I’m’ he thought. Then he went to the word he seen in his destroyed TV dinner. ‘Behind’, he wrote it down. He racked his brain for the last word and it came to him but so did fear and the feeling of being watched, he read the words aloud;
“I’m behind you!” and every light in his room went out the he heard his name… from behind him.
He turned around slowly and was facing the unnaturally dark corner. The same one where he found the letter I. His heart started to beat fast threatening to burst from his chest as a large dark figure took shape, and the last thought on his mind was where are my parents.