I've not done a short story for a long time. Seeing as I've only spent about two to three hours on this, there's bound to be mistakes, and I'm not sure if it's as clear as it should be. Constructive criticism would be much appreciated.
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It comes back to me in the nighttime.
I
hate the darkness. It reaches right inside of you, fingers scuttling over buried
memories and nocturnal fears, and yanks playfully at the corners of everything
that lurks in the back of your mind, picking every scabby worry open into a
scar. There’s no escape from it; closing your eyes only locks it in, giving it
a smaller space tear open. I try turning the light on sometimes, even though my
mum tells me to keep it off.
‘Don’t be such a baby, Reece.’
It was dark when it happened, you know. I can’t remember
seeing much – just oblong silhouettes, rearing up out of murky blackness, forming
a cage around me. A line of light jutted out from beneath the closed door to my
left, reminding me that a world existed outside of where I was, but I barely
noticed it. She kept grabbing my face, turning me away. My vision blurred
together after a while.
‘Stop crying.’
I
didn’t need to see, I suppose. There was movement all around me, mapping out an
image in my mind. Long nails bit into my skin, pinning me into place, whilst
wet, slippery lips latched onto whatever part of me they could reach, fences of
bone tucked beneath them. Rabid hands were everywhere, grabbing fistfuls of my
hair, neck, arms and thighs, tearing at my waistband and clamping over my mouth
whenever I tried to cry out. I struggled to count these hands, sure that they
couldn’t all belong to her – she had two, just two, and I’d seen them only
hours ago writing smooth lettering upon the whiteboard. They couldn’t be hers.
‘Stay still.’
I don’t know how long it lasted. It seemed like hours before
she peeled away from me, the innocuous odour of her perfume clinging to my
nostrils. With shadows pooling into her face, I couldn’t discern her expression,
but I felt her delicate hands settle upon me in the darkness, brushing me down
and buttoning my trousers as I lay there, a limp, broken marionette. I could
only squirm as she leant towards me, sinking her fingers into my hair and
pressing her lips to my ear.
‘No one will believe you.’
My
legs could barely hold me upright, let alone heave me from the store cupboard.
I had to lean against one of the tables, fingers clamped over the edge, whilst
my numb brain lathered, rinsed and repeated a memory that wouldn’t wash away.
The darkness had even spread to the classroom now, seeping through the windows
and turning everything to ash. It wasn’t real.
‘What are you doing here?’
A
cleaner stood by the classroom door, her wrinkled brow hunched into a scowl
that carried through to her dark, pouchy eyes. It’s possible that I murmured a
steady, quiet response to her question - ‘maths
work. Ms Thompson was helping me with maths work’ – but it’s equally
possible that I ignored her entirely, drifting past her stout form without a
backward glance. I don’t suppose I’ll ever remember.
By
the time I made it home, the sun had vanished, sinking secretively below the
horizon before I was ready for it to. I barely registered the warmth as I
stepped into the hallway, just as I hadn’t registered the volleys of rain
lurching from the sky as I wandered home. It wasn’t until my father spoke that
I took notice of anything.
‘Can’t you ever get home on time?’
Sometimes, when I’m lying awake with the darkness clawing at
me from the inside out, I wander to the door of my parents’ bedroom, a thousand
untold memories clotted in my throat. I get as close as I can to the door
without touching it; once, my fingertips almost brushed the doorknob. And then,
before my hand can grasp the handle with confidence, the darkness dives into
the deepest corners of my mind, yanking forth memories that I barely realised I
had: my mother cursing my silly
tears; my brother cackling over my ‘girlish’ worries; my father insisting that
I man up.
I
take a step back.
For
now, I keep my bedroom light on.
If I wasn't familiar with your style, though, I'd be expecting a maze of clichés, ambiguous description, and over-the-top imagery. There's also the fact that it sounds vague—almost like the narrator's unsure of herself, or she's trying to massage her thinking muscles. She loves the night and she doesn't know why. It lines up too well with the previous sentence: "It comes back to me in the night time." The vocabulary's simple, the phrases stripped bare of imagery, and the result's a black-and-white contrast to the following paragraphs. 
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