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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