She turned off her nightlight just as she finished the last chapter of her book. As she set her glasses down and tried to sleep, she heard the floorboards groan under the pressure of two walking feet. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, and she assumed it had something to do with the structure of her house so she relegated the thought to the recesses of her mind. But, this time, it was more persistent. She couldn’t sleep, not with the sound that horrible foreboding creaking every other second. Suddenly, she heard her fridge open. Someone was in her house. Panic flooded her thoughts as she realized there was no other way to exit the house than the front door downstairs. She thought of a plan in her head: just run to the door and don’t stop. She tiptoed through her room, and got to the top of the staircase. Suddenly, it was silent. The creaking ceased. Her breathing ceased. If it were not essential to her bodily functions, her heart would have ceased to pound in fear of making noise. The intruder realized she was awake, and she knew it. He crept from the kitchen and turned his head like a sentry scanning for movement. She was paralyzed with indecisiveness, whether or not to retreat into her room or to stand there and hope not to be noticed. As she weighed the thoughts in her head like a cleaver on her finger, the man’s dead eyes locked with hers. She knew that if she were to stay there like a sitting duck, she would be hunted down like one, so she threw herself down the stairs and swung the open door to the side and ran by the killer.

As running through the houses in her neighborhood, her bare feet pattering on the concrete, she looked behind her for a split second and saw the blur of the man pursuing her. She snapped her head back forward but still not fast enough to evade the fallen branch, tripping her over. The man caught up to her and pinned her onto the floor. In desperation, she snapped the temple of her glasses off and plunged it into her throat. Frustrated, the man struck her face once before running away.

After she killed herself to escape her tormentor, she lost all of her memories as she was reincarnated into her new body. A nurse could be seen overhearing a conversation with a mother and her newborn.

“Did you think you could get away that easily?”