The Child Woven Basket

A giggle awoke me. I groggily shifted my eyes before lazily sitting up in my bed to catch sight of the source of the laughter. As the half opaque vision washed away from my eyes, I saw the one who had giggled a few seconds before. A girl, seemingly no older than twelve, stood beside my bed, giggling. Due to the way she nearly seemed to stand over me, I couldn’t tell if she had only just been there or had been standing there ever since my descent into the ocean of slumber. “Do you want to play tag?” she asked playfully.
Suddenly, the vice of exhaustion loosened upon me. I began to feel more awake and energetic, yet my mind was still swinging between the world of reason and fantasy. I felt playful. I leapt out of bed with an anomalous sense of energy. “Tag!” the girl playfully called out, tapping my shoulder, “you’re in!” She rushed out of the room, somehow lulling me into chasing after her. I rushed out of the room in a subconscious laughter, unaware of the possibility of awakening my family. 
After endlessly chasing her around the house, I finally caught her at a dead end: a glass door leading to the backyard of my house. She frantically tried to open the door, but to no avail, the key being somewhere else in the house. I had cornered her. I dashed at her, but before I could tag her in, she seemingly vanished into thin air. I look up to see that she had somehow made it outside, despite the door being locked. Suddenly, the door miraculously opened itself, with the girl fleeing on cue. I laughed, before dashing outside of the house, continuing the chase.
The moment I set foot outside, the atmosphere of the night swept over me. The frigid grasp of the cold air almost crushed me as I wandered through my backyard. However, the giggle of the same girl swiftly crushed the silence, and I soon found myself lacking control. My feet carried me through the darkness, despite the fact I had no idea where I was going. Yet, not once did I find myself colliding with any obstacles, despite the fact that my backyard was practically a minefield of stinging nettles. I kept following the giggling, over my fence, out of my neighborhood and straight to the forest.
Once I had traversed far from the forest edge, my state of subconscious dreaming swiftly evaporated. The giggling had stopped, and reality hit me. I was in the middle of a forest, hidden from civilization, let alone another person, due to the great walls of trees. For some reason, I had forgotten where I had even come from, due to the intense darkness of the night. Panic finally set in. I began to dash in a random direction, not bothering to mark out where I had even come from. The blowing wind seemed to taunt me, as my lungs began to boil and burn. The salty taste of sweat in my mouth disgusted me, as my whole world began to turn upside down. However, my sprint was put to a stop by an irregularly placed tree root, tripping me to the leafy ground. As I picked myself up, my eyes caught sight of a monstrosity.
It was a gangly man, possessing long grey strands as hair, viewing me through two beady eyes. He had an abnormally wide mouth, coated with rows upon rows of thin, needle-like teeth. He was dressed in rags, which were painted in dirt, creases and tears. A basket, the perfect size to fit a child, was carried in the talon-like fingers of the hands the man possessed. All of a sudden, I felt the fingers of the man almost dig into my back, as I was lifted into the air. I tried to struggle and move, but I soon found myself paralyzed, my body not responding to any orders my brain desperately tried to command. The only thing I could do was cry.
The man lifted me towards the basket, allowing me to catch sight of the contents of it. The small and scattered bones of children could be seen, as the hand of the man slowly brought me closer and closer towards what would soon be my casket. “Shh…” the man calmly said, as I was placed inside the basket. “Everything will be alright.” My vision faded in and out, before exhaustion took hold of me.
Category:Dreams/Sleep
Category:Monsters