Magically Petrifying and Wonderful.

This is a "creative non-fiction" piece for my Creative Writing class. It captures those moments of my life pretty well. :)

We used to live in the middle of the woods, down a winding driveway only big enough for one car to go down. In the daytime, it was a beautiful and calm place to live. Our house was best described as a log cabin, though it was far from it.

It was great, but not always great in a good sense. When the sun set, darkness spread its wings, completely covering the forest and us. To a nine-year-old girl, with an over-active imagination, the woods, at night, was ten times more scary then it ought to be.
I remember looking out onto the barely-visible landscape and filling in the areas that I couldn’t make out with murders and monsters waiting for an opportunity to kidnap or kill me.
It was impossible to escape, especially in the summer when the windows were open to keep the house relatively cool.

To top it all off, my upstairs bedroom had three giant windows. The middle one was the biggest, reaching from the ceiling and almost to the floor. They terrified me--to this day, I still have nightmares about windows.
My parents put huge black curtains up, to keep me from getting them up in the middle of the night but… I could still imagine what possibly was behind those curtains…

The most recurring thought of what was outside my window, was an image of a man. If I happened to be brave enough to peek around the curtains, I knew his face would be there. His wildly murderous eyes would burn into mine and he would grin or maybe he would frown--he would be there, though. I was convinced.

My mother, when I expressed my fear one night, said in an exasperated tone, “Whitney. Your room is on the 2^nd floor.” I knew this, of course, but to justify my fear I explained that he could have gotten a ladder. She simply laughed and kissed me goodnight.
The lights went out and I nervously stared at the curtains, then slowly, with little movement as possible, I pulled my blankets up and over my head--because, as all children know, the covers protect you from everything.

As I mentioned before, I never got over this irrational fear of what could be outside windows at night…they can see you… you can‘t see them...I knew, in my head, that there was no way a man would get a ladder and stay in front of a window every single night, just to scare a little girl. But the fear lingered.

Anyway, outside wasn’t the only frightening experiences I’ve had at that house. It was the inside, too…
My room was messy; it was filled Barbie dolls, a big dollhouse my grandfather had made for my mother when she was little, clothes, markers, paper, and other generic childhood toys.
The dark transformed my toys into blobs of unknown objects. The bathroom light shone into my room and cast strange shadows where anything could be hiding… just waiting for my little toes to hit the floor…

Naturally, I was terrified of walking around at night but, usually I was brave enough to scurry as fast as I could to the bathroom, where the light was, to extinguish all the shadow creatures and be safe …for that moment.

There was this one time, in my room, that I’m sure it wasn’t just my imagination playing tricks on me. But, I haven’t the faintest clue as to what actually happened.
One night, I remember turning off my light and making my way back to the safety of my bed, when, suddenly, this horribly loud CRASH of a heavy object and the sound of shattering plastic made me freeze mid-step.
The scattering pieces finally settled and I just stood there, shocked. It was my CD player, I knew. The sound had come from the right, where my CD player had been resting on the top of my dollhouse. It must’ve fell off!
Finally, the shock began to wear off and the fact that my mom would be mad, since my CD player just broke into a million pieces, began to sink in. For some reason, I didn’t turn on the lights and simply went over to the “scene-of-the-crime” to check it out. I searched for the broken pieces but I couldn’t find them. Briefly, I felt around with my hand but there was nothing there.

I quickly went to fetch my mother, being the good kid that I was. We went back upstairs together and she flipped on the light forcefully, and almost angrily because of the late hour.
I ran over and began to search the floor for my mangled up CD player--but… nothing was there.
“It fell right here… I heard it.” I explained, confused.
“Whitney. What are you talking about? It’s right here.” she said, pointing at my CD player sitting on the dollhouse still.
It couldn’t be! The crash… was so loud and I could hear the plastic breaking. My mother brushed it off as me just being strange and went to bed. I searched my room again and then again in the morning. But there was nothing broken in the entire room.

And now that I’m thinking about this incident again, I believe that my room was in fact, carpeted… What in the world was that crashing sound?

At night, the house and the woods were a little too dark for my liking, but it was a perfect place for my imagination to flourish, at night and during the day. Despite all the things there that frightened me, it has always been my favorite house, both magically petrifying and wonderful at the same time.