Image: Pixabay
You started it.
‘They need to take us seriously,’ you said, backside hanging out of your jeans, blade tucked in your boot, eyes frantic like every other teenage hood on the estate.
Roll on a few years and you’d picked up your own Baikal. ‘You gotta be tooled up if you’re bossman.’
You run a gang of kids, all desperate – those same wild eyes. Your own are harder now, always glancing behind.
Now police tape flaps about, above you, your blood blackens the pavement – gun still wedged in your back pocket.
They finished it.
Written for Nortina’s Moral Mondays. See the moral – this week it’s Finish What You Started – and write a 100 words or fewer. See here for Ts and Cs.
Word Shamble 
Brilliant how you bracketed the story with the moral – fab work, Lynn! As usual 🙂
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Thanks Sonya. Took me a little tweaking, but was pleased with the outcome in the end. 🙂
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Chilling! And I agree with Sonya, I love the wordplay. I see kids like this sometimes, pants hanging off their, not in school, I just want to shake some sense into them. This is usually the result.
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Sadly, yes. It must be so easy to be drawn into that life, if you feel you have no prospects and your peers are drawing you in too. A sad way to spend a short life. Thanks for reading, Jenn 🙂
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I’m new to your blog- Love the flash fiction! It’s very cool that you have set writing prompts for different days and themes.
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Thank you and welcome to Word Shamble. Yes, I’ve fallen into a very lovely habit of taking part in the same prompts each week – it’s meant I’ve met a lovely community of fellow scribblers and even improved my fiction too – I think 🙂 Thanks for reading and for you comments
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Reminds me of the Elvis Presley song In the Ghetto. When it was in the charts all those years back, the imagery it created seemed so foreign – so unlike anything which could ever happen in the UK…
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Yep. How times change. I remember that song clearly, though it wasn’t my inspiration here. An urban tragedy that happenes somewhere every day
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Sometimes I muse over whether it has something to do with that mystical balance, the Yin-yang. For everything there must be an equal opposite black an white equally balanced; the greater the love and compassion on one side, the greater the hate and cruelty on the other.
Ok, so maybe I’m just making excuses…
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Humans are truly capable of greatness and great horror. The weirdest species ever.
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To be fair, female black widow spiders have some weird – some would go as far as to say offensive – habits, and then there are all those Flanimals (catalogued by Ricky Gervais in his fascinating and informative book of the same name. Som of them are even weirder than humans, though not so complex 🙂
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I loved Flanimals – truly odd and funny. And you’re right, there are many instance of odd and awful animal behaviour, though they have the excuse of living on instinct and being unaware of their oddness. We can’t use that excuse 🙂
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Maybe our oddness, while causing the deaths of millions, also ensures our survival – nope, that’s not right. It’s odd to continue to rape and poison the planet, and that’s certainly not improving our chances of long-term survival. I don’t get it. Maybe we have an inbuilt whatchamacallit – you know, the fault which ensures that your washing machine breaks down the week after the guarantee runs out – why can I never remember that word?
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Can’t think of it either, though I know what you mean. The way things are going, I definitely think the world would be better off without us. Cherful thought to start a Saturday 🙂
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Saturday shmatterday – I didn’t even know it was the weekend until my neighbour, John, told me. This is our routine Saturday conversation:
John: Hello Jane. I worry about you. Are you alright?
M: Hello John. I’m fine thanks. No need to worry about me.
John: I do. I do worry about you Jane. It’s Saturday today.
Me: Is it?
John: Yes. Are you glad it’s Saturday Jane?
Me: Umm…
John:Jane, Are you glad it’s Saturday?
Me: Umm, Yes.
John: It’s Sunday tomorrow Jane.
Me: Mm. That’s um, you know…
John: What are you doing tomorrow Jane?
Me: Umm… the um, you know, some stuff. What are you doing John?
John: I’m going out.
That’s the highlight of the Saturday conversation. If it wasn’t for John I may never know what day it is, or even which end of which month. (“It’s July 2nd Jane. Are you glad it’s July?”) Oh yes, we have stimulating conversations. We talk for hours, or at least, it feels like hours 🙂
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We have a customer who does the rounds of our shopping centre called Mary who sounds very much like John. She walks around each shop in turn.
(At the shoe menders’)
‘Morning, Mickey.’
‘Morning, Mary.’
‘Morning, Craig’
‘Morning Mary.’
(Onto us at the flower shop)
‘Morning Em’
‘Morning Mary’
‘Morning Debbie’
‘Morning Mary.’
‘Morning Gemma’
‘Morning Mary’.
(when she sees me)
‘Morning.’
‘Morning Mary.’
(She’s been told several times over nearly four years but she can’t get my name in her head).
She knows the names of all the security guards and the cleaners. She comes back round later to tell every one how her boyfriend Geoff is (Geoff is bedbound and not so well.) If we get a thumbs up, he’s okay.
Routine is very important to Mary.
If retail continues to go the way it’s going and most of the shopping centres close down, where will people like Mary go? There’ll be thousands of lonely people across the country who’ve lost their support network. John and Mary would make a great team, I think. 🙂
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That thought has crossed my mind. We have an elderly man who goes around the shops handing out sweets to the female staff. That sounds bad, but it’s quite innocent really. He’s a retired merchant seaman who appears to have been excessively attached to his mother. He’s reverent towards women. Since I gave up my business he doesn’t recognise me. I think shop staff are the only people he talks to.
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There are a lot of people like that – you stumble across them all the time when working in shops, don’t you? I wonder about them, what their lives are like away from the shops. Lots of wandering, lonely souls.
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It reminds me of how lucky I am.
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Yes, me too, Jane 🙂
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A powerful tale of a tragic downfall, and how the tragedy starts when we’re young. Another great lesson learned from this story — we have to listen to our children.
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Thanks Nortina. Another inspiring prompt from you there – super stuff as always 🙂
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