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.