The Darkness Swallowed Me Whole

He appeared as eyelashes kissed goodnight; an uninvited guest at a party of kin.

Legs descended from the ceiling.

Floating, landing on, and popping every cloud of laughter from his strand of silk.

Danger rang throughout the room; electric fear ran through my body.

He seemed to grow one thousand times as I watched him soar to a destination that appeared to be next to my sister.

Suddenly, he would find the floor in front of me.

Dropped; he released his grip from silken rope.

Transformation ensued on his approach; first, crawling then slithering like a snake standing a few feet in front of me.

What I thought was a spider had become a life-size scorpion with the face of a boy with black eyes.

But they weren’t eyes.

Giant, oval, black caverns filled half of his child-like face.

Deep, dark well-like places as if you could fall in them – as if he wanted me to.

They pulled like magnets and felt cold like January.

Terror filled every crevice in my bones.

Silence beat like drums.

The desert creature cut through thick air with a perfectly clear “Hello Heidi.”

“Do I know this being?” I thought.

“How could something of this sort know my name?”

He held my gaze with his caverns of magnetic black.

Something said these were not things to mess with; wells you did not want to peer in to; wells that once you go down you can never come back up.

Yet, they somehow penetrated my wall of fear and spoke to me in silence.

Curiosity rolled through my mind like a desert wind.

“What was inside of them?” I wondered.

“Is it possible to get a closer look?”

“He’s still a boy…”

The creature became more child-like in facial features as I stared.

The air of him was that of a playful child gone bad.

At that moment, I realized the scorpion boy knew my weakness.

He knew I was a mother.

I was exposed and unable to protect myself.

He wrapped my vulnerability around his tail like twine; he was ready to strike.

Winter's chill flooded my veins like someone opened the front door in an ice storm.

He knew his features would make me doubt the chill I felt.

But as they say...

Once a mother always a mother.

I kept my distance as I was now somehow closer to him without moving.

"How?" I wondered.

Feet firmly planted on the ground, I could not resist the beckoning and peered into the edge of those arctic wells, cautious not to fall.

Suddenly, a hard shove met my back.

The caverns grew to swallow me, and everything went black; I tumbled into the tundra.

Frozen air cut my body like knives as I fell in the deep, dark well of him.

“It got me,” echoed in my mind like my startled scream on the walls of the creature before my lifeless body slammed into the frozen bottom of his belly.

I never knew what lived in the desert could be as cold as ice.