WRiTE CLUB 2013 Play-offs Round Two - Bout #4

Continuing on with the second round of the WRiTE CLUB play-offs, our ten contestants will be battling it out with a brand new writing sample.  The bouts will be posted on Mon - Tue - Wed - Thur - Sat, but the voting will remain open for all bouts until Sunday at noon.  Today we have Bout #4.

Once again...every vote counts. The contestant who doesn't win their bout...but garners the most votes amongst all of the other losers...will become a wildcard winner and advance to round 3.  

Whether you've been following along from the beginning or this is your first time here...no matter...it's just a matter of choosing the one you feel deserves to move forward. Please offer some critique if you have time.  Anyone reading this can vote (after signing up on this LinkyList) so blog/tweet/facebook/text/smoke signal everyone you know and get them to take part in the fun. 

 
And now...stepping into the ring with a brand new story to tell...here is Muleshoe.

On the third day, God said: Now you just stay there and think about what you did.

So Elim stood where they'd tied his hands to the posts of the main street promenade, leaning into the dwindling shade as the sun climbed higher.  The rest of the dust-choked street was long since deserted.

Which left just Elim, standing spread-armed between the beams, struggling to keep his aching head shaded and his sluggish thoughts pious as his bare back and shoulders roasted in the sun.

That was a tall order.

It was powerfully difficult to let his eyes rest on the beautiful covered walkway without thinking of the people it had been built for.  The raised wooden walk had kept their genteel boots out of the mud; the open sloping roof had guarded their reverend heads from the rude heat of the day.

They would have been fine, decent folks.  They wouldn't have left even a bastard like Elim strung up like this.  But they had long since passed on to their reward, and left him at the mercy of their brutal heirs.

He was close, though – so close his sweat dripped onto the weathered gray planks.  If he could just get past the pain in his arms and the breathtaking tightness in his chest and lean in far enough to get his head into that heavenly shaded space – just for even a minute – he would surely breathe in some of their deathless grace, and understand how to atone for himself.

That kept him busy enough not to notice the slow, rhythmic thud of hooves behind him.

Still, he couldn't miss the enormous brown face that hung itself over his shoulder.  There beside him was Molly Boone: unbridled, unsaddled, and apparently having liberated herself from the corral.  Elim’s mouth cracked in a smile.

"Miz Boone," he declared in a parched whisper, "you are a brazen hussy.  Is this you flauntin' yourself around town without your bonnet on?"  He closed his eyes as her hairy lips anointed his face with a streak of oaty slobbers.  "And dolin' out your affections to any man in the street, I see.  Ain't you 'shamed?"

No, not hardly.  Shame was for people – for creatures who could sort right things from wrong ones, and hold themselves accountable for the difference.

Elim breathed in her warm-barn smell, and steadied his resolve.  "Don't listen to any of what they said about me, now.  You know I ain't like that."

He had to get himself sure on that too.  Back home, he could have said it for a certifiable fact: he did not and never had hurt anyone.

Here, though...

Elim glanced down the empty street, past the adobe walls shimmering in the heat and the tilting burnt-out church steeple, to the black-iron manor at the end of the road. 

Maybe this place had changed him into a murderer.  Elim couldn't have said whether it had that power.  But it certainly was fixing to change him into a dead man. 

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And with their own brand new piece of writing, welcome back to the ring....Emma T. Nestor.






"So, Drum, you said Dr. Flanagan and Dr. Digby were scared when the car approached. How could you tell that from where you were hiding?"

Drum, head pounding, filtered out the crime scene and focused on Detective Ajax Philemon, who sat next to him on the curb. He stared, really seeing the policeman for the first time. Hey, this guy’s not all bound up … and there’s no goop leaking out of him. He’s not a binder or a leaker—he’s … continent! Maybe I can tell him what I really saw —

Drum started to open his mouth, but stopped. He’s not going to believe me. Continent or not, he’s still a cop.

"How did I know they were scared? I—I just knew.”

Drummond Witherspoon had a secret. He could “see” the emotional state of the people around him. He called them leakers and binders. The leakers were annoying, with garishly-colored trails of emotional goo; Drum’s middle school was an overwhelming swamp of the viscous stuff.

The binders were dangerous. They appeared to be wrapped in transparent cables that could snap and swing off; hurting anyone who got too close. Most binders were okay until their cables started groaning, but some of them, like his foster mother, were so tightly wound that it was never safe to be around them.

The detective continued. "Did you see the shooter or anyone else in the car?"

Drum’s mind shrieked, his stomach churned. I “saw” fear as soon as the car came into the parking lot—whoever or whatever was in that car made Dr. Flanagan and Dr. Digby leak like crazy, and it was that awful sick greenish color that comes before screaming—only they never made it to screaming. What was in that car was bad, so bad; worse than bullets... and I could not see it. The memory made him sweat.

He said, "No. The windows were tinted.”

"Okay, tell me about the car. Did you see the license plates?"

"I don’t remember the license number. I think the car was dark blue."

"And you didn't happen to see a logo or a name, like ‘Ford’?"

"No, the sun was going down. It did have a round thing on the front."

Detective Philemon swiped at his phone with his finger. He showed Drum the screen. "Is this it?"

"No. It wasn’t sticking up off the hood like that." My head hurts. I’m going to be sick.

The detective swiped at the phone again. "How about this one?"

"Yeah, that’s it." I have to lie down. I can’t talk anymore.

"So it’s a BMW. What did it sound like?"

"It thrummed … like it could go fast.” But it didn’t go fast. It just rolled out of the parking lot, leaving me alone with two dead people.

Drum’s vision tunneled and his ears rang. He slumped forward on the curb and slid out of consciousness as Detective Philemon caught him and yelled for the paramedics.
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Remember the WRiTE CLUB motto, it’s not about the last man/woman standing, it’s about who knocks the audience out!