For grad school, I was considering applying to their fiction programs. Such an application would require like 30 pages of fiction. And considering I’m not that experienced, I thought that maybe applying to a fiction program wouldn’t be such a good idea if I actually wanted to get in. I wanted to try to write something but I was having some sort of a mental block. So my baby sister suggested (she likes to write short stories) that I just write and make it up as I go along. After rereading it, it sounds kinda interesting. I haven’t finished the part about the little blonde, but this is what I have so far (no edits):
Chicken
His mother should have arrived back home from work by now. She worked as a police officer for Miami PD, working the shift after the moonlighters that began at 7:00am. Even if there was an accident on Highway 826, where the way people drove you’d think they were asking to be killed, she always arrived promptly at 7:00pm. What she did after her shift ended, Sam never really knew what was in store for any particular day. It could have been a suitor or the gym, but she always arrived at seven. Her predictable arrival allowed him to have the house to himself for three and a half hours. And for days with little enough Algebra 1 homework, he could finish at lunch the next day, he could do whatever he wanted as long as all the evidence was gone.
It’s not like his mother was completely oblivious to his behavior after school. She was vying for the available crime scene investigator position with the police department. It’s not like she didn’t care either. She set three rules in place when he started high school: Follow the law, do well enough in school to go to a 4-year college, and use condoms to avoid STDs and impregnating women. And Sam obeyed, for the most part, that was good enough for her.
This afternoon Sam stepped off the bus holding hands with the little blonde who lived in the neighborhood up the block. She got off a stop early to have some alone time with her boyfriend. He enjoyed the way her thin hair stuck to her tan cheeks in the humidity……..
It was 9:30pm and Sam was curled up on the old brown leather couch. He awoke to his neighbor slamming the car door across the street. None of the lights were on because he had fallen asleep after eating a couple of hamburgers. He thought his mom would be home soon, but knew she wouldn’t care because he had already cooked dinner. Looking around he squinted to see the clock on the cable box. 9:36. “Ma!” he shouted. No response. “Crap,” he rolled on to the floor and forced himself to walk down the hallway. He pressed his ear to her scratchy bedroom door. It wouldn’t be the first time that she slipped in with a date without waking him up. It was difficult to hear breathing over rain pounding on their new roof. It didn’t survive the last hurricane and they had to replace it with some fancy material they saw on an infomercial. It made the rain loud as hell, but a soothing sound after a long day to ease him to sleep. There was no breathing on the other side of the door. He peeked inside; the black curtains were still open, so the yellow streetlight barely illuminated an empty bedroom. If she wasn’t there, she wasn’t home.
It sounded like someone dropped a large set of keys on the front steps. His head turned sharply to the right. Running to the front door, hoping that was his mom. Peeking through the peephole, he didn’t see anyone. He never let anyone know, but having your mom as a cop was tough. If she wasn’t home on time, she might never be coming home. She patrolled one of the heaviest crime areas in Miami…
