🏃♂️😨🩸
Sweat dripped down my face as I waited at the starting line. I had bought special shoes with check marks on them and a blue track suit for the occasion. My new acquisitions shone like diamonds under the harsh lights of the track.
Through my yellow-tinted goggles I could see the others around me, ready to set off. Each and every one of them looked different from me. There were certain limits due to the weight category I was in though, meaning that us contestants were all roughly around the same size as measured purely by mass. Thus, there were some very small and fat creatures as well as some very skinny and tall ones. For example, the life-form in the lane directly left of me was bulbous and red and must have been composed of some very lightweight matter.
The others around me were also getting ready to set off. Anticipation was building, and the competition was nearly ready to boil over. One of the contestants was having difficulty waiting patiently for the race to begin. His furry paw hit the distal portion of the starting line with a thud. The audience gasped. Some bird life-forms in the audience squawked. A security life-form wearing an effervescent yellow vest lumbered to the starting line in response. The creature who had offended the rules was dragged away by his collar. There was no room for nonsense among this very serious business. When the false-start fiasco had finally been put to rest, the judge blew his whistle.
I felt simultaneously terrified and relieved. The worst part is always waiting for it to begin – nothing is so bad once you’ve already begun. As I ran I could feel that I had started out with too quick of a pace. There was no chance that I would be able to keep this up until the end of the 400 meters, but I didn’t care. Sometimes when you’re full of adrenaline like that, it’s difficult to come to terms with the realities of the universe. Every organ in my body was screaming for me to slow down. As I passed the brimming stands I shortly caught a glimpse of my coach, who was smiling and screaming my name. This gave me the strength to keep my speed up.
As I neared the 200 meter mark, something I saw on the path near the tracks nearly made me halt to a stop. It was a face I would have recognized anywhere, but one that I had not wished to see ever again. Worst of all, she was heading straight towards me. Thankfully, I was nearing a bend at this point, so I would in a few seconds be set in a trajectory in a direction opposite to her.
Despite everything, I forced myself to focus on the race. There was a particular opponent right in front of me taking leaps and bounds with his metallic, C-curve shaped spring foot. I could tell that he was faster than me. My willpower to overtake him overwhelmed me like some sort of transcendental experience. In the mess of a state in which I was at that point, I felt that everything would be alright as soon as I got to the finish line before him.
As my legs pounded the straight that composed the last 100 meters, I honestly wasn’t sure if I would make it. Although I was finally leaving the spring foot behind me, I felt like I was about to collapse at any moment. The second I hit the finish line and I knew I had beat the spring-foot, I fell into a heap at my own feet. I didn’t feel anything at that moment except for pain and relief. I had never run that fast in my life. As the physical stress began to wear off, it soon dawned on me that the worst was yet to come. In the corner of my eye I spied the familiar female standing at the edge of the stands, waiting for me.
We made eye contact. I knew I had to settle the business I had once started.
Meanwhile, my girlfriend had come down from the stands to ambush me.
“WOW..!” she started, her pink gills fluttering in the wind.
She tried to hug me, but I pulled away.
“Hey, give me a second, I’ll be right there,” I mumbled. My interjection was met by a blank stare and by a slight deflation of her excitedly puffed up gills, but there was nothing she could say to protest.
I crept suspiciously to the edge of the stands. I expected more life-forms to have been watching me, but everyone was too wrapped up in their own business to care.
“Common, let’s go somewhere more private if you wanna talk,” I said to my adversary.
“Shuure, we can go out back over there if you wanna,” said the lady goblin, a sly smile painted over her green and crooked face. She was wearing a tattered hat that dangled around her floppy, vertically hanging ears. Under it I could tell that her hair was oddly disheveled. I hated that she had come here to embarrass me like this.
I led her firmly to the back of the stands and looked around. The rest of the life-forms who had been watching the race hadn’t started to come out yet, so the coast was clear for now.
“I haavee anotha job for you. I knoww u seed ya wanted out, but honey, ya do such a wondaful job on these cases. We just need ya. It’s a tricky one, so I khame to ask for ya help,” she suggested.
“I told ya, I want out,” I said.
“This one’s good money though,” she said, “I’ll give ya a day or two to think abat it,” she added reassuringly.
At that I turned around and slouched back to the stands. I needed some time to myself.
🏃♂️😨🩸
That night I lay in my bed, shaking because it was all coming back to me. I could see their shrivelled goblin faces and remembered the glow of the warm money that had been there. I had been part of it.
My heart thudded. I couldn’t stop replaying my part in it. I had lifted the money, I had stolen and taken from innocent people. I had done something I could never forget.
My girlfriend lay soundly asleep next to me, her humongous eyelashes nearly flapping open every so often. I felt conflicted, because there were things I could never tell her about. We shared everything, but I knew that this would be too much for her. I shook with fear and sweat through the night.
🏃♂️😨🩸
Back then I had no way of knowing that the nightmare was just beginning. The terrible green goblin that had come to surprise me at the race began haunting me.
At first I was only suspicious when I was in a big public place with lots of people, like at the mall or the movie theatre. Gradually, without completely noticing it, things got so bad that I began to see her even though I was only in the house by myself. Wherever I went, or even if I decided to stay home, I kept looking behind my back to make sure that I was safe. Despite my incessant paranoia, I had enough self-awareness to tell that my perception of reality was beginning to blur and falter at the edges.
I knew that things had really gotten bad when my mother started noticing too. It had been on one of those nice, relaxed Sundays that we like to spend together. We had just visited the supermarket.
“Why u lookin behind yur shoulder so much nowadays?” she inquired.
“I don’t know, I thought I just saw someone I knew over there,” I replied nonchalantly.
“U look skeerd, I tell ya, u ain’t alright,” she retorted, blue feathers bristling, “I bet it’s that feemale u have goin’. She ain’t one of us. That’s no good for anyone, bein’ with a different species altogetha,” she added.
“Mother, it’s not that,” I replied. I knew that it would be no use to continue this conversation, as it would only add to her suspicion of me.
We walked home silently, our bags brimming with groceries.
🏃♂️😨🩸
The last time I spoke to my adversary was on the Wednesday of the week following the incident with my mother. It happened at one of my races again. I don’t know why she chose to meet me like that, except for maybe that she somehow knew that it would be especially annoying and unsteadying for me to have to deal with her in that environment. That race hadn’t been a particularly important race of mine, but it happened to be my second to last one of the season. Nevertheless, the promise that had reared its head at the beginning of the season by beating the metallic C-foot hadn’t come into full bloom as I had hoped it to. Things seemed to always turn out like this for me. I would do pretty well at things, but I could never be the best. It upset me sometimes to think about it, but there was nothing I could really do about it.
On that Wednesday, I spotted the green goblin before my race had even begun. Her greasy appearance made the insides of my palms break out into a cold, clammy sweat. I had to use my entire focus to keep myself just standing still at the starting line. I tried fixating on the emergent stimulus of the whistle that was yet to be blown, but I was so distracted that I almost forgot to start running when the “BANG” finally resonated through the air. That race I ran not truly to win, but to forget about the anxiety that hung like a dark cloud over my personal life. My head and my heart really weren’t really in it that time, so it doesn’t come as a shock to anyone reading that this particular race didn’t go down in history as one of my best performances.
The advantage of not having run spectacularly was that there were not as many life-forms crowding around to congratulate me after the race. I looked up to find my girlfriend in the stands, and noted that even she was not paying any attention to me – her webbed fingers were tapping like mad on her portable device. She was obviously busy communicating with someone else. Despite being quite a tall and muscular male life-form who often caught the eyes of many observers at these races, this time I could honestly be quite certain that not a single life-form spotted me as I crept over to the stands.
As the greedy goblin saw me nearing her hiding place, she finally lost her patience. She clamoured underneath the effervescent lights of the track, scouring towards me with the greasy entrails of her coat tailing behind her. I quickened my pace. I had to get there quickly, so that no one from the stands would look over and notice what was happening. My legs were really not in the mood to run after all the effort I had exuded out of my muscles during my race, and I had to settle to go at a pace of a fast walk.
I finally reached her. I was just about to open my mouth and begin making my case to her, when she disappeared as if into thin air. I looked around desperately to find her again. Where was the green greasy goblin I had just been eyeing down? Had I just been imagining everything?
I looked over to the others still crowding around the track. My vision’s always been good, 20/20 I think, and I could see them just fine, even make out the details of a life-form in the front with a fuzzy purple coat framing his bearlike outline. At least the other life-forms surrounding the stands continued to be real to me. I felt thankful to have some (relative) anchorage to reality left.
As I headed back to the stands, an odd feeling overtook me. I had nothing to prove that the green goblin from my past had ever been to visit me at all in the first place. The thought was oppressive. I felt like I was losing my breath, as if someone were holding me underwater. I started gasping for air.
My girlfriend saw me from a distance and ran up to me with her long tentacled hair flying in her wake.
“Are you ok?” she asked, worried. From the concern painted clearly onto her pretty face I could tell that I didn’t look like I was doing very well.
🏃♂️😨🩸
“Are you feeling a bit better now?” asked my girlfriend when I was safely back at home. She had made me bundle up underneath the covers and placed a cup of warm tea in my hands because she had learned from her mother that is what you are supposed to do when someone is having a difficult time and you do not know what to do to help them.
“Do you want to watch something?” she inquired tentatively. I could tell that she seemed a bit fearful of me. I must have been acting quite out of character.
“Ok,” I managed to reply. I felt that I could use some sort of distraction from whatever was going on with me. I felt dangerously on edge.
She bundled up next to me, and I could feel the outline of her tail pushing up against me. She pressed the button, and from the roof of our apartment sprouted the hologram onto which was plastered the logo of our favourite streaming service.
“Maybe we should just continue with Masterchef Space?” she asked quietly.
“Ok,” I replied again.
The show started playing before us. There was some drama between the contestants and one of the huge ant life-forms had just thrown a pan at the panel of judges. Whatever was happening on the screen was entertaining, but I could feel that something really wasn’t right within me. A deep fear crept up into my chest uninvited and remained there. I started shaking again.
“Are you cold?” she asked.
“No,” I said, but immediately realized that I should have said I was cold, because it would have better explained what was currently happening with me.
She was lying so close to me that I could hear her breath. Part of our arms were also touching. Little by little, I felt that her arm began to feel greasy and disgusting. I looked over to make sure I hadn’t imagined everything. The result was even more terrifying. It was no longer coming to terms with the familiar and pretty face, but instead the horrible thing that had haunted me. Her face was shrivelled, green and completely goblin-like. There was that same blank stare in her eyes.
I jumped up and ran to the kitchen.
She got up and followed me there.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
In a panic, I pulled out a kitchen knife, shielding myself from her with it.
“What are you doing, put that thing down,” she said in her terribly squeaky voice.
She advanced towards me. There was nothing but fear coursing through my veins. I needed to end it.
Once my adversary had been reduced to a bloody heap at my feet, I saw that it had never been my adversary at all. The girlfriend I knew and loved was smothered into a bloody mess on the carpeted floor.
I screamed.
At this point I knew that my adversary had never been anywhere, not by the stands next to my races, not in my girlfriend. She had been me all along.
I had to get rid of her.
I ran to the window, knowing it would be my last 100 meter sprint. I jumped out.
I lay on the sidewalk with my neck broken for quite some time, remaining unnoticed. It was getting dark, and the neighbours were mostly away on holiday.
Eventually, I was approached by a greasy, capladden green goblin. She bent over my pathetic dead body
“Too bad, we relly could’a used ya help wit dis one,” she said.
🏃♂️😨🩸
WAST WRTNG 