Writing to Save My Life! Literally!

This story finished first in its round at the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction contest . My Regeneration by Kevin Lenihan and Dena McKinnon Quickly now, children, into the pool! Hurry, the monsters can't swim. But we can't either! Hold onto the tube, it'll be ok. Gretchen, the oldest, was six. I wouldn't put it past her to somehow have picked up a bit of swimming somewhere. Clever girl. Poor dears, clinging in a circle around the inner tube. Such terrors, no child should have to deal with it. They all streamed tears but Gretchen. She studied my face with the intensity of a shrink. Clever girl. I pushed them out into the middle of the pool with the skimmer. What about you, Mommy? That was Billy, a year younger than Gretchen. Sweet Billy, always my favorite if I were to have one, but I don't play favorites. Mama will be ok , I told them. But the monsters?! Mama is changing, children. Mama is becoming somethi...

A deserted carnival, sense of something wrong, something terrible at the edge of her memory. And a quantum photo booth claiming the power to take pics one our into the past, or into the future. The race for her life began before the gun went off. Carnival at the End of the World

Written for broadcast. Narrator is a woman in her twenties. Distant sirens coming slowly closer. Standing in my nightgown, I look out from my third floor window onto the moon-shadowed street. I feel a sharp pinch on the skin of my ankle. My worst fears coming true. I'm a phlebotomist, filling vials of blood all day at the hospital. I don't like putting the needle into the arms of people who are afraid, especially kids, but the blood itself doesn't bother me. However, some things do freak me out: like the idea of being restrained, or having to work  with the mentally ill. And there is one more fear that plagues me, my deepest terror, but I can't bear to mention it. At the hospital, patients are sometimes restrained in the ER for their own good. It's terrible to watch them pull and thrash at the leather cuffs. Perhaps I have a bit of claustrophobia, I don't know, but this horrifies me. Maybe this phobia is also the reason the insane freak me out, becaus...