Contest Winner: Dying Scenes

It seems easy enough to write a good death scene, but some authors never seem to get the hang of it. (And movie directors are even worse!)

The Dying Scenes contest asked for a description of the best dying scene in 500 words or less.

I received some good entries - it was tough to pick one winner. Thanks to everyone who entered. As always, I am very impressed with the writers out there!

I’m publishing the two best here because they were both very clever.

The runner-up:

THE DEATH OF ROSE by Barbara Rollins-Reed

At the moment of initial injury, with the first wave of extricating pain, Rose begs for an instant death, but fate is not to make dying so easy for the ravishing American beauty. The first impact of the brutal blade slices deep into vital areas and severs thousands of nerve endings. Rose feels the flow of precious fluids drain from the fresh wound, taking with it the essence of all her energy.

Why did this have to happen now? Why, at the peak of her existence, at the height of her loveliness, was life so cruel, so heartless, as to be ripped away from her so viciously?

Rose struggles valiantly to draw in one last precious intake of life-giving oxygen. She remembers it is believed that at the moment of death one's entire past life could flash quickly in memory. Not so for Rose. She can only imagine the future continuing without her, as though she had never existed at all.

The last thoughts of Rose are of others as she begins her fatalistic journey into the afterlife. Standing tall and proud in an exquisite silver vase, she hopes those who so cruelly ended her short stay on this earth will stop, smell her sweetness, her fleeting fragrance, and receive brief periods of pleasure as she slowly decays.

The winner:

THE SLAYING OF JUNKYARD ED by Larry A. Tilander

There's many a man who deserves to be dead, a few whose demise was well planned
There’re corpses a-plenty in rivers and bogs, in graves scattered over the land
There's many a death scene been played in these hills, there’s many more begging to die
The strangest I know is the man who died slow, the junk man who just wouldn't die

His name it was Ed and there's folks wished him dead from the cities and towns all around
For larceny, thievery, jiggery, pokery, folks wished him under the ground
The cops let it known, the seed it was sown, that they'd turn a

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic