Which is Scarier: President Trump or a Creepy Clown?

While reality has been scary enough recently: I just learned that Trump is an anti-vaxxer, which is more disturbing than the racism, the sexism, the "grab them by the pussy" and the "nasty woman" and the "Mexican rapists" because it indicates outright ignorance and poses a far greater threat to our country then generally gauche and classless behavior-- the possible resurgence of plagues and epidemics . . . but despite the combined looming threat of President Trump and killer clowns,  the English teachers still got together last night for our Seventh Annual Scary Story Contest, and I think we are actually getting better and better at writing these things (which would make sense) as all of this year's stories were terrifying and consistently well-written; the prompt was "The Cellar" and the stories were various in plot and theme: giant worms, uxoricide (by use of giant worms), a changeling baby with a man-sized nose, a Nazi surgeon/wine connoisseur, a grand Gatsby-esque gala, a haunted house and a complicit landlord, an indigenous tribal ghost payback, and much suffering by children, who were drained, dragged to hell, possibility molested, shoved into an oven and a dryer, burned in fires and generally tortured and neglected; Stacey and I took second, which made us quite proud-- it was a tough field-- and Liz K, always the bridesmaid and never the bride, finally took first place . . . Stacey and I were also pleased that for the second year in a row, our story was deemed the most horrific, and we now know that our combined voice is the only one that is easily identifiable: Cunningham described it as "sort of fucked up and funny."