The Troubles

Amina looked out of the glass window of her house. It was a dark and rainy evening of October, and her parents left about twenty minutes ago to go to Target. Apparently, they had forgotten that there wasn’t that much food left in the fridge. 

Amina sighed and turned away from the window when something bright-white outside caught her eye. A flashlight? Astonished, she quickly glanced around outside once again. Nothing. “How extraordinary-” she thought to herself. “A person outside, maybe? Why would anyone be outside when it was nearly dark?”

“Nah. It was probably just my eyes playing tricks on me.” 

It wasn’t a good idea to get scared when home alone. You could start seeing all sorts of things; not just a dash of bright white light somewhere outside. “None of those things exist,” Amina thought. This comforted her, but not for long.

An hour passed by, but it wasn’t very eventful. Amina sat around and did her schoolwork for the next day. She wasn’t worried about her parents for a reason: whenever they were in a store they always had some sort of last-minute products to get, so they wouldn’t likely be coming back until later. 

Amina was so deep into studying for her science quiz, she completely ignored a knock at the door until the person outside was banging on it, obviously annoyed they weren’t being let in. Amina hurriedly got up from her desk and ran to open the door.

However, when she was right at the door and about to open it, she realized what she was doing. She had come incredibly close to breaking the #1 rule of being alone — to never trust anyone. This applied to being alone in the house, as it certainly wasn’t the greatest idea to open a door when you didn’t know who was behind it.

The person, whoever was outside gave yet another loud, urgent-sounding knock on the door. “But what if it’s my parents knocking? Did they forget their house keysor something?” Amina wondered if that one rule applied to opening doors for parents. It probably didn’t, as they were family. 

She knew she had to check who it was through the window, and fast, or the person might just knock the door down. Her eyes moved towards the window, and she carefully pulled the blinds away to see.

Nobody was there. Nobody on the porch, nobody hiding in the bushes nearby.

“Maybe they went away?” Amina slowly crept away from the window. If it was her parents, they would surely just call her on her cell phone and tell her to open the door. What if they lost their phones though? No, two phones lost at the same time is just literal stupidity. This just couldn’t be her parents.

Amina took a deep breath. In, out. In, out.

She put her hand on the doorknob, unlocked the door, and very slowly creaked the door open.