Is this my favorite that I've written so far? Perhaps. And so, here's another warm-up drabble that was used to get the brain juices flowing.
Write a story in the crime genre. It's about a mountaineer and should include a bucket. Also use the sentence 'It's over.' Bonus prompt: Your character is very shy.
I’m looking at the blood splatters on the floor of the shack and my first thought is that I should be grateful it wasn’t me. Not a very nice thing to think, especially when there’s a body in the midst of all those blood splatters, and especially because the reason it wasn’t me was because I was the one wielding the ice axe.
Well. Semantics.
I set the axe on the floor next to a rusty bucket, then send a glare at the corpse of Maads Jabrony. The glare itself is not successful, as I can only manage a second of it before the nausea sets in. I stumble backward and brace myself against the pine logs forming the wall behind me. I don’t know if I’m going to vomit or shit myself. Thank goodness for the bucket.
“You have to do it,” Maads had said not seven minutes ago.
But I couldn’t. I’d told him as such, yet instead of being understanding and accepting my absolute denial that I should don my lederhosen and sing the song of—not even my, but his—people, he had picked up the trophy from the mantlepiece. It was a weighty one. The Swiss don’t skimp on their contest winners: it was cast in bronze and must have been at least fifteen pounds, all sharp antlers and gleaming horns.
Maads hefted it high above his head. He was red with fury. A vein pulsed in his forehead like a wriggling worm.
I knew he would hurl it at me; I knew it would hit me. In that moment, I knew that I would rather be killed by a first-place yodeling trophy than sing in front of even one single person I did not know. I lunged away from the trophy’s downward arc, and in my haste, I saw the shining point of a decorative ice axe that had always hung on a plaque by the door. I tugged it from its home. Heavy footfalls thumped toward me, and I knew I had only a second to act.
So I swung.
I stare at Maads’ corpse, at the way the leather of his lederhosen stiffens in his pooling blood.
“It’s over,” I say. He can’t hear me. But it feels good to say out loud anyway.
The shack is starting to get cold. I eye the stacks of folded lederhosen in one corner.
Would it be worth it, to cave now?
No, I think, as the frigid mountain air creeps between cracks in the wood.
Never.
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