Your young niece is staying over when you notice she keeps all the lights on in the spare bedroom she is sleeping in. When asked if she is afraid of the dark, she says, "No. I'm afraid of what is IN the dark."
Your move, writer.
There's a sturdy comfort in taking her literally rather than reassuring her out of it, and that's one direction worth chasing — the two of you doing a slow, deadpan inventory of the room, narrating what's actually there under the bed and behind the curtain until the dark loses its mystery through sheer specificity. Another angle plays it as gentle comedy, the kind where you end up leaving every light in the house on too and pretending it was your idea all along, because admitting a grown adult also finds the hallway a little sinister at 2 a.m. is its own kind of bonding. Or go quieter and sit with what she actually means — kids sometimes name a fear precisely because they've been paying closer attention to the world than we have, and the story lives in you taking that seriously instead of correcting it.
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