“Is he going to be alright?”
Linda McDonald stands outside of an operation room with tears in her eyes,
“Ma’am, I can’t say for sure, you’ll have to ask the doctor…” Carlos Case one of the new, part time nurses, answers. He knows that this procedure is risky, and that it’s possible that the little boy might not make it out, but he doesn’t want to be the bearer of bad news.
So instead he stands there awkwardly while Linda cries for her little boy.



Henry wants to leave. He’s been sitting in this large white room for too long. The bright lights were beginning to hurt his eyes, and the shiny objects all around weren’t helping.
“Are you thirsty?” someone asks him, but he hardly hears the question. He is focusing on the creatures face. Its mouth was a screaming blue color that hurt Henry’s eyes, and its head was the same color. For eyes the strange thing had shiny circles. It scared Henry. He wanted the monster to leave.
Monster.

Now Henry was panicking. He shouldn’t have thought that word! He didn’t mean too! He tried desperately to pull it back into his mind but it was too late. The word was gone.




Alicia Payne was going crazy. That must be it. That HAD to be it, because there was no way in the world that what she was seeing was real.

She looked down from her second story window and shook her head, trying to clear her head, but it just wouldn’t go away.

On the side walk across from her apartment, sat something that Alicia could only describe as a monster. It was green with scales and claws and razor sharp teeth, and one single eye in the middle of its head.

Alicia wasn’t sure how long she watched it for, but she finally came to the conclusion that her crazy artistic neighbors had gotten bored, and created a sculpture.

“Stupid artist,” she mumbled, quickly closing her blinds, because she could have sworn, it looked straight at her.




Screaming erupts in Henry’s ears, and he tries to block it out. He covers his ears with his hands, and looks around at the strange people around him, wondering why they weren’t covering their ears too.

Finally the screams get to be too much, and Henry closes his eyes and begins to scream with them. He isn’t sure who it is that’s screaming, because it changes every time. All he knows is that he wants it to stop.



“Henry! Henry!” Linda McDonald bands on the window that shows a full view of the horrific scene going on before her.
“Ms. McDonald, please! Restrain yourself!” someone cries. Linda does not. She pounds on the glass, trying to break it, trying to get to her screaming son.



Henry is floating. This is what usually happens after the screams start. He’d over heard his mother say before that he was “passed out” but he wasn’t exactly sure what that meant.
But now Henry was okay. The screams stopped and he knew what was going to happen next. Soon his mom would be there, with a blanket and ice cream, and everything would be okay.
But his mom didn’t come.
The screams do though, and suddenly he’s falling. He falls and falls and falls, while the screams grow louder in his head. He begs them to stop, but they don’t.
And then he begins to cry. He sobs and screams as he falls, ever closer to reality.
And then it stops. Suddenly he’s back in the big white room, and his mom is there. She’s screaming too. Henry realizes that something is wrong. He can see everything, even himself. There’s his body, lying on a cot, still screaming.
Still screaming.
And then he’s back in his body, but he’s not screaming anymore. Words fly around him as the strange creatures begin to talk.
“He’s okay…”
“Don’t know what happened…”
“That scream man…”
Now Henry is tired. He wants his mom, and ice cream. He really wants ice cream. But he’s so tired.
So he closes his eyes. His mom told him before that if he was tired to close his eyes and count to ten.
One.
Two.
Three. Four.
Five.
Six.
Seven. Eight.
Nine.
Ten.



Linda stops banging on the window. Linda stops screaming. She stares down at her son lying on the hospital bed and feels a weight being lifted off of her shoulders.
“He’s gone,” she whispers, right as the monitors go flat.
The doctors rush to Henry and try to bring him back, but Linda knows that it’s no use.
The little boy is gone.