• Stephania


    The night was windy and cold, and the full moon watched from the sky as Stephania cried on her front porch. She figured something like this would happen when mother found out she got a D in history. This was always her punishment for such things, she would now have to sit and study by porch light from an oversized history book, and with nothing but a T-shirt and jeans on, she had little chance of getting warm.
    Stephania kept crying as she did every time, but for some reason, tonight, an eerie silence surrounded Stephania’s neighborhood. All was quiet, except for a teen’s whimpering in the moonlight. It remained that way for some time, until a man appeared before Stephania and broke the silence. This man had a dark and creepy air about him.
    “What is the matter, my dear?” the dark man asked.
    Stephania wiped frozen tears from her eyes and replied “Mother kicked me out for getting a D in History.”
    “Is that all? May I ask also, why your arms are covered in bruises and why you have cuts upon your face?” he asked, holding up a mirror for Stephania’s sake. Stephania held up her arms, looking in awe at the bruises that seemed to never have been there before. She looked into the mirror and saw nasty scars all over her delicate face. Why had none of her friends noticed before? How is it she never noticed them before?
    Stephania wondered about these things, until she heard the door behind her open. She twirled around to see her mother in the doorway. She was wearing a pink nightgown and held a T.V. guide in her hand.
    “Who the hell are you talking to, you stupid brat?!” Stephania’s mother screeched.
    Stephania’s eyes widened in fear, for what she heard was not what was said, and what she saw was not what was there. Due to poor Stephania’s “injuries”, she delusionized the words, “I’ll kill you,: angrily spilling out of her mother’s lips, and that T.V. guide suddenly turned into a deadly knife to ham Stephania with.
    Stephania couldn’t help but to act on instinct. She grabbed her History book from her lap, and raised it above her head.
    “What the hell do y…”
    Stephania’s mother could say no more. By then, the oversized history book had been bashed against her head and snapped her neck. Luckily, Stephania did not have to worry about her already dead father. Stephania stood up after being thrown down by her own strength. She looked up into the mirror on the wall to notice her unmarked face. She held up her arms to see they were clean except for a few drops of blood that spurted from her mother’s horrid face.
    Her eyes widened once again and turned to confront the shady man that deluded her, but he was nowhere to be seen. She ran out and looked down the mile long streets that no one could hide from. The creepy, dark, shady man had disappeared into thin air.
    Stephania walked back into the house where her mother lifelessly lay on the ground. She found the calendar on the kitchen wall and she began to cry. Suddenly, she found the answer to all of her problems. Stephania walked to the counter and grabbed a knife that had been used just before she had been kicked out. She held the sharp blade to her throat and slowly slid it across. Stephania fell to the floor and bled to her early demise.
    As her blood spurted out her throat and started a big, bright red puddle on the pristine, white kitchen floor, Stephania’s life raced in her mind.
    Stephania’s final memory was of the terrifying stories told by her peers, of the horrid happenings on full moon nights, on Friday the 13th. Around her neighborhood, the devil supposedly appears before good people and manipulates them to do terrible things. That was the reason Stephania’s neighborhood had such an eerie silence and why the man with the evil aura disappeared into thin air. That was the resolve the neighbors had made, as they gazed upon the murder-suicide scene created by a troubled Stephania.

    Afterlife


    Stephania walked a dim path in her afterlife. She wanted to stop but her legs kept moving. Soon the dark ground beneath her broke away. Stephania fell and landed upon a hotter earth that burned her bottom. She screeched and looked at her legs to check for burns as a shadow fell upon her body. Stephania looked up to a man with a dark, creepy air about him.

    “Welcome,” the man said, “to Hell.”

    The man snapped his fingers and Flames sprouted up from beneath Stephania and devoured her.

    “Why? Why did you...” was all she could push out in the pain.
    “Because,” the man said, beginning to walk away, “the human heart is weak, and anyways,” the man turned to look at Stephania with evil eyes, “Don’t you know you shouldn’t talk to strangers?”

    The man walked away, almost dancing to the sound of screaming and his maniacal laughter.