Cutting through the graveyard on the way home after a school dance, Alex McKee apprehensively hustled down the rows of stones. He walked quickly, for he was frigid and very frightened. No one had danced with him and he wanted to get home as soon as possible to turn the evening’s events over in his mind. Alex stopped, panting with his hands on his knees. He had to rest.

The boy sat down with his back against a gravestone and felt around in his pocket to see if he had anything to eat. He felt something in his picket; it felt like cookies. But when he took out the snack, there was broken glass in his hands, and they were bleeding uncontrollably. The glass slowly transformed into Oreos.

He leaned against the stone, nibbling at the snack and thinking about the dance and what he may have done wrong. As soon as the cookies had been devoured, Alex got to his feet. But just as he was about to get going, a look of shock spread across his face.

The marker he had been leaning against was his sister’s. She had been committed to a mental institution at age fourteen after she had burned the McKee house to the ground. It sickened Alex to think about her. So he ran away as fast as he could, racing toward his home. As Alex ran, he tripped on a root and went careening into an open grave. Out of the root he had tripped on, blood started oozing like sap, and it made a groaning noise. And then the helpless boy saw the tree start to bend. The tree tore from the ground and collapsed over the hole in which he lay. Alex cried for help, but everyone thought it was just the wind. It was almost a week before they found Alex McKee.

Walter Morris is a seventh-grader at Central Junior High School