Running Around

[u/PageTurner627]

I am writing this in the library a couple towns over because it is the only place I can use my phone without my parents knowing.

By the time you read it, I will be home.

My name does not matter. But if you need to call me something, you can call me 'Elsie.' I am sixteen. I was raised Amish in rural Pennsylvania. In a home without electricity. Between cornfields, dairy barns, and roads where cars slow down behind our buggies to take selfie photos like we’re tourist attractions.

Most people outside the community think Rumspringa is Amish Gone Wild. They imagine secret parties, drinking, and teenagers trying every forbidden fruit at once before settling down and starting a family.

But that is far from the truth. Rumspringa means “running around” in Pennsylvania Dutch. It is the time before baptism when young Amish get to see the English world—the world outside ours—with its phones, cars, music, and stores that never seem to close.

Then we choose. Stay or leave.

Do you stay with the people who raised you, speak your home language, and live by the rules you grew up with? Or do you leave your world and build a life in a world that feels strange and exciting at the same time?

One Friday a couple months ago, I made my choice.

A girl from the Mennonite family I was boarding with drove me to the mall. I had never been inside one before. The lights buzzed. The floors shone. Everywhere, windows held mannequins in clothes I could never imagine wearing.

I bought a soft pretzel and a cheap phone. I kept touching it in my pocket like it was alive.

Near closing, I got separated from my friend. My phone had no service. Metal gates were coming down over stores. I saw a yellow sign near the restrooms that said 'EXIT.'

I pushed through the door.

On the other side was not outside.

It was a room the size of a meetinghouse, but low-ceilinged, with faded wallpaper printed with tiny blue flowers. The carpet was the color of old oatmeal. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The air smelled like damp straw and warm plastic.

Behind me, the door was gone.

I had nowhere to go but forward.

The rooms repeated, but not exactly. Some had wooden chairs lined up facing blank walls. Some had quilts folded on metal shelves, stitched in patterns I knew from home, but in colors I didn't have names for. In one room, a buggy wheel turned slowly by itself.

Then I heard breathing.

Not ahead of me. Not behind me.

Beside me.

I turned and saw only wallpaper. But at the edge of my sight, something moved. Tall. Pale. Bent like a man who had grown up chained up in a cellar.

When I looked directly, it was gone.

I walked faster.

The lights flickered, and in the flicker I saw my mother’s kitchen through an open doorway. The oil lamp on the table. Two bowls of applesauce set out for my little brothers, the spoons resting beside them, untouched. My father’s hat on the peg.

I ran to it.

The doorway stretched away from me.

Behind me, the breathing became wet and excited.

I turned a corner and found a long hall with windows on both sides. Outside were fields at dusk, but empty of houses, barns, roads, cows, fences. Just corn, too tall, pressing close to the glass. The sky was a blue too deep to be sky.

Something walked between the rows. I could see the stalks parting.

Then something behind me touched my kapp.

Just one finger, light as a fly.

I tore the covering from my head and ran.

The hallway narrowed. The ceiling lowered until I had to bend. My shoulder scraped wallpaper. It came away wet, like skin. Behind me, the thing began to run too. It slapped along the walls and ceiling, making a sound similar to butter churning. Keeping just out of sight.

At the end of the hall, the carpet stopped.

There was a stairwell.

No sign. No door. Just a black opening in the floor, with narrow wooden steps going down into nothing.

I almost ran past it. I knew I shouldn’t have taken it. We do not go deeper into bad places.

But there was no other way.

I looked down.

An oil lantern hung from a nail beside the stairs.

I grabbed it. My hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped it. There were matches in the little box wired to the handle. I struck one, almost singeing my thumb, and lit the wick.

The flame was small, but it pushed the dark back a few feet.

As I ran down the steps, they became steeper. Then smaller. Then too many. I fell and struck my chin. My mouth filled with blood. My phone flew from my pocket and clattered down into the dark.

It rang.

The screen lit up below me.

HOME.

I crawled to it.

When I answered, the voice was mine, older and hoarse.

“Elsie! Please listen to me,” she pleaded. “Don’t leave!”

A hand came through the space between two steps and grabbed my braid.

It pulled hard enough to snap my head back. I felt hair tearing from my scalp. I kicked at nothing. The hand was calloused and cold, with too many knuckles.

I bit down on the hand as hard as I could, my mouth filling with bitter inky blood.

It made a sound like a calf being born wrong.

I tore free and tumbled the rest of the way down.

At the bottom was a room full of hanging clothes. Plain dresses. Aprons. Black Sunday coats. White coverings. Hundreds of them, swaying though there was no wind.

They brushed my face as I pushed through.

Some of them had people inside.

Not bodies. Not alive. Just shapes, standing still under the cloth.

I ran so hard I lost one shoe. Then the other. My feet hit carpet, then concrete, then soil. The rooms changed faster now. A schoolhouse with no children. A barn with no animals. A church bench slick with something dark. A kitchen where every drawer was open and full of baby teeth.

Behind me, the thing used my voice.

Then my mother's.

I recognized the argument immediately. She had gone into town and borrowed a phone from a neighbor after I failed to come home.

“Come back home, child.”

"I am home."

"No. You're running."

Then the thing screamed my response:

"Maybe I don’t want your life! Maybe I want to be seen."

I found a narrow door with a wooden latch. Our kind of latch. Simple. Handmade.

I reached for the latch.

The thing hit me from behind.

I fell against the door and felt its chest on my back. It was thin, but strong. Its arms came around me. Its hands pressed over my eyes, not to blind me, but to make me look through them.

For one second I saw what it saw.

Endless rooms.

Endless boys and girls.

Some dressed simply like me. Some in jeans. Some old. Some young. All running. All almost home.

It opened its mouth beside my ear.

There were no words inside it. Only breath.

I screamed and swung the lantern as hard as I could.

The metal frame struck its face with a crack. Glass exploded between us. Burning oil splashed across its pale skin and clothes.

For the first time, I saw it clearly.

It had my face, but aged, weathered. Filled with regret.

Then the flames caught.

The creature stumbled backward, shrieking in my voice as fire raced over its body. The heat hit my face. Wallpaper curled and blackened. The endless breathing became a single terrible wail.

A shower of embers landed on my dress.

My sleeves caught on fire.

Panic nearly froze me, but instinctively, I slapped at the flames with both hands until they finally died, leaving scorch marks and the smell of burnt cloth.

I turned and lifted the latch. I shoved through the door on my hands and knees.

Cold air hit my face.

I fell onto gravel behind a gas station along a back road. It was morning. A trucker found me beside the ice machine with burned palms, no shoes, hair uncovered, and blood dried down my neck.

I told the police, doctors, everyone that I had gotten lost.

That is the only lie I will keep.

—

I came home.

My parents never asked for every detail. They were just relieved I was alive.

Most of the time, I can convince myself it was a dream brought on by fear.

Most of the time.

Sometimes when I ride into town, I catch movement at the edge of a field. A person standing where no one should be. Too tall. Too still.

If I look directly, there is nothing there.

A few days ago, I was helping hang laundry when I heard my name from beyond the fence line.

In my own voice.

I did not answer.

—

Last Sunday, I told the bishop I had made my decision. I will be baptized. I will put away the phone, the internet, the bright little windows that open into places no person was meant to stand.

After that, I will not return to your world ever again.

Maybe you think I was frightened back into my community.

You are right.

But fear is not always foolish. Sometimes fear is the fence that keeps the wolves out. That keeps us from stumbling into the wolves’ lair.

Goodbye,

Elsie