A ten-year-old Amanda wandering around the sights and sounds of a carnival. Trying to take it all in as such an event was much larger than the backroads of isolated territory from whence she grew up. She could not imagine this many people assembled in one place. It was made more disturbing by the fact none of them seemed familiar. Short for her age, she wandered unnoticed among the crowds and began to feel the first stirrings of fear. The loud talk, the screaming children, the long lines of procession, along with the myriads of odors created a miasma that she wanted to flee. The laughter and the faux expressions of joy on the faces of people, took on the maroon tones of a nightmare. She could imagine underneath the laughter, were horrid screams about to erupt.

It's funny, leaving a place, ain't it?" he said. "You never do know when you'll get back.

He looked at me then, his deep golden eyes meeting mine, and I saw a heat in them that I felt reflecting in my own.

Darkness engulfed me...There was no ground below me, no sky above. Only the black, and the cold.

The sun had begun its descent toward the horizon, and the sounds of the carnival played like a familiar song behind me.

That's when I realized the chill wasn't coming from outside__t was coming from within me.