31 Days of Writing: 5 Things That Scare Me

I stumbled upon some creative writing prompts and really like this one:

Make a list of five things you're afraid of happening to you. 

There are a lot of things that I'm afraid of, but most of them are pretty standard. Here is a list of my top irrational fears.

1. Getting my toes snipped off by super-sharp hedge trimmers.

2. The end of the world a la Seeking a Friend at the End of the World or even worse,  The Road. I'm super frightened of what normal, relatively good people might do if confronted with the end of times.

3. I still think about the juvenile scary story/urban legend People Can Lick, Too.  Like every night before I go to sleep. At the age of 29, I still can't dangle my hand off the edge of my bed because of a stupid story I heard at sleep away camp in 6th grade. I don't even own a dog.

Art by Drinkdecaf 

4. I've always been afraid of my belly button getting infected. So afraid, in fact, that I've googled infected belly buttons. I'm going to advise against that, folks. I'm probably on some sort government of list now.

5. When I was eight or nine, I was sitting at the dining room table working on homework while my parents watched 60 minutes. There was a segment on a man who had hit someone while driving his car and drug the person for something like 16 blocks. His defense was that he didn't know he had hit the victim and didn't realize that someone was attached to his vehicle. I never knew something like that could happen. Ever since then, I have been terrified of hitting someone and not knowing. At certain points in my life, I have been so overly concerned with this notion that I would park my car and get out to check for bodies under my vehicle.


My head is a weird place. My hope is to spin one or more of these fears into a short story at another time in the month.