I assume you want me to confess. Fine, I will.

Well it all starts out as everyone is afraid of something; even if they don't know it yet. I am afraid of escalators. This fear started when I was ten. I went shopping with my grandmother during the Christmas season of 1997. I was just starting to like this time of year for the first time I could remember. My grandmother had finally gotten custody of me and now I lived with her in the most peaceful little house on the country side. I never liked shopping or any of those girly things. I hated trying on clothes that never fit, and even though I was only ten, I knew there were cameras in the dressing rooms. I tried telling my grandma I was afraid to go in there because some strange person would be getting paid to watch me undress. She never believed me.

Grandma always said I had a knick for telling stories but what I needed to do was separate the real stories from the fake ones. Right now people don't believe anything I say is real anymore. I don't blame them, I just see differently than they do.

Adults think of the mall as just a bunch of stores and sales. Teenagers think of it as a place to hang out after school or on the weekends. Children only went for the soft pretzels and dipping sauces which were sold there. When I look back, those delicious soft pretzels weren't worth any of my traumatizing years that followed.

You might be asking yourselves what made me so afraid of escalators, or depending on what kind of person you are you might not even care.

At the beginning of this I said I would confess.

What happened was me and my grandmother went shopping on the second floor. We took the elevator up. When we walked past the escalator I saw some lady getting sucked into the moving staircase. I never forgot the way her face looked or the clothes she was wearing. When the escalator crushed her down a patch of the lady's brown curly hair remained there forever in my mind. The green glow in all escalators haunts me to this day.