Here is the second installment of Sunday Story, based on some of this week’s posts.

She could see, through the fabric of her hiding cloth, the thin beam of light pouring from the crack in the door; could almost touch it. It grew wide and with it her fears.

At that moment, she receded into the farthest reaches of her mind; her fight-or-flight reflex set on an inward escape. Ingrained in her very being, through countless events of her youth and adulthood, countless slights, pains, hurts, deceptions, was this wish for solitary confinement far from the rest of the world. She could almost feel the wall between reality and her.

But she knew, this time, that she could not stay frozen, waiting for whatever horror was coming to seize her. Part of her would have jump off the floor, as if frighten by a common mouse. But a mouse this was not.

She thought of making a dash for the back door, somehow getting to the car before the intruder could double back, and lose herself in the morning traffic. But they would certainly get to her before she reached the safety of her own car.

As all these scenarios played out in her mind, in the flash of a thought, she knew she was starting to slip away. It was as if her body was staying behind as her spirit took flight. She could see herself, smaller and smaller, at the other end of a tunnel. And she knew that if she couldn’t, by some feat of will, snap out of this horror, she would be lost.

To be continued (here).