The Frankie story continues. Back In April, I posted a timeline for my Frankie stories which have been written for the Australian Writers’ Centre Furious Fiction Competition. The competition which started as a monthly adventure has now been scaled back to quarterly. I have been adding to my pile of short stories for nearly every iteration since they started.
Pre-emptive strike
This instalment of Frankie’s story was written prior to the prompts being published. After the March instalment I had an idea of where I wanted to take the story and pre-wrote it with the intention of slotting in the prompts when they arrived on the first Friday of the season. It was easy and it was hard. I don’t think I have done a good job and the prompts have had to be bashed into place square peg-like. None-the-less it’s done. I have no idea what happens next!
June’s Furious Fiction.
This quarter the prompts where as follows:
1. The first sentence must have six words.
2. Something had to be served
3. The words stage, wire and log (or derivatives thereof) had to be included.
The story will make absolutely no sense if you haven’t read the previous “chapters”, so it will not be a winner! As I have said before, I’m not in it to win it!
The peasant revolt
Tom felt very pleased with himself. He’d left the less than Honourable Karen Brooks in the suburbs in a banned silver lamé dress, surrounded by an angry crowd. Whatever happened served her right!
He quickly realised that he hadn’t been that clever after all. He was in someone else’s car with a body in the boot. Not just ANY someone’s car, but a Minister’s car and it was his name in the log book! Face-Palm!
He had blood on his hands literally AND figuratively.
He’d better go fetch Karen and the bike. He backtracked and parked a block away from where he had left her. He walked around the corner to see people standing over her mangled body. Two others were kneeling, trying to remove the lamé dress, squabbling.
“You’ll have to get it dry cleaned! You can’t wash it! Where will you get that done?”
“But it’s so beautiful! I haven’t seen anything like it for years”
When the crowd saw Tom, they didn’t flinch. Unusual reaction, he thought, for people caught in the act of murder.
“It’s him!” one said, “the man who drove away.”
“Guilty conscience?”
“I think we’re all in a bit of a bind” Tom laughed nervously. “I’ve got the fellow she ran over in the boot and you’ve got the blood of a dead minister under your nails.
“SHE ran him over? But YOU drove away?” replied a woman with wire-framed glasses
“It doesn’t really matter. We’ve got two dead bodies and not much time before someone comes looking for them. Well, her anyway”
“What’s with the dress?” the woman asked.
Tom wasn’t about to defend Karen, “She’d been at a private party. They think they can get away with it. Professing to toe the party line in public… but you should see them after dark! ”
“Why are you with her?”
“I’m an undercover journalist”
“Pffftt and I’m Spiderman!” a man said.
“I’ve been working on a story with the Judge,” he said pointing to the bike “We’ve been trying to get them thrown out of Parliament…” Tom just kept on blabbing. The whole story. Not one secret left unsaid.
“It’s a pity they closed down Facebook,” Spiderman said, “We could have put this on the Community Page.”
Understatement!
“So what’s your idea to solve our problem Clarke Kent?”
Tom scratched his head, “At this stage, I think we start by cleaning up the road and hiding the car.
“Ok” said Spiderman, “I just happen to own an auto-detailer’s business. We can clean it up and then stash it. Mabel here just so happens to manage the local crematorium.”
“That’s very convenient,” Tom said. He realised that these grey residents were as ready to cast off UCP as he was. What he and the judges had been doing was nonsense in comparison. Tinkering at the edges, playing with the law, pretending to be brave.
Here were the urban warriors. Here were people ready to cover up a double murder.
Viva la revolution!