Fear Itself Part One

This past year I wrote in monthly installments for my school newspaper, The Rebellion, a story about fear. I thought I'd start posting these in weekly segments, alongside my normal blog posts! Thanks, anyone who reads :)

“Fear Itself”

Part One

     The book was odd for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that it didn’t have a title. I had tugged it out of the tightly packed lowest shelf, filled with an unexplainable nervous energy, while perusing the isles of a second-hand book store, unsure what had drawn me to it even as it was happening. Thick and leather-bound, it had come out accompanied by a huge puff of dust. I sat crisscross on the floor holding it tightly, trying to understand what made it feel warm and almost alive against my skin. I felt it pulse like a living heart in my hands. I imagined, briefly, that I was rather like Ginny Weasely in the presence of a horcrux in the shape of an old journal.

     I was not well-acquainted with the haphazardly shelved and creatively sorted system of the shop, as I had just moved into the area a few weeks before. My family had left the humid summer of South Carolina to occupy a quaint little gray house in Harder, Oregon, which had no air conditioning (to be fair it was probably unnecessary) and a porch the size of our welcome mat.  I didn’t mind living in the climate so much as I minded being so far away from all familiar people, but I was trying to maintain a sort of drawn-out anticipation. That way, I could almost pretend it was excitement.

     When my parents had announced the impending move, I had just laughed. I had been sitting next to my brother, Jacob, on the floor of our living room, putting clear nail-polish on his toes (he was three and absolutely delighted), in shorts and a t-shirt even though it may have, in other climates, been a season for sweaters. They stared at me, after breaking the news, as I laughed (probably sort of manically) and said “alright, let’s go to Oregon. Buy me a parka and some boots, let’s do it.” I was sarcastic, but I wasn’t mad. My mother looked warily at me. “Katrina… we know it’ll be hard on you, especially. You’ve already had a year of High School, you love your friends. Let’s talk about it.”

      “You know, I thought you were going to announce another baby” I said with a smirk, “wouldn’t you like a little baby, Jakey?” “Yes!” Jacob cried, and my parents shared a look. “Oh, come on,” I continued obstinately, “we’ll never leave this place.” I shifted gears as my mother sighed, “I’d never come.”

     But I had, in the end, and I’d done it quietly. Anger didn’t suit me; it came on like a pair of jeans that didn’t fit. But sadness slipped on like a silk dress, and I wore it a lot these days.

     Upon moving into town, I immediately took to exploration, which was how I discovered that this place had little to offer the younger generation other than a decrepit playground, a slightly less decrepit playground, an ice cream parlor, and an old book shop. The grand exploration had taken about three hours. However, the bookshop seemed as if it would take my attention for endless amounts of time; the dimly lit, dusty isles were mysterious and oddly comforting, filled with the universal scent of old books. Fat red comfy chairs were scattered throughout the maze of shelves, and the woman behind the desk had greeted me on the way in with a lazy wave and a wink as she knitted a horrible puce sweater. The entire place oozed personality. I’d been there all morning, trying to figure out the disjointed system of the shop, which I was beginning to think was based on complete and utter whim. I was in a section I had vaguely categorized as the gothic novel/pre-1960s science fiction, when I’d noticed a shiver in the    air around a simple black book on the bottom shelf.

     I opened it after having held it curiously for some time, but nearly dropped it when I saw the contents. The pages, all of them, were all filled with sketches of hundreds of spiders. Not the big hairy kind you read about in National Geographic, just little black ones all seeming to scuttle on top of one another, in a hurry, it seemed, to get to the end of the book. I tried to make myself swallow, but it felt like someone had blown a hairdryer down my throat and left a scorched dry hole in its place.

     When I was little, my family used to go camping all the time. We kept our camping supplies in our huge, musty garage and took it all out in the summer to take to the coast, near the ocean, which I remember as a great, roaring, ancient monster that reached out over and over as if to pull me away. I would stand before it like a warrior, and dare it to come closer, and feel like the bravest person on earth before this most enormous enemy. When I was nine, a spider laid its egg in my sleeping bag, and it hatched the first night there.

     I had fallen asleep in the velvety darkness of night that you feel on your skin when you camp, with a great young love of nature and an innocent braveness. I woke up covered in baby spiders, and with it came a change. Ascent, descent, growing up or falling apart, I don’t know. But that is, I suppose, how I came to be in this bookstore, a pale 17-year-old girl who would rather stay inside reading than venture out into the sun, with a great all-consuming fear of spiders and the vague idea that some part of me was covered in spider-leg scars.

     There was a third strange thing about this book, which I discovered when I slowly let the book settle to the first page. It may not have been so much strange as impossible and wrong, and it sent great thrills of fear shooting through me that no spider sketch could prompt. In black ink, written on the very first page, was written “Katrina Grimes” in familiar writing.

     It was my signature.