Creative writing club prompt: Write a story about a character who is getting overwhelmed with emotion and how you want to portray that. Timed, 30 minute limit.
notes: Lindsey McClade is the jaded, washed-up former precocious teen detective protagonist of "No Easy Way to Say This", which right now only exists as a few visuals, names, themes, and this scene.
She hits the ground. Hard. Curls up into herself on instinct, some ancient dull-eyed ancestor whispering that if she gets small enough the pain will go away. But all it does is surge through her, a signal carried by bundles of traitorous nerves that don’t seem to understand that she was better off before this particular message got delivered. “I did warn you, Lindsey.” Darren crouches down next to her, hands in the pockets of his garish sweat-stained varsity jacket, stolen from his older sister when she got a full ride to Georgetown and a top spot on their soccer team. His hair, obnoxiously over-styled and underwashed, blots out the glare from the light behind him, and she manages to open her eyes. “You think you’re untouchable because of some grade-school bullshit? Think you can say whatever you want to say and there won’t be any consequences? Think again, you stupid bi-” The only warning before the metal cuts through his neck–cuts maybe isn’t the right word, since it implies a kind of cleanliness and a neat edge, and this is more like jamming a pencil into an eraser while Ms. Jacobs scrawls out the quadratic formula–is a faint hiss. And then Darren’s coughing up blood, blood with little chunks of flesh in it, his eyes wide and bulging out of his split skull. His body doesn’t slump to the ground, no, it’s held up by the other end of the metal driving itself deep into the alley asphalt behind him. Jutting out from his neck hangs that red hexagon like a smarmy little umbrella. STOP. Lindsey spits, grunts, and pushes herself up off the ground, leaning on the stop sign for support. Staggers out of the alleyway, out towards a road where drivers react with squealing tires to a sudden change in the traffic pattern. Mutters to the puddle of blood she’s leaving behind: “I fucking warned you too, Darren.”
