Month: May 2022

Highway to Hell

~ annemcsommers ~ 11 Comments

Usually my writing is dark, but every so often, it is tragic. This week’s entry for the six sentence story word of DETOUR by girlontheedge is definitely dark below the surface. Not much is said directly, but a lot is implied. If you have triggers, read the tags before reading, this one is a bumpy ride.

People tell me that life is a highway, that it isn’t the destination that matters, but the journey you take to get there.


If that is true then meeting you was like finding a detour in they construction zone that was my life, finally a chance to get out of the slow lane and drive.


At first it was perfect, the wind blowing through my hair, and by the time I realized you had led me onto a dark isolated road, I was so far away from the highway that I couldn’t find my way back.


So I kept going, when the road got bumpy, I slowed down a little and told myself it was okay, it would get better soon.


I didn’t turn back at the first blowout, the sixth, or even the broken axles, and it took a full blown crash to make me realize I couldn’t keep doing this, one day it was going to get me killed.


When I got back on the road, I was a cautious driver, always going below the limit, and it took me months before I could even think of hitting the highway again, let alone taking detour, but it’s been three years; I am ready to try again.

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Rebirth

~ annemcsommers ~ Leave a comment

This was a 250 word piece for The Writer’s Mess Friday Picture Prompt Challenge, based on the picture below. This one is another sci fi, this time about sending out a ship to start life on a new planet. My goal was to make this a little lighter that the upcoming Six Sentence story, but my nature prevailed, and it’s a little dark as well.

Callista added the last samples to the capsule, and pressed it into place. The drawer lock clicked, and the pleasant chirp of the verification system indicated that it had been accepted.

This was it, the ark was complete. All biological samples were safely aboard, and tomorrow the ship would launch for a new world.

She stared for a minute at the ark’s glowing power source. It would provide the energy needed for terraforming, for creating their new home, and she prayed that it would work.

The ark would launch tomorrow, but in one year she would follow it, one of many who were chosen to populate the new colony, or so people thought. It wasn’t just a colony, it was the last, best hope for their race to survive.

The planet was running out of resources, the utopia of no disease and long life quickly turned into a shortage of supplies, and people just assumed that at some point the government would fix it.

The truth was that they were going to do nothing, because in less than a decade the amount of energy being harvested from the core would stop the planet spinning, leaving the world a lifeless husk.

It would be three years before the effects became wide spread, before people realized that the colonists had gone to repopulate the species, and the rest of them had been left to die.

So Callista prayed, that this ark would work as it should, because everything depended on it.

A Ginormous Pig

~ annemcsommers ~ Leave a comment

This was for the Weekly Invisible Ink Challenge, and the prompt “Your first time seeing a large animal as a child”. I took an experience I have been told happened when I was a child from an early zoo visit, and put my own spin on it. I found this one really hard, child POV is not my wheelhouse.

“Mommy! Mommy! Look at the pig, it’s swimming! It’s ginormous!” She said, it was the biggest pig she had ever seen, ever.
“Yes baby, it’s a very big pig.” Mommy smiled, and stuck the the scratchy hat on her head.
“Can I pet it?” She asked, pulling the hat off her head. Oops. She almost hit a lady with a baby.
“No, we don’t pet animals at the zoo.” Mommy answered.
“We feeded the deer, can we feed the pig?” She asked, she could pet it while she was feeding it.
The lady with the baby gave mommy a mean look, I don’t like her.
“No-“ Mommy said
“I WANNA FEED THE BIG PIG!” It wasn’t fair, this was so much better than the deer.
“That isn’t a pig, it is a hippopotamus.” The mean lady said.
“A very big pig?” She asked her Mommy.
“Yes sweetie, a hippo is a very big pig. Do you want to go see the elephants?” Mommy asked.
“YES!” She said, taking one last look at the swimming pig, it was the biggest one she had ever seen, EVER.

How I Got Away With Murder

~ annemcsommers ~ Leave a comment

This was based on a couple of Meme’s floating around about killing people to make their autobiographies more interesting. I mixed it with a little stir craziness from lockdown, the oddity of the true crime buff community, and ended up with this prologue, which even I have to admit, is really strange.

Welcome to my autobiography. I am writing this prologue at 32, when I first came up with the idea of writing an autobiography, and you are probably reading it because of all the cool stuff that I am about to do. Ya, ABOUT, to do, as in I haven’t really done anything noteworthy yet, or at least nothing I can talk to anyone about. The latter is why I decided to write this in the first place, get it ready, and get it published posthumously.

Ok, so the book will of course give you the random growing up stories, all carefully crafted, to make me look great and my enemies look like shit. I want to tell you in this prologue where this book started, and that was in 2020, during the covid-19 epidemic, more specifically in lockdown.

I was middle class, single middle class. I say that cause when someone says middle class you are thinking 2 kids, pet, house, and I am more like apartment, have enough money to stay comfy, but my apartment is kind of boring for extended stays. I needed to find something to do, and before you think it, no I wasn’t one of those people who made sourdough, and turned to introspection. Mostly because I couldn’t get a starter, and my bread always turns out like a rock. I did make jam though, and it was fucking amazing. Anyway, I want to say I spent my time in isolation constructively, but basically I spent it doom-scrolling and binge-watching anything and then everything I could stream.

On one of my doom scrolls I read this joke “Gotta stop killing people to spice up my autobiography.” The next week it was “Thinking of killing a character in the book I am writing. Its my autobiography” And like, I thought this was dumb, because it wouldn’t actually be that interesting. I mean, its actually not that hard to kill someone. I mean, you can do it with your bare hands given the right size ratio or the element of surprise. Bring in a baseball bat and well, most people can do this.

What takes it from boring to interesting would be killing someone and GETTING AWAY with it. So that led me to true crime, and true crime bloggers, and like this thing where you all talk about how bad people are about getting away with murder. That of course leads to the conversation of, could you get away with it, AKA the perfect murder.

I am smart, resourceful and I KNEW I could rock this. Weird part is, the better you are, the deeper you get into this community, the less people share about their plans, like weirdly, “just in case you have to use them”, like yikes right?

So when I came up with my perfect plan I was so super proud, and yet extremely protective of it, cause I had like the best plan ever, and as soon as I put it out there, all these assholes were going take pieces and pretend they came up with them.

So here lies the rub with planning the perfect murder. Told people I had the perfect murder plan, the response “no plans perfect” . I was like actually, its pretty awesome. And then they responded, prove it. And there it was, you can’t actually prove its a perfect murder, unless you actually do the plan, and commit the murder.

I am not crazy, I did not go “Yep, sure, right on that.” I of course, blasted them for being a hypocritical asshole, and sulked like the adult woman I am.

I let it go, for a long time, because, well, really what other option did I have. Lockdown got extended, started working from home, and honestly I think the isolation got to me, because I reached a point where it didn’t seem so insane anymore.

Then I started murder shopping, as an amusement really, and that went on for like months, and it was the end of 2021, I had two vaccinations, and my stupid anti-vax, I guess former friends now were not people I could see. I just, I got bored, I had done all the things I could do, and watched all the shows, and I was really really bored.

That was when I realized I had completely assembled my murder kit. So I spent my time perfecting, revising the plan, until one day I guess, I completely lost it, because I picked a person. My victim I guess, and two weeks later, I, uh, killed them.

That is when I discovered the next problem. Killed’em, got away with it, and now I can’t tell anyone what I did. Jackie_the_ripped_1978 is great and all, but loose lips sink ships, and I don’t want to go to prison. But it sucked, cause I did it, I did the perfect murder, and if I tell someone then they are going to tell someone and everyone is going to claim the reason I went to prison was cause the murder wasn’t perfect not because Jackie can’t keep her trap shut.

So I came up with the idea, this idea, the stupid Meme idea, autobiography. The issue being, to sell this, without letting anyone read the murder bit, I need to have accomplished something worth someone taking a posthumous autobiography site unseen, and publishing it. It. So now I am onto great things, to get this story out there. So all my great works that follow, remember, did all that, to be able to tell you all about me losing my mind at 32 and committing the perfect murder, AND most importantly, getting away with it.

There are a few issues with my murder/autobiography plan, if you want to mimic it. It assumes you either will outlive and/or hate your parents, because life is not going to be great for them after this comes out. Works best for only children, same reasons as above. Same, actually goes for a family really, husband and kids won’t really take this so well, so you know why I died alone in the end.

So now you know the dark secret behind my wonderful life. If you are here for the descent into madness and murder bit, skip to chapter 22. If you just want to read the feel good bio you were expecting, read everything except chapters 22-28 inclusive. I hope you enjoy this book, as much as I enjoyed getting away with murder!