He took one step forward, stopped, looked about, and took two steps back. He paused again, his head sticking out like a tortoise out of its shell, and glanced about, before taking two steps forward. Then, one step ahead from the position he began, he start the ritual again.
He didn't walk like that on all places. It was only on grounds that were checked like a chessboard. There was something that seemed compelling to him to partake in the rather odd walking method whenever tiled floors were concerned. And they had to be checked tiled floors, not just regular square tiles tessellated, but arranged with the familiar dark-and-light alternate texture.
He didn't care if they stared at him while he was walking like that in the mall. That particular series of moves had saved his life once, and somehow that became ingrained in his psyche as a type of obsession that took on a compulsive role.
It was a long time ago, roughly when he was merely a lad of three. His parents, they took him out to an amusement park once. It was one of those fancy semi-permanent amusement parks that featured rides and stations that were there all year round, opening when the weather was not too cold and wet. It was his first time there when the incident occurred.
There was this maze/puzzle sort of game that one could take part in. There were mirrors, and some harmless booby traps that basically ejected those who fell into them out of the game room safely on to the bouncy mats below. And of course the ground was marked in a checked scheme to help folks figure out the relative positions of everything. Every month, the configuration of the puzzle was changed, thus ensuring novelty and encouraging children to visit the amusement park more often.
What wasn't said that a rather sadistic operator had taken over the puzzle during the time that he visited, and had reconfigured the maze to be far more deadly. In those days, the supervision was very lax, and so no one noticed that the puzzle was made to be life-threatening. It just so happened that he happened to be the first person to play the puzzle since the reconfiguration from the sadistic operator.
Three-year-old him cried as his parents waved at him and cajoled him to enter the puzzle on his own. He had bumbled his way through the puzzle as best as he could, but when he took that step forward, he heard a click. Scared, he retreated twice, only to hear another click. At that point, the tile that he had stepped on that clicked suddenly glowed red, and he just made a mad dash forward, succeeding in moving back on to the square. Seeing that it wasn't going to go well, he moved forward by another tile and the glowing went away. He then charged forward as much as he could.
Some other kid followed behind him, and was promptly hurt by the fall through the trap of the formerly glowing tile. There were knife edges along the sides that sliced deep into the flesh of the falling kid, and through the frantic screams, the sliced up ball of flesh landed on the mat.
(Based on an exercise generated by WriteThis - 03-Jan-2014 22:52:27)
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