Setting: A creepy alleyway 

The child had just finished his third day of second grade, and he was exhausted. The teacher was friendly, his classmates were pleasant, and he was already feeling more comfortable than he had felt in the old school. But any enthusiasm he had amassed throughout the day was gone now, transubstantiated into fatigue from six hours of learning and playing. All he wanted was to go home and lie in his soft bed with his favorite stuffed animal. 

He knew the safe, familiar path to get home. But it took thirty minutes, at a minimum, to follow that route. To a seven-year-old, thirty minutes is a century, and thirty minutes trekking across hard sidewalks and past indistinguishable brown buildings is a millennium of agony. So he decided to take a faster way home, through the dark alleys his mother had warned him never to even consider exploring. 

The buildings there were brown, too, but a different brown–more ancient, and more rugged. There were no sidewalks, only dirty gray tiles that somehow seemed both worn from the heavy footsteps of crowds of people and vacantly characterless, as if no one had ever touched their dull limestone surfaces with so much as a child’s sandal. The sky was invisible to the child, all he could see from his vantage point was dark bricks, then darker bricks, then nothing at all. 

A shiver fought its way down his tiny spine. He did not belong here. He kept walking. Every shadow could be a kidnapper. Every sound could be a monster. He had walked too far down the alley for turning around to be worthwhile, but he had a long way to go before he reached his familiar welcome mat. He was stuck in the middle, not lost, but unspeakably afraid.

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