Suspenseful Seven-Sentence Sunday -- No End in Sight

Sometimes what prompts me to start writing a story is nothing more than an image, which ultimately finds itself somewhere in the middle of my work. My novel-in-progress began with one such image -- that of a dog finding something disgusting in some shrubbery near a country cottage:

She backs out of the low shrubs and turns toward me, her tail wagging proudly. Hanging from her mouth is half of an arm, from about mid-forearm down.

At one end, there’s a claw-like hand; at the other end, a blood-encrusted stump. Cookie approaches me until I tell her to stop. “Oh, Christ! Cookie, drop it!” She’s ready to listen, and deposits her prized possession ten feet away from me. She can sense I’m not as excited about her discovery as she is, and looks askance as a maggot crawls across her quizzical face.

My novel has been in progress for over a year now. I have about 50 more pages to achieve what I think is a reasonable length for my first draft, and I'll confess that I'm not sure yet how it ends. At this point, I'm in as much suspense as you are.

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Suspenseful Seven-Sentence Sunday -- That Helpless Feeling

A few days ago, I came closer to death than I'm ready to. I was in my car, my son in the passenger seat beside me, pulling up to a quiet intersection. Ahead of us, to the left, two cars collided, each going about 45 mph. One of them had run a red light. I don't know which. One of the cars was sent airborne. It landed on the right-hand side of a car several car-lengths ahead of me to the left, then proceeded on two wheels toward me, finally coming to a rest about ten feet away. While this was happening, my son and I were basically frozen in time. I watched the events unfold as if my windshield was a movie screen. There was nowhere I could have gone, nothing I could have done to avoid obliteration if that's what was to be my fate. Mercifully, I'm still here, as are all of the inhabitants of the vehicles involved. Stunning.

This reminded me of a police officer in my story "Administrative Leave" (Ellery Queen, Sept./Oct. 2010). He is at home after an officer-involved shooting in which he killed a young man. As he stares out his bedroom window, a strange man standing in his backyard stares back. Feeling trapped and frozen, the police officer watches the events unfold.

He pulls a cell phone from his left pocket. His right hand stays hidden. He punches the keys with his thumb, never taking his eyes off me. The phone on the table on Lorraine’s side of the bed rings. My head snaps instinctively at the sound. I turn back to the man and he smiles. He knows he’s got the right number.

I hope your week ahead provides you with plenty of options to take charge of your destiny.

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Suspenseful Seven-Sentence Sunday

I was supposed to post this on Sunday, following the rules of "Suspenseful Seven Sentence Sunday" bloggers. I was, however, in the throes of a screenwriting competition. I did very well in the first two rounds of the contest, writing two scripts of which I'm quite proud...and then came the brick wall I faced yesterday. My brain seemed stuck in cement, and I couldn't come up with anything I felt satisfactorily complied with the required elements of my script: a tugboat (location) and an X-ray machine (object). The genre was up to me to determine. Let there be no suspense about the results of the script I submitted within minutes of last night's deadline. It's a complete dud. I laughed myself to sleep...had to, otherwise I'd have cried myself to sleep. Soggy pillows aren't much fun.

So, while I'm not optimistic about advancing to the final round in that competition, I am hopeful of finding a home for a short story I recently completed. It's based on a few real-life incidents, one of which has haunted me for years. In the late '70s, a middle-aged science teacher at my high school killed himself by laying down on the railroad tracks one morning. He'd been the kind of teacher that high school students would have perceived as weak; as a result, his students disrespected him, misbehaving in all sorts of outrageous ways. How much his work situation drove him to end his days is unknown to me, and I have no knowledge of his home life. (I'm glad to say that I was never a student of that man, but must confess that I'm not completely innocent of having tormented some other teachers in the ignorance of my youth.) I've long wondered about how some of those misbehaving students handled their teacher's suicide. I wonder if they think about him years later, and now, in middle age themselves, are ashamed of the people they were when they were teenagers.

In my fictional story, one of the students from that science teacher's class is now a police officer, a few years away from retirement. One night, he encounters a young man intent on suicide by cop. Here are seven sentences from that story:

Tyler made a U-turn and stopped parallel to our vehicle. As he passed, he held up a little something for show and tell: a Smith & Wesson. He had one hand on the wheel. The other hand pointed the pistol at his own head. He gave me a look like somehow in his eighteen-odd years of life he’d managed to acquire more wisdom than me, like I was a stupid old man who didn’t know a thing. I recognized the expression. There was a time when I felt exactly the same way about people my age, and the memory of that only made me angry.

I'll let you know if the story finds a home in print soon.

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