NSE #7
The real news behind the upcoming
short story "Surrogate Criminals"
Dallas, my home town, has seen a slew of seemingly pointless crimes as of late, from a murder over a lottery ticket to a murder over a bottle of water. But pointless criminality is not exclusive to Dallas, for better or worse. A young man in Florida was murdered for a deal gone wrong—not a drug deal, but deal for used headphones. A woman in Bellbrook, Ohio attacked a Tesla truck turned ice cream truck, for no apparent reason. And, to top it all off, multiple people in Houston have attacked power line repairmen—for repairing the long-broken power lines.
Also in Houston, in a less pointless, more extravagant form of illegality, a businesswoman has been sued with misappropriating money from her own company, an escrow service for surrogate mothers. The business has lost millions to its owner, which she used, allegedly and primarily, for the purposes of funding and promoting herself as a rapper. So, in a way, this crime actually was a bit pointless.
Finally, a woman has plead guilty for calling the police—nearly four hundred times in less than three years. One may wonder if she were concerned about crimes such as those above and seeking answers from the police.
Which would be reasonable, not only if the attempts were fewer, but also if the police were above the caliber of this officer in Southport, Indiana, who overdosed on Fentanyl during a traffic stop. Apparently, during a search, the officer accidentally inhaled the drug from a dollar bill he discovered in the trunk of the car. And while that may be strange, stranger still is how the article seems to congratulate the officer on a job well done. While he may have failed utterly at avoiding putting powder up his noise, he did a bang-up job when it came to alerting everyone to his deteriorating condition.
As to why the article congratulates him so, as to how he actually may have overdosed—and as to why any of these strange events really occurred—I’ll save my speculation for my fiction.
The real news behind the upcoming
short story "Boiled Ice"
The foundation of this upcoming short story is news of a Kentucky man who died from taking a shower at a motel. Apparently, the shower had reached temperatures of 150 F, scalding the elderly man so badly that, even with hospital treatment, he died from his injuries. I was intrigued by how this old man didn’t manage to simply remove himself from the shower, but I was also inspired by the motel’s claim that the man had never stayed in one of their rooms. The mysteries abound!
I then stumbled upon mysterious news elsewhere: a woman in Bangkok who seems to have killed herself and five others with cyanide, apparently because she owed them all way too much money; a woman in Phoenix who was found shot to death in a hotel—a location friends say is not up to her standards; and a real-estate developer who committed suicide after allegedly failing to put out a hit on his wife.
That last bit tied all of this together for me in ways that will become clear in the story, but I also found a less disturbing story that could contribute to my fictional tale: news of a regular event in Key West, Florida, involving a Hemingway look-alike contest. And, since Hemingway loved to fish, I was inspired to include the bizarre and seemingly disturbing story of a child dredged up from a Louisiana marina. And while this may seem like yet another negative tale, frightening and horrifying to all of those involved, the fishermen in reality soon discovered that the child was no child, but a test dummy for diver practice.
Read my fiction next week to see if I end things so positively or if I follow the trend of reality. I like twists, but I don’t always prefer a happy ending. Hopefully you’re the same.
