Fear

She was a sketchbook drawing on a blank white canvas--her lines and curves were unstable and moved and jerked in a chaotic dance that would nearly tear her apart at every second that passed. Smoke billowed up from the cigarette in her hand and stabbed and swirled its way inter her form. She and the smoke became a jumble of flat lines on the empty space around her.

She tensed up--an overwhelming feeling of being watched struck her. She whilred around and yelled.

"I know who you are!"

She could see it, the black canvas that outstretched and enveloped everything it touched, yet somehow remained on the edge of her vision. It was a nasty shadow reaching out to take her, to kill her, to end her.

"You're only fear!"

She yelled again to the empty room around her. Her words were silent letters that floated up from her mouth and dissolved against the canvas into nothing.

"Get away!"

She could feel it. It was inside her, burning her. It was the cold in her eyes. It was a heavy cloak that bore her down to her knees only to have her stand back up against the pressure.

"Get away!"

It advanced and yielded and retreated and advanced again while she turned and looked for it, always at the edge of her vision. She held her arms out and the smoke from her cigarette left her body to form a pillar at the edge of her reach.

"Get out here, Fear!"

She stood defiantly, and challenged the thing she hated most of all.

"I can run; I can hide; you will follow me."

Her form trembled and her lines grew thicker and darker. She yelled out in pain and gritted her teeth until they cracked.

"I bet..."

She yelled and took one final drag of her smoke, then threw it to the ground.

"...I can put you out..."

Her muscles tensed. The smoke rose up and twisted her form with tiny slivers of lines that crawled in through her feet and out through her head, then disappeared against the blank white canvas.

"...like a cigarette!"

Her foot came down on the smoldering remains of her cigarette.