Oct 25 • 🩸My Original Horror Content
The Things We Ignore
Below is a short story I finished to share with this group. I wanted to open with a heavy one, because often I think writing from the heart is the most powerful thing a writer can do. I have worked in Child Welfare for over a decade and have been an active Horror fan my entire life. I can 100 percent assure everyone that there exists no Horror more terrifying than human curlily. I get to see real monsters frequently. There are thankfully far more good people in the world than bad, even on days that seem so dark! This is to help get your minds turning about writing some of your own original work, but I also love to push my passion when I can. We all owe it to children to protect. We are all mandated reporters. I hope you enjoy my short story!
The Start:
My name is Mara, and I’ve worked in child welfare for eleven years. I used to believe the scariest part of the job was knocking on doors, never knowing what waited on the other side. I was wrong. The scariest part is realizing what harm we walk past because it isn’t in the manual.
This story starts with a “simple” case. A closed one.
Nine-year-old Liam had been removed from his mother after repeated neglect. I was his final caseworker before he was placed with his aunt. He was small for his age, quiet, flinched at sudden noise. But when he talked about the vents in his old apartment, his eyes sharpened with a fear I dismissed as imagination.
“Things crawl through there at night,” he had whispered during our last session. “They talk if you stop listening.”
thought it was trauma expressing itself in metaphor. Kids create monsters to understand the monsters they lived with. I nodded, documented, moved on.
Case closed.
Two months later, I got a call from the landlord:
“The family left belongings in Unit 6B. Can someone collect them?”
No one wanted to return. So I went.
The Middle: What We Overlook:
The apartment was dim and stale, like it had been holding its breath. Toys were gone, but a spiral notebook lay by the bedroom vent. I picked it up. Inside were drawings of the hallway outside that room, page after page, each drawing with a shadow growing closer.
My stomach went cold—not because of the drawings, but because the vent beneath my hand… felt warm. And something inside scratched softly, like small fingernails dragging across metal.
I should’ve left. I should’ve reported “possible animals.
”But child welfare trains you to check even the places we’d rather not."
I unscrewed the vent.
Inside was a tiny space padded with a blanket—like a hiding spot. Toys, juice boxes, and a second notebook. On the last page Liam had written:
“If you ignore it, it grows. If you pretend it’s not there, it gets stronger you have to see it. Or it never leaves.”
He wasn’t talking about a creature.
He had been talking about what he lived with.
The “thing in the vent”—the whisper, the growing shadow—was how he understood neglect, fear, hunger, yelling, sleepless nights. Kids don’t say “my emotional needs weren’t met.” They say, “A monster is in my room.” And I had ignored it.
The vent wasn’t haunted. The trauma was.
The Ending: The Lesson A Child Taught Me
I brought the notebook to his aunt’s home. Liam sat on the couch building a Lego tower, calmer now, fuller in the face. When he saw the notebook, he didn’t look afraid—just sad.
“You didn’t believe me,” he said gently. Not angry. Just stating a fact.
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t listen the way you needed.”
He thought about that, then nodded once. “It’s smaller now. It doesn’t follow me here. She sees me.”
His aunt put an arm around him. And I understood.
Children don’t need us to fear their monsters. They need us to see them.
Before leaving, Liam asked me:
“Will you help other kids see their monsters sooner?”
“I will,” I promised. This time, I meant it.
When I got to my car, I opened his notebook again and saw a final line:
“Monsters grow in the dark. Not when we talk about them. When adults look away.”
Moral of the Story:
Children often express trauma in ways adults mistake for fantasy, exaggeration, or misbehavior. When we dismiss, minimize, or ignore their words, we feed the very harm we are supposed to protect them from.
The lesson:
Listen to children the first time—even when what they say doesn’t make sense to you. Especially then.
Because sometimes the difference between a nightmare and survival is simply an adult willing to believe them long enough to look.
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The Things We Ignore
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