The Circle

She knew it

Was up to her. It was like belling the cat - her idea, her responsibility. Before any of the others could stop her, she got a safety pin out of her purse and jabbed it into the index finger of her left hand.
She rolled the point of the pin in the droplet of blood, then tried to draw an X across the bottom of the page she'd been reading from. The point of the pin just wouldn't hold enough. Finally she just wiped her finger across it, and then did the same thing in the last two pages.
"Now," she said. "What do I write?"
They all sat and looked at each other while the ghost wind shrieked at them.
"How about, 'Everything returned to normal,'" guy said.
"What's normal?" Brian asked.
"He's got a point," Walter admitted. "We may need to be more specific."
"No too specific," Lesley said. "I've only got so much blood."
No one laughed.
"Okay," Walter said. "Does anybody know what time Lesley started reading?"
"I checked," Lesley said. "It was 11:18."
"All right. How about, 'Everything returned to the way it had been at 11:18 that night?"
There were nods all around. "Go for it," Guy said.
This time Lesley had to use the pin. It was slow going, but she finally got the words scrawled across the bottom of the page.
The wind continued to scream.
"Read it," Walter said.
Lesley's hands were shaking. Come on, she told herself, you didn't lose that much blood. But she knew it wasn't that. What if she read it and it didn't work? She couldn't stand that horrible, shrill noise much longer.
From the back of her mind a grim thought began to nag at her. What were the gruesome things the story said happened to them?
Let it work, she prayed. Let everything be the way it had been. Just exactly the way it had been.
"'Everything,'" she read, her shaking voice barely topping the roar of the wind, '" returned to the way it had been at 11:18 that night.'"