FEAR NOT FEAR

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By Neel Anil Panicker

She’s been with me for long. She’s my constant companion, so to say. She sleeps by me and then, come morn, she wakes up beside me.

At times, on cold wintry mornings, she beats me to it.

And then when I wake up, groggy eyed and sidle up to the window and gaze out at the distant mist filled landscape that stretches as far as the eye can see, I see her.

There she is, peeping out from beyond the valleys and the rivers and the hill tops and the jagged edges of mountain peaks___first, a mere form, then a silvery mist daubed pearly white silhouette floating in the still born skies.

Soon she traverses the distance and stands and stares right into my half stoned eyes.

I peep in through my mind’s periscope.

She comes into clearer focus; slowly coming alive in my mind’s eye.

And then I know her for what she is___a ghoul, an apparition, a ghost with two huge craters for eyes, a grotesquely asymmetrical apology of a face that’s sans any bones but with enough knife markings to make it look like a grand crisscross confluence of all the rivers of the world.

Or, maybe, she’s just my fears, the ones that I attempt to keep at bay, the ones that refuse to leave me; the ones who have sworn their allegiance to me, sworn themselves to a lifetime of faithfulness.

#flash #fiction #musings #musings #ghosts #fears #236words