my attic and i

by Elaina Bayard

I grew up with an attic in my room, and I hated it. 

There it was, right above the door to my bedroom: some portal into a monstrous, dark dimension. The string to tug it open and unleash all its horrors taunted me. If I laid on my left side as I went to sleep, I could stare at it, tracking its movements. And I did. When sleep took me at last, I trusted my army of stuffed animals to keep me safe. If one ever went missing, I would assume they had fallen in some epic battle for my safety.

Now, my fear seems quite silly. I’ve been in my attic more times than I can count. I had even been up there as a child. But something about it haunted me. Maybe it was the long shadows, difficult to parse for a girl who hadn’t yet been given glasses. Maybe it was the awful screaming sound the ladder made. Maybe it was my hatred of bugs.

Maybe it served as a symbol of my lack of privacy, since I could have my precious alone time interrupted if anyone needed to get up there. Maybe it served as a symbol for the unknown, since anything could be hiding up there when it was closed.

Or maybe I just liked to make up stories, and I was never really scared at all.

—

playing dressup

by Gabrielle Yuan

I often find myself in fear, and in contemplation, of dressing more casual than warranted. Most of the time, my daily curated outfit leans more toward being slightly too uncomfortable to sit through a day’s worth of class. With the colder weather approaching, out of necessity, I’m beginning to experiment with the clothes I have. Many staple tops are similar: sleeveless with thin straps, and specifically since this summer, too many shirts with accented collars. 

To counter an East Coast winter, I’ve purchased countless cardigans to mix and match with the thinner tops, in hopes of resourcing outfits fit for all four seasons. I’m left unsatisfied: always a bit too cold sitting near the library windows, or buzzing, slightly warm, on the campus steps. 

While not a revolutionary discovery, I’ve decided to right this situation by beginning to layer. Coming to this conclusion on my own, I ventured down to Savers, thrifted long sleeved white and black shirts—hoping to find new color combinations, trusting that I can pull off jean-on-jean textures, and have someone, maybe a stranger, notice this subtle, yet internally significant change. 

My determination to begin dressing out of convention and into my own comfort extends to Halloween. I’m done resting in half-fear, half-heartedness to pull together an outfit that balances effortlessness with overthinking. This semester marks the month, the week, the day for me to lose the fear of being seen. 

All feelings pass in October—moving into my own costume, in and out of season.

—

who’s afraid of jane eyre? (it’s me)

by AJ Wu

When my oldest cousin went off to college, he did away with childish things—his dusty ziplock bag filled with Game Boy cartridges, his Pokémon cards, and his three stacks of illustrated, abridged classic novels adapted for very young children. I adored all three hand-me-downs, but the classics were, undoubtedly, my favorite. (And if I, between the ages of seven and 11, ever told you that I’ve read Great Expectations, what I meant was I read a version of Great Expectations where Miss Havisham speaks American English and everything is neatly resolved within 80 large-print pages max. Sorry.)

All to say: In my formative years, my greatest fear was my illustrated, abridged, children’s Jane Eyre. *Spoilers* for Jane Eyre, but there’s a pivotal scene where Jane discovers that Mr. Rochester’s wife, Bertha Mason, is locked up in his attic. My book contained a pencil sketch of Bertha standing over Jane in her sleep, dripping candlewax onto her face. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a very detailed or realistic drawing, but still, it haunted my waking and sleeping moments for years.

Too scared to pick up the book with my own hands, I asked my mom to rid our household of this evil by throwing it in the trash at once. She acquiesced after not a small amount of confusion. Life carried on and was good, for a time. Several years later (I’d rather not reveal at what age), I encountered the book again while digging through the back of a cabinet, and—after recovering from my profound betrayal and terror—dropped it into the recycling bin. A wrongfully killed ghost come back to haunt, exorcised once more.

Reader, I’ve heard that acknowledging your fears is a first step on the journey towards conquering them. I’m older now. At 21, I’ve conquered every other fear a person can have and will ever have. Now that I’ve set myself free through the telling, maybe, one day, I’ll finally finish the illustrated children’s Jane Eyre.

—

the haunting of the bathroom stall

by Daniella Coyle

Moths have always freaked me out—no—terrified me. I have often tried to find reason for this. Maybe it’s something in their uneven flight, their fragile wings that reflect the light in lurid, flickering distortion. Maybe it’s an even stupider thing, like their name’s similarity to the ever-horrifying maths. Or maybe it’s that there’s nothing at all to be scared of, and yet they nonetheless start in me a tremble of disgust and a need to get away. That’s the reason they call fears like this irrational, isn’t it?

Middle school is a pretty nightmarish scenario to begin with. The bodily smells and growths and sensitivities, plus the feral mood swings, are enough to make you feel like you’re possessed by something ancient and evil that’s just awoken. The mounting awareness that you are being perceived is not unlike discovering a bright green pair of eyes—or several—watching you in the dark. Add to that your own individual fears, which make sense to nobody else, and you’ve got yourself a horror movie. 

I’d gone to the restroom during class, less to actually use the restroom than to pass some of the time that otherwise would be spent listening to the teacher explain the properties of water through boisterous classmates’ interruptions with the 2014 equivalent of today’s ‘6-7’ joke. Still, in commitment to the bit, I went into the restroom and paced back and forth between the stalls, noting their varied cleanliness. That’s when, as I came to pass directly in front of the mirror above the sink, something snagged on my peripheral vision. A flash of light, maybe, which morphed into a shadow like a green afterimage. Instinctively, I looked behind me. As I turned back to the mirror, and leaned closer to inspect, one of the stall doors creaked and then slammed behind me. Of course, I whipped around. No one.

The only sound my shallow breath, I crept up on tiptoe to the stall the sound came from, my heart pounding. This was it. This was my death. Slowly, slowly, I reached out to the door. Then, all at once, I swung it open. Instead of a guy with a knife like I was expecting, or a ghoul, or a monster in the traditional sense, a dreaded moth came flapping right into my face. I screamed. Ran out of the stall, the bathroom, the school. It was only after hiding behind a bush for a solid 10 minutes, after I’d ensured The Beast was nowhere near, that I, shaken, returned to class. After that, the childish jokes and boring lessons did not bother me much.

—

spooky season

by Jessica Lee

As a campus tour guide, I always tell guests about how we have our late-night organ concerts on the three spookiest nights of the year (Halloween, during Orientation before FDOC, and right before graduation). This anecdote often inspires a chuckle from some parents in the crowd, but I often wonder: Are these nights really that much spookier than the rest? Some of the spookiest nights I’ve had on campus have actually been some random winter nights during December reading period, walking across the barren, snow-covered Main Green after a long night of studying at a library. Or some absolutely haunting birthdays, being left alone with my thoughts and pondering what it means to be getting older. Some people even describe the summer as bringing their most nostalgic spooky feelings, when they reminisce about warm camp days filled with campfires and ghost stories.

So many people love getting their fill of “spooky season” and getting into the Halloween spirit. Much like Christmas, it’s one of those holidays where stores start selling their decorations months in advance, shoving the spirit down your throat whether you want it or not. For them, it’s a beloved time of year that they secretly wish they could celebrate all year long. If you’re one of those folks who wants pumpkin spice year-round, or to keep their skeletons out of the closet well into Christmastime, or to have their Hocus Pocus/Halloweentown/Haunted Mansion movie marathon in the spring…who am I to stop you? I’m the type of person that may or may not be listening to Christmas music in the middle of July, so whenever you’re ready to begin your “spooky season” or enjoy an eerie night, I support you in all of your spooky endeavors.

—

fault lines

By Michelle Bi

There was a woman buried under the mound of dirt behind my elementary school playground. At least, that’s what we whispered into each other’s ears, scampering around it as if She could claw her way out from within at any second.

If you stand on top of it, you can feel Her breathing, my friends whispered to me like a prayer. So, we clambered to the top, furtively, feet light and slippery against the loose soil. I held my breath. Dug my heels into the earth. And really, I could feel it falling and rising, in and out, in and out, the rhythm of—perhaps—some forgotten breath from long ago, waiting to break free. We leapt off. We fled the scene, laughing.

The next time I felt Her was in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek, huddled in my closet. She was sleeping, and then all of a sudden, She was roaring; the ground seemed to roll and crash like high tide at the beach. I shoved my head against my folded-up legs, and waited for that deep bass thrum to subside.

Nothing but an earthquake, my mom said later—but I knew who was really behind it.

Since then, I’ve been aware of Her, the woman I imagine curled up just beneath the earth, her head between her knees, her lungs animating all the rest of us. Of how She laps at our footsteps, murmurs after dusk and before dawn. Of the rhythm of Her breathing—how it softens, loudens, and never quite stops.