Eternal nightmares

It was a brand new day in Pinkwhistle. Halloween day, in fact.

Susie Snook yawned, stretched, got out of bed. It was strange, but she'd had the most awful nightmares. Several nightmares, in fact. Perhaps even hundreds of them!

And they hadn't been just any nightmares. They had been naked nightmares.

Susie was a naturally shy girl. The worst thing she could possibly imagine was to be caught in public with no clothes on, and have lots and lots of people all laughing at her. So, naturally, she often dreamt about things like accidentally coming to school with no pants on, or being chased nude through strange cities by evil clowns.

But the dreams she'd had last night had been a thousand times worse. It was like her subconscious mind had been fixated on making her live out her deepest, most excruciating fears of public humiliation in exquisite, life-like detail. And, for some reason, an evil carnival had been involved.

Oh, well. They were only dreams. The memories were already fading.

Time to get up!

Susie smiled, thinking about the day ahead of her. It was Halloween! A very special day, here in the idyllic American small town of Pinkwhistle. The leaves were falling, the air was getting crisp. And tonight would be a very special night.

Because a travelling carnival was coming to Pinkwhistle! Everyone would be there!

As she jogged through the streets of Pinkwhistle, whistling a merry tune, Susie was unaware of two things. The first was that every other woman in Pinkwhistle had also spent the night in the grip of an onslaught of deeply humiliating naked nightmares. The second was that she wasn't wearing any pants.

She never learnt the first thing. And she didn't learn the second until exactly three seconds after she burst in through the door of her morning math class, shouting "Sorry I'm late!"