Over the past five months I’ve been writing a short-short story everyday on this blog. Today however is the end of the line. I’ve been writing this blog as a place to test some of ideas about what makes and what doesn’t make a site suck.  There are some good features on this blog and some not so good features. There’s a continuous theme of somebody admitting they are the real individual behind this blog which might be interesting or annoying depending on your tolerance for ambiguity and this is followed by a different kind of story everyday. That’s the overall concept of the blog but there are few visuals and the layout is quite simple. But what do you think? In the next six days, I’m going to ask you to provide any feedback you might have in the comment section below. The person providing the best feedback for the blog will be mailed a collection of short-short stories, Fast Fictions. It usually goes for 10 bucks so this is a nifty little offer. 

  And here’s today’s short-short story…

 


 

Killing Someone is Harder than You Think

 

   Wednesday evening, in the kitchen, she teaspoons out two helpings of the poison into his glass of water. Upstairs the toilet flushes and she quickly stirs the crystals until they dissolve into an apparent absence. After this she tosses the spoon into the sink where it clanks a couple times but she thinks better and picks it up to rinse it under hot water.

   “Deep cleaning the spoon?” he yawns as he passes to pick up his glass of water.

    “You can never be to sure,” she smiles but he’s not listening to her. He’s sleep walking his well-worn path to bed. In the morning he needs to get a head start on his marketing strategy for the Flecher account but all that work is safely stowed away at the back of his mind. He can’t afford to think about anything right now. 

    In the bedroom he places the glass of water on the nightstand, folds his clothes into a neat pile – next to Thursday’s pile – and slips into bed without messing up the sheets. He breathes in through his nostrils and breathes out through his mouth. He falls asleep.

    In the middle of the night, however, he wakes up to a lopsided duvet. She’s been having a fitful night of anxiety and half-nightmares and the sheets have rippled out waves of worry. He gets up to go to the toilet and when he gets back into bed he gives the sheets a shake but the edge of the duvet knocks over his untouched glass of water which falls onto the alarm-radio knocking some of its transistors out of commission. What he notices is that Thursday’s pile of clothes is soaked. The digital time display reads 4:22. He’ll clean it up in the morning.

    But in the morning, the alarm fails to go and he sleeps in until nine. He arrives late for work with no ideas and loses the account. At twelve o’clock he punches the bathroom wall but in the mirror he can’t believe his pose. Who cares? something inside him whispers and his organized mind reshuffles all the days and weeks and years that have led to this juvenile outburst. For twelve years he’s been working too hard. On his lunch break he goes home to burst into her afternoon routine. What was she worried about that led to such a horrible sleep?  He swings open the front door to surprise her with a bouquet of flame-tipped lilies and roses but she’s on a ladder in the foyer changing a bulb on the chandelier. The door knocks over the ladder and her head lands on the edge of a table. 

   At her funeral, he cries that it was one of her unknown, late-night fears that brought him back to life.