FROZEN WITH FEAR

In response to a writing prompt on Mama’s Losin It blog:
Describe a moment when you felt afraid.


        When I was a college sophomore, I lived in a dorm that had suites. Each suite had an entryway, a bathrooom on the right, a huge walk-in closet with four separate sections on the left, and two bedrooms straight ahead.
        The dorm was located on a hillside. We were on the second floor against the hill, so our bedroom windows were at ground level. A private residence and a garage were only about four feet from that side of the dorm, so it was pretty dark outside of our windows, which had both blinds and curtains for privacy.
        Joann and I roomed together, while Barb and Sandy had the other room. Sandy was a bit of an airhead, so when she claimed that there were prowlers outside of our windows, we didn’t believe her.
        After it was reported to the house mother, the police got involved and sent a police car around several times an hour after dark, but never found anyone. The house mother thought it was probably either local high school boys or male college students, trying to get a peek inside the girl’s dorm. Both she and the police thought the prowlers, if there were any, were harmless, but lots of the residents became rather paranoid about the situation.
        I had the reputation of being cool headed and skeptical, so when some girls from the third floor thought someone was watching the dorm from inside the garage next door, they called me to their room. I saw someone was indeed there, but it looked like the person was wearing a dark coat with two vertical rows of shiny buttons that occasionally caught the light. I surmised it was a police uniform and that an officer had been stationed there to catch the culprits. The girls in the room didn’t believe me, so they reported it to the house mother who called the police ---and sure enough, I had been right. They ended up “outing” the hidden policeman.
        This went on for several months. Girls claimed someone was scratching at the screens on their windows. Others swore they heard whispers outside. I never heard a thing even though my bed was against the wall directly under our window.
        It was winter, so it got dark early. One evening after dinner, the four of us were in Barb and Sandy’s room. We were gabbing away and munching on popcorn. We often kept cans of soda on the window sill to keep them cold and one of us had taken a can from the sill. 

        Suddenly Joann stopped in mid-sentence. I looked up to see that she looked like a deer caught in the headlights, staring at the window. When the soda had been retireved, the blind had curled up and was caught on the curtain, so there was a small triangle of window exposed, and outside the window was a set of staring eyes.
        I had never been afraid of the “prowler” mainly because I didn’t really believe he existed, so I got up to walk across the room to pull the blind down. I took two steps and suddenly, my knees buckled and I fell down hard. Instantly I was so afraid that I couldn’t get up and ended up “walking” to the window on my knees. It seemed like I was moving in slow motion, taking forever to get to the window. I was trying to shout, “Get the hell out of here” but I couldn’t speak or scream.
        When I finally got to the window, I pulled the blind so hard that it came off the roller, exposing the entire room to the outside. I retreated, still on my knees, to a corner to the left of the window where I couldn’t be seen.
        Meanwhile, Joann, Barb, and Sandy had fled to the house mother’s apartment and had her call the police (long before cell phones existed.) By the time the police arrived, the peeping Tom was long gone. The poice asked for a description, but both Joann and I had seen dark eyes, nothing else.
        I calmed down rather quickly, but later that night Joann and I moved my bed away from the window. I had huge bruises on both knees for days. The prowler seemed to disappear after that and we got through the rest of our sophomore year without incidence.
        Sandy dropped out of school that summer to marry her high school boyfriend. Joann decided to take a year off to work, so graduated a year after Barb and I who found new roomates for our junior year when we moved to the lower floor on the opposite side of the dorm next to a busy and well-lit parking lot.
        Since then, I have always worried that if I were ever in real danger or in an emergency situation, I would not be able to scream or run away, that I would simply freeze in place and become a victim. Occasionally, I have a nightmare that I am in danger and can’t even manage to dial a phone to call for help, let alone move, run, or scream.
        Luckily I have never been in such a situation, so I still don’t know how I would react if I were afraid again. I hope I never have to find out.

(©2009, C.J. Peiffer)

I, ROBOT

In response to a writing prompt at Mama’s Losin’ It:

Write about something mean you did to a sibling growing up.

        My sister Linda was a practical jokester. Being three years older than I was, she thought of clever things to do to make my life miserable. When I was very small, she pretended to eat sand from our sandbox, telling me how good it tasted. Of course, I believed her and went crying to my mother with a mouth full of the horrible grit. Once when Linda was supposed to pack my lunch for Brownie day camp, I found two pieces of paper with the words “SWISS CHEESE” and “HAM” written on them between two slices of bread in my lunch bag. She even cut round holes of varying sizes in the paper labeled “SWISS CHEESE.”
        Every day for about a week, I found my wet toothbrush lying on the sink instead of in the holder above the sink. I ignored it for a few days. But Linda was patient. She was waiting for me to say something, then told me my toothbrush had fallen into the toilet so she didn’t want to put it in the rack with the other brushes. Of course, it hadn’t fallen in the toilet. She just said that to annoy me.

        It took me a while, but I soon realized Linda was terrified of many things. All I had to do was scare her with them. She was afraid of bugs and worms--- I loved chasing her around the yard with a juicy worm dangling from my fingers. She would scream and cry if she had to get a shot or have antiseptic applied to a cut or scrape. When she was 12, an episode of “Captain Video” scared her so much that we were never allowed to watch it again.
        Click HERE to see how totally inane it would be to be afraid of this old TV show. Besides a low budget and terrible acting, to save money this futuristic outer space show was interspersed with clips of old cowboy movies which were supposed to depict Captain Video’s undercover agents on Earth.
        One week, my sister had been particularly mean to me. She claimed I was responsible for something she had done ---and of course, I was punished for it. She had also punched my arm resulting in a painful 4-inch bruise, but when I blamed her, she told my mother I had fallen and was lying to get her into trouble. I was racking my brain for a clever way to pay her back, when an idea fell right into my lap.

        We were watching an episode of “The Thin Man” with Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk. On the internet, I discovered that the episode “Robot Client” aired on Friday 2/28/58. I was 12 and my sister was 15. (Click on the name of the episode to watch the video of it ---about 25 minutes.)
        The plot revolved around a scientist who had invented Robby the Robot to handle radioactive materials. When military officials showed up for a demonstration, Robby entered the room carrying a dead body.
        At that point, my sister screamed and cried and wouldn’t watch the rest of the show. I was 12 and it didn’t scare me at all. “The Thin Man” was a mystery/drama, but it was also a comedy.

        But then, I knew how I was going to get back at my sister and luckily I had two things I needed to do it.
        My parents bedroom was on the first floor of our house. My sister and I had separate rooms upstairs. My bedroom had two walk-in closets. One held my clothes, but the other was used for storage ---and that is where my two props had been packed away. I found what I needed and hid them under the bed so I wouldn’t have to be digging through the closet when everyone else was sleeping.
        I waited and waited until I was sure my sister was asleep. Over my PJs, I pulled on a Halloween costume from 1956. In 1958 it didn’t fit so well, but it would do. It consisted of pants and a pullover shirt that were made from a metallic gray fabric with black outlines that were supposed to look like dials and knobs. There was also a gray hood to hide my hair. The shirt may have looked somewhat like the illustration to the left.

        It was a rather poor excuse for a robot costume, but the best part was the mask.
        The red and blue mask had a piece of plastic, like a one-way mirror, so I could see out but no one could see in. Above that were two red eyes with flashlight bulbs in them. A wire ran from the mask down my arm. In my hand I held a cardboard cylinder made of two sections, one inside of the other with a spring inside. By squeezing it, contact was made with a D battery which made the eyes light up. Releasing it turned the eyes off.
        From a box in the closet I had retrieved an old rag doll. It was huge --probably four feet long, as you can see from the photo of it on my typically unmade bed ---from when I was about 8. I laid the doll across my arms to look like the robot on TV carrying a dead body.
        I crept down the hall to Linda’s room. At her open door, I started flashing the eyes off and on and walked stiff-legged like a robot. I grunted a little and bumped against the bed to wake her. Finally, she sensed my presence. In the light from my robot eyes, I saw her eyelids flutter open, then her startled face ----and then all hell broke loose.
        Her scream could have lifted the roof from the house. She sounded like Fay Wray when she spotted King Kong through her window. And my sister wouldn’t stop screaming. I ran to my room, tore off the mask, hood and costume shirt, and threw them under the bed along with the doll. I jumped into bed and pulled the covers to my neck. By that time, my mother had flown up the stairs. My father slept like the dead, so knew nothing had happened until the next day.
        I wiggled out of the costume bottoms, leaving them under the covers and stumbled down the hall rubbing my eyes, asking what was going on. I didn’t want to miss seeing my sister turning into a blob of quivering Jello. When she calmed down enough to speak, Linda kept saying the robot from “The Thin Man” had been in her room. My mother, at first, thought she had been having a nightmare. I tried to act totally innocent, but I couldn’t keep a straight face. My mother finally figured out what I had done.
        I hadn’t thought ahead enough to realize my sister’s sonic screams in the middle of the night could have given my mother a heart attack. However, my mother had a sense of humor and laughed about it the next day. Linda, however, never found any humor in the experience.
        I don’t remember my punishment so it probably wasn’t too terrible. But, no matter. It was worth it. Besides setting my sister’s knees knocking for a few days, the incident put an end to her pathetically amateur practical jokes. Ultimately, she realized she was in the presence of a master.

(©2009, C.J. Peiffer)

To read about my all-time best practical joke, click here: "CARD TRICK"