FreeWrite Prompt: Residue

 
 

Ugh, this day has really gotten away from me, and I still have to finish up the final post for April's Power Up Day initiative. I'm saying this to try to excuse the really-not-good-if-I-didn't-have-to-I-wouldn't-share-it piece of fiction writing that I came up with. 😂

But again, one of my goals this month is to not overthinking my posts, so this is the result!

The prompt for today from my Hive Blog Posting Month calendar is -

Find a Freewriters prompt & do a 5 minute FreeWrite

I was going to scroll through and find a Freewriters prompt that spoke to me, but then I realized that wouldn't be nearly the same challenge as taking the one @mariannewest assigned for today.

Which is... Day 1633: 5 Minute Freewrite: Tuesday - Prompt: residue

What a challenge it turned out to be! I really gotta clear the writerly cobwebs from my brain, so I plan to do more of these (hopefully with better results) in the coming weeks.

And I blame the fact that not only have I been watching the final season of Killing Eve, I also saw the headline earlier today that a romance novelist who wrote "How to Murder Your Husband" goes on trial 4 years after chef spouse found dead in culinary school kitchen.

All of that combined with the additional prompt I got from The Most Dangerous Writing App of, "She had made a poor job of hiding the damage" is what inspired (although I'm not sure that's the right word...lol) the Flash Fiction story result below.

EDITED TO ADD: I was in such a hurry, I forgot to include my usual screencap of the MDWA result. This time I only did the beginning of the story, as I'm not sure I want proof that I wrote this whole thing & didn't edit it - doesn't seem like an accomplishment at the moment after rereading it...lol!

 

Residue

 
 

She had made a poor job of hiding the damage. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more it made sense to make as much damage as possible. A crime of passion might be easier to explain, if she was ever caught that is, than one that had been meticulously planned out for years, almost from the day she'd said "I do" to him.

She didn't think she'd ever actually go through with it though - kind of the thing that a writer like her would ponder when working on a story. Would the main character commit murder? If so, how would they do it so they knew they'd get away with it? There was that joke about worrying when the FBI was looking at your search history on your computer, what kinds of things would they find. It occurred to her it could be the perfect front for an actual murder, should it ever come down to it.

It's not like she hated him. She just needed the money that his very generous life insurance policy would guarantee. Just one short moment in time, a perfectly aimed blow to the head, and a few moments of an almost cathartic release of destroying his office, the place he might as well have called home, and then she'd have the rest of her life to sit and write the murder mysteries she'd grown up loving, all the while knowing the satisfaction of never being caught.

It was almost twenty years later to the day that she was sitting on the couch, enjoying her usual cup of afternoon tea, watching television and realizing how little she regretted what she had done. The phone rang, and as she put her tea cup down, she noticed the residue of the leaves had clumped together on the bottom. It slowly dawned on her what it looked like and she fainted, solidly hitting the corner of the coffee table on the way down.

 

---

 

"It's the strangest thing," the officer on scene said to the coroner. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say it looks like someone wrote, "caught."

 
 

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