Scary Writing Text 2021 Age 14-18
1st 14-18 yrs. YWA SCARY WRITING 2021 Chosen for surprise factor and clarity
Audrey Millard
Crow Middle/High School
Age 14
Limbo
I have lived here for 63 years. White faded house with a wraparound porch in the boondocks. What used to be a popular road, but now less traveled. I have loved and lost in this house. Had a family, but they are all gone. I don’t like change. I stayed. I spend most of my days on my porch, listening to the earth talk. Humming of the summer, the cold breeze fall brings, the bite of winter and the smell of spring.
In my youth I was wild and had seen some things. It was a Sunday afternoon, I sit there in my rocking chair; a little deer crossing the road from my apple tree to the creek across the road. Then tires gripping gravel, dust, crashing and ripping metal. Next comes the scream that makes each and every hair stand up, and seems like it took hours, but it was only maybe a minute. With my adrenaline pumping I ran to the crash. The girl who was in the crashed car ran right into me. She was sobbing from fear. Calmingly I asked her name.
“Arie,” she said.
We stumbled back to the house, setting her in my chair. She was fine, nothing was broken. “You are a lucky girl,” I said. “My name is Victor and someone should be here soon to help you.” I was still shaking. This old body can’t take this.
Shortly the ambulance came. We walked down toward them. I was waving them up, but I guess they didn’t see me. As we got to them I heard the driver say, “We’re too late. She’s already passed.”
I looked at the girl, and she looked at me.
“Where are we?” she said….
2nd-tie 14-18 yrs. YWA SCARY WRITING 2021 Chosen for nightmarish creepiness and originality.
Ronan Hall
Cottage Grove High School
Age 14
The Hour Glass
You are in a hospital room. Nurses move around tending the patients. You tilt your head, following the tubes from your arm up to where the monitor should be.
Instead, the tubes feed into the bottom of a large hourglass with your name written across it. There is several times as much sand left in the top as is in the bottom. You sigh with relief; you have plenty of time. You know the hourglass isn’t normally there, but you are not surprised.
Returning your eyes to the scene in front of you, you are startled by a small bald child in a hospital gown leaning over the end of your bed. Is she a chemotherapy patient? In an instant her appearance changes – blood drips from her nose and sunken eyes, her skin turns ashen and hangs off her bones – then she is back, perfect as before.
She moves around the side of your bed: regal, cold. She smiles and traces the tubes with her fingers to where they plug into the hourglass. She begins to pull on the tubes.
NO! If you lose those, you won’t survive.
“Please don’t do that,” you say. Maybe she doesn’t understand.
Still smiling, she jerks the tubes free.
“NO!” you scream, reaching frantically, desperate to replace your lifelines.
Serenely, the child takes the hourglass and begins to leave.
“No. Stop! I still have time!” you shout after her.
She turns and grins. “But it belongs to me now.”
The girl vanishes. Was she ever there?
Your hourglass. That is gone.
“Wait!” you call falteringly. “I still have so much time.” But you know that it is hopeless; there is no heartbeat left.
2nd –tie 14-18 yrs. YWA SCARY WRITING 2021 Chosen for the haunting, poignant quality.
Shaylee Yeates, age 14
Crow Middle/High School
Age 14
The Nightmare.
Sunlight caressed his misshapen face, though he did not feel its warmth. The light no longer entered his consciousness through closed lids; his eyes had not opened since the sun had passed from his life, his only love.
In his mind he had wept from the time the death had been announced, but here in the world of mortals he slumped silently in a great high backed chair. To all who passed him in the deeply corroded streets of the cobblestone square he sat as a statue; the dust had been swept around him so in appearance, the man seemed cracked, his skin bursting with sharp edges.
And of this, the man was unaware, for at this time he could see only black. The pure darkness that frightened him so that he wished he could cry out and hide within himself, for along with this carbon black stood the dark cloak of Death. Death stood snidely over the man, greeting him with a simple nod of his angular head; his lips were drawing back over his pointed teeth, ragged white saliva stringing inside his mouth. No sound came from him, but the deep ticking of a clock, the noise so unbearable with its deep throbbing boom and the chime of the much-feared midnight; for at the sound of the last chime the cracked man joined his lover in death.
And in this deep abyss of death stood the pale form of his lost love; her eyes foggy and white as the thin rags she was swathed in. And try as he might, the man could not embrace her, nor did she acknowledge him. For Death was not kind, and did not allow one who did not live in life, to live in death.
3rd. 14-18 yrs. YWA SCARY WRITING 2021 Chosen for plot quality.
Erin M. Sackett
Crow Middle/High School.
Age 16
House of Felidae
Long ago, the daughter of a fisherman married a stranger. She was a good, if ugly woman, Telescope, Heath, and Aurora all had decided. No matter how small the day’s catch had been, she always found a bit of fish for each of the felines. But the girl was not attractive. Her hands and womb were barren from a harsh diet. The only thing attractive, Telescope pointed out, was her dowry.
The three cats swiftly learned the man wasn’t worth his fish. Not once since the strange man had come had they been given a single meal. When his wife was home, he beat her relentlessly. Only the fish and the cats were there to see the color on her face each day. Worse was when she was at sea – with no one to beat up, the man turned to the cats for fun. They were kicked, bruised, and starved.
The cats waited. Inebriated, the man returned home. As he made his way to the icebox, his foot connected with something – and down the drunken man went. With a cry, his skull cracked, releasing blood into the air. Coldly, bony Aurora slipped from in front of the man’s foot, and joined her fellows beside their kill. Impassively, they watched as the man’s life fled his body. At first, he swore, hands grasping. But bit-by-bit, his cries slowed.
Only when the man’s ragged breathing stopped did they move. Heath slunk to the dead man’s features and paused. Sightless eyes gazed back into his. And for a moment, those eyes seemed extraordinarily akin to those of a fish. With a nod from the big tom, the others advanced.
When the girl returned with her daily catch, rank and tired, she arrived to find her abuser gone, and her cats’ coats fat and glossy once more.