Chapter 1

The first time I encountered her, I was on a college trip to Bhurban. We were scheduled to go to a high-end restaurant for our farewell field trip, every batch before us was hosted there. Things happened, and when we arrived it was a different resort. Secluded and far off from the town's center, surrounded by a thick forest of pine trees. The snow was about 3 feet that year. The food was stale, and the coffee was bad but we were having fun. The backside of the resort opened into a forested area, fenced off as private property.

We weren't allowed to leave the premises but one of my friends discovered a spot where the fence was broken. Soon, six of us were past it and into the thick snow. I don't remember how far we must have walked when I realized I couldn't see them.

When you look at a forest from the outside it looks navigable, inviting, but once you enter, everything seems the same. The trail can disappear from under your feet and you find yourself lost in a maze of trees that all look the same. I am no hiker, and I hate the cold. Being claustrophobic doesn't help in such cases. I started running (though in that much snow running is more like stumbling) in panic.

When I came upon her, she seemed like a regular child hunched over, eating snow. But when I approached her, I saw here hands were bloody and there wasn't snow in her hands, it was glass. Sharp, smashed, shards of glass. Her mouth was bleeding, her lips were torn and she just kept shoving glass into her mouth. I tried to reach out and jerk it away from her but she kept staring at me as she chewed. If you have ever seen a child, bleeding profusely from their mouth combined with the sound of glass crunch between their teeth, you would know how I felt not being able to stop her. I am not sure if it was the sound of the sight of blood but my head was spinning.

The trip was scheduled to return at 7pm. They said they found me by following my gutteral screams just a few yards into the forest. What I had to face with my parents at home I won't mention but there were no more trips without family afterwards. Back in islamabad, my mother was certain my fever was brought on by the cold. But the fever raged on for more than a week. I was too groggy to remember the details but I remember I saw her sitting just outside my room door. Those two weeks were hell, knowing that she, a perfectly normal looking child, was just outside my door and I was scared to death she would take me.

When the dreams started, I couldn't tell anyone about them. It would have been too embarrassing to admit that I was scared of a glass eating child whom I believed had followed me from the forest of Bhurban. But in the dreams she would just keep crying asking to be only near me, with her bloody, gashed, glass speckled face. And I was scared to death of her even in my dreams. I had no idea what she wanted.

Then slowly she started meddling with my real life. I would often wake up to find her clinging to my cupboard, or just running around the house. At one time, when I was working on my computer she just came and calmly sat beside me. When I tried to run out of the room, I found the door locked. You cannot imagine the horror of being in that room just watching her chomp away at the shards of glass, for those few minutes. Sometimes, I would find myself paralyzed lying beside just watching her bloody face. I was always found by one of my siblings or my mother, screaming like a dying animal, even though I have no recollection of the screams myself.

When I moved cities after getting married, I thought I must have left her behind. But how wrong I was. How terribly wrong I was. The pregnancy made it worst.

(To be continued)