A collection of horror shorts.
SHOWER SCENE:
One rainy night, Wesley Bishop lounges alone, sipping a Jack and coke. Though his girlfriend is on her way, Wesley browses a dating app, fantasizing about women he's only seen in photos. He's unashamed, e...
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Maggie sat in the Campus Care waiting room, flipping through a pamphlet and biting her lip. It was quiet – she was the only patient in the room – and her nerves were making her restless. She peered around the dull room, making eye-contact with the receptionist she'd already attempted to make conversation with just minutes before.
The woman behind the desk caught her gaze with a look that said, "I don't have the energy to talk to you, hon," so she turned away quickly. Maggie knew that look. After almost 20 years of getting in trouble for talking in class, or being too loud indoors, or interrupting people, she learned to recognize it. And while she didn't always understand it – Maggie would talk to anyone who was willing to listen – she respected it.
Nobody who knew Maggie would describe her as shy. She could talk for hours, eloquently, on just about any subject that came her way. But there was one topic of discussion that Maggie didn't seem to have many words for, and that topic was sex.
That's why Maggie shifted in her seat in the waiting room, trying desperately to distract herself from the task at hand. Posters lined the walls – diagrams of fallopian tubes, types of birth control and their respective failure rates, illustrated stages of pregnancy trimesters.
Maggie's gaze rested on the last poster, the illustration of a fetus. What a nightmare, she thought to herself. The illustration itself made her feel ill.
Unlucky for Maggie, she'd had a pregnancy scare just a few weeks before. Although she'd never tell you about it, she recently had sex for the first time with a boy she was seeing casually. They met at a party, they shared a lot of laughs, he was cute, she was ready. They used a condom, and the sex was okay. She liked him, but not romantically. She wondered if she might be gay, which was another thing she'd never tell you.
But a few days later, her period was late. She panicked. She thought through every possibility obsessively. Possible lives flashed before her eyes as she walked to the drugstore for a pregnancy test:
Getting an abortion and enduring guilt and therapy for the rest of her life;
Bringing the baby to full-term and giving it up for adoption and enduring guilt and therapy for the rest of her life, and:
Bringing the baby to full-term and raising it as a single mother, forcing her to drop out of college and enduring guilt and therapy for the rest of her life.
Thankfully, in the dirty drugstore bathroom, three separate pregnancy tests came back negative.
But Maggie wasn't all bark and no bite. She was a young woman of action, and she would do anything to avoid any of those scenarios. That's what brought her here, to the Campus Care clinic. She was here to talk to Dr. Duvall, OBGYN, about birth control options.
And it was the first time she'd ever dreaded a conversation.
"Maggie?" a young nurse, probably a student, called out.
