Sunday, January 17, 2016

Janet Flash: A New Life

by Michael Seese

I didn't get a chance to submit anything to Cracked Flash this week. I had to wrap up a submission for MASH Stories on Friday. Then Saturday, I worked on my latest Janet Reid piece. This week, we had to use the words.

The words we had to work with were:

Scat  
Bob
Diddy   
Cool
Snap


I did something different. Knowing that "diddy" would be tough -- but that the rules allow us to divide the letters consecutively across words -- I came up with the sentence for that. (It's tough... you'll have to look for it.) Then for some reason my mind changed "snap" to "snag." So I built a sentence on that word. (When I realized my error, I was able to alter the sentence to make it work.) With the idea for the story in mind, I wrote the other three sentences and connected them. 

Naturally, the result was too long by about 50 words. So I had to cut an entire paragraph that I loved. Oh well.  I think it still works.

Below is "A New Life."

After a year, they'd given up hope. The search went from methodical to scattershot to cold case. Then one day Crazy Jake snapped his rod while fishing in Lake Bobbitt.

It made the national news.

At the funeral my parents cried like nothing I'd ever seen. Not counting my father's tears of remorse after yet another of his unspeakable acts.

I know.

I was there.

I'd gotten her passed-out drunk. Before the body had cooled, I put her in my favorite sweatshirt. And I'd dyed her hair to match mine.

Once they buried that hitchhiker girl, I was finally free.


Please share your thoughts. 

 

2 comments:

  1. Took me a bit, but I found it.

    And I'd dyed

    Good story!

    ReplyDelete