The Odd Idea

Consider an image. A girl stands naked in the doorway to a darkened – no, pitch black – room. The door leads to her worst fear, a fear she has decided to conquer tonight. She shivers in the draft, wraps her arms around herself and prepares to step forward. She shuts her eyes.
Suddenly there are large hands on her back – her bare skin crawls at their touch – hands that shove her roughly ahead – much, much faster than she had planned to move. Her eyelids snap open wide; she shrieks silently and throws her hands into the blackness into which she is falling, as if she can somehow push against the nothing and propel herself back into the light. To anyone watching from inside the room her terrified body makes a beautiful silhouette against the brightness that spills around her from behind and beyond but which never quite seems to want to make contact with its opposite – and, no longer teetering, she slips into the smudge of nothing between the light and the dark, and disappears.