Monday, December 6, 2010

Flash fiction

As promised, here's the flash fiction story I wrote for the Crime Bake contest this year. The assignment was to use 10 of the following 20 words from Charlaine Harris' titles:

Bedroom, Bone, Club, Corpse, Counselor, Dark, Dead, Family, Fool, Grave, Heels, Ice, Landlord, Living, Pick, Scene, Secret, Surprise, Trollop, Worse
.

I used all 20. Enjoy!

A Fool's Grave

His grave still smells of the dead. The family gathers around it. The corpse, my landlord and occasional patient, Pete Hellas, won't give up the secret now. He was a stingy, slovenly, diabetic fool. His stupid son, Spiro, and his trollop of a wife are even worse. The dark-haired son I wouldn't dare pick a fight with. The daughter? President of the Bonehead Club. A pitiful bunch.

I slip away from the scene, careful of my heels on the new ice. They'll be surprised when Counselor Adams reads my name in the will. Seducing Pete in his bedroom and persuading him to leave me the apartment building was worth touching his disgusting body. I'm done working as an underpaid nurse. I'll evict the family and the renters, condo-ize the units, and sell off all but mine. So I gave him a little extra insulin. It's my turn for living.

14 comments:

  1. Excellent, Edith! In a scary kind of way....;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow, I'll bet it was hard to get all those required words into such a short piece! It reads so well, too--great job!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks, Ramona and Kaye. Yes, hard, and fun!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nicely done, Edith! I like how you turned & twisted the story so that we find out that it was murder just at the end.

    Congrats!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Excellent. It takes a special knack to work in all the words and still end up with a good story.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks Alyx and Linda. It was a lot of fun writing it, even if I didn't win the contest.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh Edie, that was great. You are so clever with words. What a talent.

    Barbie

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hey, Barbie, thanks! Glad you liked it.

    ReplyDelete
  9. You should be ashamed of yourself. A nurse would never do such a thing. It is against our Nightengale oath.

    ReplyDelete
  10. It's fiction, June. Also, nurses have been convicted of killing patients. This happens in the real world.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Nursing Assistants, LPN's and imposters. Not RN's. Any diabetic who gets an insulin shot from a nurse will be thinking about your story if they have read it. I hope they don't.

    ReplyDelete
  12. June, if you don't want to read murder fiction, you don't have to. Fiction serves a purpose in the world.

    ReplyDelete
  13. June, no doubt you are an extremely competent and caring nurse who would, of course, never harm your patients.

    However, murder of patients by registered nurses has indeed happened in real life. Just google "registered nurse murder". In particular, I refer you to this article:

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-172X.2010.01845.x/full

    Field J, Pearson A. International Journal of Nursing Practice 2010; 16: 301–309 Caring to death: The murder of patients by nurses

    ReplyDelete
  14. I was empaneled for the trial of the registered vocational nurse who killed 17 people in Nocona, TX. I didn't get picked for the jury and she settled before the trial anyway, but she sure killed 'em! Then there's Charles Cullen, Rachel Baker. Not Nightingales, these nurses!

    ReplyDelete