Spring: A Trilogy of Stories

Three thought provoking and harrowing stories continue the Trilogy series.

SLEEPING WITH YOUR EYES OPEN; TO KILL THE DEAD' COUNTING MISSISSPPI


To Kill The Dead


The perfect crime? No honour amongst thieves? They were the starting point for this story. 


I envisaged this run-down motel in Mexico as the meeting place for the two characters who have planned and seemingly got away with, the perfect crime. No-one hurt, life insurance paid out, but as always, there are unknown factors that come to light as one of them tries to betray the other.


Interestingly, a couple of months after writing this story there were two stories in the news that echoed the method of ‘death’ in the story, and only yesterday my son told me of the same thing almost happening to his brother’s dog at the weekend. The moral is ‘don’t get too close to the cliff edge………’ and could you really trust your partner?


Counting Mississippi


One summer we drove down from Tennessee to Florida. Driving through Georgia suddenly we hit a storm; no, not a storm, torrential rain. The interstate came to a standstill as you could not see a foot in front of the car, the wipers useless. The same thing happened to us just outside Key Largo when we had to stop, and another time, fog descended upon me whilst driving high in the hills about Monte Carlo (the same road that Grace Kelly perished on).


Memories of these have stayed with me. One night I was driving home, aware that a really bad storm was behind me, catching me up; I needed and wanted to get home before it caught me. It got me thinking, “who else was on the road, running ahead of the storm?” And what were they running from?


There had been a story on the television of some guy who had had a ‘relationship’ with someone online and it turned out that the person he’d been writing to, even talking with, didn’t actually exist, it was a lovely older woman pretending to be someone else, a younger girl.


There have also of course unfortunately been other stories involving social network sites and murder.


I put all these together one stormy night, waiting for the thunder to come after lightning. Of course the thunder and lightning actual happen at the same time, it’s just that we hear the thunder seconds later, how many seconds depends on the distance it is away from us, hence “One Mississippi, Two Mississippi” and so on, and wrote the story in one night, with a rewrite the next couple of days.


Sleeping with your Eyes Open


As a lawyer my father originally specialised in divorce, hence working with my PI uncle. When I was about eight there was an item on the local news in Cardiff about a hostage situation in a house just off Newport Road. A husband was holding his wife hostage, and her lawyer, my dad! Luckily it was resolved without anyone being hurt. The thing I remember is a few days later my father telling my mum that his client, the wife, had gone back to her husband!


My dad would often despair at clients who argued and fought over who was going to get the knives and forks or the dog, more so than the children they shared!


He would also despair of the women who went back to their abusive husbands time after time after time.


Domestic abuse is still an unspoken about part of many people’s lives. People stay in relationships for many reasons; love of course, (misplaced love), for the sake of the children, but also due to their own insecurity, they don’t want to be alone. Even is their partner has cheated, betrayed them, lied, they’d prefer to pretend it didn’t happen. They are weak, but people are stronger than they think we they are usually.


I had the title of this story first and then a brief outline and then the story again practically wrote itself. I waited for the ending to come, which it did a week or so later.