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FIRST Prize
"BLOOD LINE" by Dan Cooper
He tried again to move. Again he failed. The room seemed to have a life of its own, and Travis was now the stationary object in a reversal of sanity. He was the used furniture in the shadow of a swirl of activity that had just faded, leaving its effect like wood smoke clinging to the fabric of his mind.
Travis stood transfixed amid the ruin of all he knew in his young life. The normally small living room was suffocatingly tiny now. And quiet. The TV seemed hideously trivial now, but even its noisy chatter was subdued by the ominous quiet of the rest of the room. The hellish noises of only moments ago had become mute phantoms that would make this evening live forever in his memory. Paralyzed in shock Travis stared, wondering if this was real or a dream. Before his powerless eyes his mother's blood was splashed across the living room wall.
Yesterday had been so utterly normal that Travis had been bored to death, he had said. Bored to death. To death. Travis' thirty-seven year old mother, Melodye Toomey, now lay dead in the next room. The whole thing had taken maybe forty-five seconds.
The strange voice had appeared at the door to their small second-floor flat on the south side of Chicago at 7:15 p.m. But Travis had blocked out the intrusion of yet another of his mother's uninteresting friends. There had been some typically dull conversation behind him as he strained to hear the TV instead.
But the background conversation suddenly rooted out his attention, with a threat that shredded the thin veil behind which Travis had attempted to hide his mind. The voice jerked Travis into his mother's world for one final time, with the darkly menacing promise, "See you in Hell!"
DAN COOPER is a freelance writer and Contributing Editor for Suite101's site on Vintage and Classic Cars. He also edits a column for the newsletter of the Writers' League of Texas, and this year had a short piece of creative nonfiction published in "A Cup of Comfort for Courage" (Adams Media).
