Grocery List | Teen Ink

Grocery List

October 14, 2013
By DrippingWords BRONZE, Nampa, Idaho
DrippingWords BRONZE, Nampa, Idaho
2 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Favorite Quote:
"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;

...

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king."

--J.R.R. Tolkien


The shot of the gun rang out, and pain ripped through my arm. A scream tore its way out of my throat, and I fell to the ground. My arm felt as though it were filled with thousands of pieces of burning glass, burning through my flesh and bone. The knitting needles I had been using as a weapon fell out of my hands, landing next to the blindfold that had fallen to the ground when I ripped it off. The man holding the gun stood in front of me, his hands shaking slightly, his eyes wide behind his black facemask.

"Come on, let's move! Leave the girl!" The gravel in the man's voice made shudder, and the shooter looked briefly at him before nodding.

I heard scuffles behind me as I imagined other men swiping things off counters into burlap sacks. Sinking to my knees, I clutched my arm and watched as the man who shot me pocketed the gun and ran out of sight. Glass crunched under his feet and the door gave a final slam before everything went quiet.

My arm was covered in blood; red liquid coursing out of my body like a river of death. I knew I was dying. Stumbling to my feet, I managed to carry myself into the kitchen. A sheet of paper still clung to the fridge: a grocery list. I yanked it off before I fell to the ground.

"Three...." I wrote as my hand shook, the world around me spinning faster. "Came.... Interrogated......information." The words scrawled in blood stood out against the stark white of the grocery list, but the edges of my vision were fading into darkness. I heard a disembodied voice shout my name, faintly, and a pair of hands shook me, but I floated away into the black void surrounding me.


The author's comments:
Written for Flash Fiction Month.

309 Words.

I used the prompt: "Knitting blindfolded is even harder with a gun pressed to your head."

I also did the challenge: "Write a story that opens in media res. That's pretty common in flash fiction, but here's the twist: somehow in the rest of the piece, you need to tell the reader what happened first. In essence, even though you're opening in the middle, we want to know where it started."

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