exercise 6 by Janell Zimmerer

I’ve often sat in a dark room, with shadows playing on the wall, and felt as if someone were watching me. They’re eyes digging into to my flesh to reach my subconscious. It drains the life out of you, as the modern electric clock ticks through a minute maybe two. Then the feelings gone and your alone again.

I guess we’re never really alone though. I remember as a child walking the paths of grass that let to the abandon bar that used to be at the back of the neighbor hood when I live in the Midwest. Back then there was a small bit of woods that look to a child like an ever-expanding space of trees, bugs and a small sense that I was not alone. Wood have that feeling as if your be consumed by what’s watching you. As I kid I was dared to go to the barn to see what was inside and as I walk slowly away from the neighbor hood kids taunting me, I feel something rip through my body. I become aware that there was no such thing as being alone.

The barn was empty mostly except an old tracker in the back. It had some dust, and golf balls shot through an open window, but there weren’t dead bodies hanging from meat cleavers or skulls littering the ground it was just old. But something still had its eye on me.

The barn was made up in my by horror movies, ghost stories and urban myth. I guess ghost stories are apart of culture. It’s probably because we want to believe in an after life. I a sense, a very really sense we create the ghost. The drank swallows of wind the swept through the glittering gold field and dimmed as it approach the spot of my terror. I believed the myths I had heard and continued them when I returned saying it was haunted, besides I had no right to take away the thrill of a haunting in the neighborhood.