Nightmare

I am the sugar-fairy, subsisting on energy drinks and plums and bananas, curled up with my aching calves and leaning so close to the pictures (wonderful, swirling things) in my books, that I could fall right in.
In the dark, in my head, I am walking a path I know like the back of my hand. I am followed. The creature of my childhood nightmares lurks in every shadow; slinks and skulks and slides around the tree trunks. Gigantic catlike, monkeylike thing. It is all powerful limbs and ribs and horrible starving face, with a cry like something driven. Like something tortured. Teeth bared, it will not attack. Waits, instead, for me to go mad with the fear of it and run and run, and never stop running. Walks alongside me.

You will always be scared.