Fiction: Fear

February 27, 2018 Fiction , POETRY / FICTION

By

Safia Izhar

It was a crisp morning. The sun was rising, and the chirping of the little birds was adding to the charm of the half lighted surroundings. The horizon was smiling with a promise of hope and goodness. The boy believed in omens. He began to walk and whistle in a good mood through the trees. Suddenly he heard a loud roar and in reflex, he began to run without even looking back or tracking the sound of the voice. The roar seemed to move along him and he increased his speed. People around him thought he might be some athlete or fitness freak. None of them realized that he was scared beyond wits and even he didn’t notice that no one else was running from the frightening roar. The people seemed calm as a sea as if there wasn’t any odd noise anywhere at all.

He didn’t want anyone to call him a coward and the cover of an athlete was the best choice in the current scenario. At last, his legs began to fail him. The roar came again and again. Now, he wondered why couldn’t other people hear such deafening sounds. However, when he finally began to lose hope, he thought that he could at least look at the monster directly before being perished. He stopped. He looked around. He couldn’t see anything. Suddenly the thing roared again in his ears. He looked around again. Still there wasn’t anything but the roar continued right in his ear.

His forehead was sweating so he took out a handkerchief from his pocket. While removing the handkerchief, his hand touched something hard. It was his cell phone. He took it out and fell on ground with a thud. He was shocked to see. He was getting calls from home and the roar was actually the ringtone that was set automatically through the software that changed ringtones daily on his cellphone. Sometimes they were the same. Sometimes they were funny, sometimes they were melodious. Today it gave him a horrible one…

Fear is such an amazing thing, he thought. It is there even when it doesn’t exist and we believe too much in fear.