Our prompt sentence today was donated by this week’s judge,  Pete Morin@petermorin, author of the upcoming Diary of a Small Fish. It’s not a sentence from Small Fish, but from a future release. (I just liked it a lot and he let me have it.)

How did it work for you?

Well it worked well for these people, this week’s finalists:

spbowers

redshirt6, @redshirt6

Monocle, @_Monocle_

John Hancock, @Grokdad

Jen DeSantis, @JenD_Author

Give them a round of applause! Then read their entries below and vote for this week’s winner! Tomorrow at 9:00 am Eastern, I’ll announce the winner. So send your friends and family to vote right now!

spbowers

“In my considerable experience, drug dealers are more likely to die a violent death than get hit by a bus.” I said and flicked the TV off. “

“Your considerable experience huh? From watching NCIS and Law and Order?”

“Maybe.” I smirked at him and he laughed. I loved to watch him laugh. His eyes crinkled up and the sound make my stomach turn to liquid goo. He lay stretched out on the couch an arm behind his head. I sat scrunched in the uncomfortable chair, the one we usually made Grace Harlan sit in in hopes that she didn’t stay long. I didn’t mind though, I liked to look at his long body and wish he was mine.

A door opened and closed and he jumped from the couch, a light in his eyes that made my heart thump painfully and the breath leave my body. If only he’d look at me like that. “Hey baby he said and ran to the front hall. It was silent for a long time and I tried not to imagine the kiss, long and deep, his lips soft and tender. Maybe my roommate would get hit by a bus.

redshirt6, @redshirt6

In my considerable experience, drug dealers are more likely to die a violent death than get hit by a bus, which is of course why she chose this course of action. To anyone watching, it would seem an accident and nothing more. But that was her goal.

Of course, something would probably go terribly wrong, it always did. Anything she tried to do seemed doomed from the start.

Like starting a family! That sure as hell didn’t work. Fairy tale marriage, an honeymoon in Europe, and then settling down in a swanky neighborhood right on the golf course. Such a wonderful start! But of course it didn’t last.

And of course, she had been blind to it all. The cheating, the dishonesty, all of the sneaking around. That had been really terrible and it had all come to light so fast! If she had realized her shrink was in on it from the beginning she never would have fallen for any of it! But she got wise to them! She got wise to them all!

Oh yeah, she had finally realized that she wasn’t the one with a problem. It was all of them. If she had realized the medicines they had her taking were really designed to hide the truth from her earlier she could have avoided all of this.

But too late. And now, he child, her sweet and beautiful darling. Only two years old. But sadly he was destined to be a gang banging drug dealer. High end of course, but still.

A moment of clarity and an insight into his future. That was all it took. She couldn’t stand by and watch that happen to him. Not as a loving mother! Of course she couldn’t stand for it.

As the bus sped down the hill she waited patiently. When the time was just right, she tossed the child under the front wheels, as any sane and loving mother would do.

Monocle, @_Monocle_

“In my considerable experience, drug dealers are more likely to die a violent death than get hit by a bus.”

Marcus gave me that warning before letting me set up my own corner. He’d somehow managed to do it, though. 30 years on the street, he’d seen his little stoop change hands a dozen times as gangs rewrote the turf boundaries in the neighborhood. Even when the Cartel swept through in the late 90′s, they let him keep is regulars. So, naturally, I didn’t believe him, and decided to carve out my own niche, just like him. Not so small that I can’t get me the nice things. Not so big that I have to worry about the sharks.

But still, it’s pretty weird. When your nice ride stalls out (fuck you and your shop, Xavier) in the intersection running the red, and the the Crosstown #20 comes barreling towards you, you realize that getting hit by a bus is actually a pretty violent death, drug dealer or not.

Not that it does you much good at that point.

John Hancock, @Grokdad

In my considerable experience, drug dealers are more likely to die a violent death than get hit by a bus. Of course, bus drivers are more likely to use drugs than drug dealers are to drive buses.

Its just one of those things that keeps running little circles inside my head. Bus drivers. Drugs. Death. Violence. Kittens.

Circles in circles. I forget to breathe. Somehow I got here, somehow I got strapped in this metal bed and cranked up with tubes and IVs running in my arms. I know if I could think straight I could remember how, or why but Buses and drug dealers run Curly Joe running circles on the floor, and the patterns in the tiles keep shifting into moving images of death and people and corpses and buses.

Bang! That noise keeps running along with the circles too. Bang! Bang! Bang! And blue haired old women hitting the floor like bowling pins. And one young man with braces snaps backward like being pulled with strings. Marionettes. Marionettes of Death. Caught in Circles.Circles spin and spin again.

“How are we doing, Mr. Seben?” a homely nurse asks me. For a minute, the circles won’t let me off. I’m caught in them like escalators in dimensions gone amuck.

“What can…. how… what is this medicine?” I think I ask her. I must not have succeeded though, because the poodle she walked in with jumped up and started ripping out whole chunks of her throat. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Its experimental” she throws out as circles come back to snag me again.

Bang! Bang! go the bullets and then I slide on the circles and the circles become handcuffs and I’m handcuffed to the bed and the bus drivers tell me I shot someone.

but I can’t tell. Are these my shoes?

Jen DeSantis, @JenD_Author

“In my considerable experience, drug dealers are more likely to die a violent death than get hit by a bus.”

“Back up,” a girl in the back of the classroom called, her head popping up as she eased herself out of the low slouch she’d been employing. “What considerable experience?”

“Well … the experience—that tells me drug dealers generally die violently,” I said, annoyed at my stammer.

“And you don’t consider getting hit by a bus violent?” she asked, tapping her pencil on the side of her thick framed glasses.

I eyed her up. Spiky hair, dyed a deep violet. Pale skin and bright eyes outlined in thick, black liner. And the glasses—don’t get me started on the glasses. They had thick, green frames, dotted with sparkly rhinestones. The frames alone probably cost her parents upwards of five hundred dollars. She probably didn’t even need them for vision correction. God, I hated my job and the new generation.

“Violent, but not in the technical term,” I clarified.

“Technical term? I’d call it violent, technical or not. I mean, it certainly wouldn’t be an easy death, now would it?”

“Well, no … but you know what I mean. They’re more likely to, you know, meet their demise on the other end of a gun or a knife, then they are to die accidently.”

“All I’m saying is you should have said “accidently. Getting hit by a bus is violent, and it doesn’t make any sense to call it otherwise..”

I swallowed the bile rising in the back of my throat. Back in the day, kids would have just sat and stared vacantly, no questions asked. Of course, back in the day, who had to talk about drug dealers and violent deaths to a class of incoming freshmen? But here we sat, 2011, with respect at an all time low and me talking about drug dealers to a class of kids who thought I was an idiot all because some teeny-bopper anology nazi in sparkly glasses disagreed with my terms. I missed the old days.

“It really isn’t that important,” I said tersely.

“The drug dealer might disagree,” violet-hair mumbled from the back.

I rolled my eyes and looked at the clock. Only seven more hours to go before the end of the first day.

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