The word of the week is guard, and I ended up going with the definition as in a person whose occupation is guard. It went a little off after that, and even I wasn’t sure what required a guard until I got there. Definitely a great creative exercise!
I always thought that people who ended up in this kind of situation knew that they could end up here, and could look back and pick out the choice that led them to their inevitable end.
It was only as I sat in the small room, with a 24/7 guard outside the door, that I began to realize that this wasn’t always the case, and I knew because that wasn’t the way it had gone for me.
If you were being nitpicky, you could point out that I knew when I called in a bomb threat on a public building that this was a possible outcome, but getting to that point, the point where I called in a fake threat wasn’t just a single choice affair.
It would be easy to say it was my parents divorce, joining science club, watching a chunk the size of Rhode Island fall off of a glacier, but it was none of those things, all of those things, and a thousand other little incidents that led me here today.
Maybe it would only have taken a single change for this not to be where I ended up, or maybe all of everything could change and I would still end up here, a product of fate, or just genetics.
The important bit was that I called in what I thought was a fake bomb threat, 37 innocent people died, and I would have to live my entire life knowing that if I had taken my part of the “hoax” a little more seriously, that I might not be sitting accused of domestic terrorism.
Anne McSommer's Writing Nook 
Reblogged this on Pattys World.
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good use of the cue word. nice job.
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Intriguing!
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Wow. Strange, with moral echoing still ringing. I wonder hi ow many of us just ghb o along, not realizing that inattention has consequences.
Kinda brilliant, Anne!
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Wow! What a story. So cohesive, so possible, and so heart breaking.
How easy to ruin your own life, and how easy to be played the fool.
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You never know, from the outside looking in, what causes some people to end up where they are.
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Sorry, Anne, got lost in the labyrinth here. Perhaps I’m a little thicker than usual today. 😉
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Interesting. A case of ‘what would I do if…?’ Better to look a fool than to hesitate. But then what if you are accused of a ‘fake’ threat? Gosh, Talk about dilemma!
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ayiiee. the path of decisions (we make)
engaging Six, pulling us along, even as we began ‘to get a bad feeling’ about the ending.
well done
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I wonder what made him call the hoax in the first place.
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Well done. Good six sentences here. And the moral questioning that can apply to all areas of our lives, hits that universal note.
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