For Dr. Dial-Driver's Pop Market. This was an in-class timed flashfiction assignment, making a suspense story ending with the line, "Some days I almost forget about the scar. And some days I still feel like I'm being followed, but I always remember to [blank]." Brian suggested the closing phrase, and there were a lot of interesting spins put on the phrase.
It's not a great flashfic, especially compared to Lauren's - suspense is her wheelhouse, and she delivered a great tale of an assassination attempt with an Agatha Christie twist. McKenzie had a great fight scene in a coffee shop MacGyvering kitchen implements into weapons. Brian had a psycho attack a guy in an empty movie theater, which was a great use of setting, and Deborah set her story in an aquarium, where a stalker was eaten by a shark. A guy named Shane had us all thinking that his narrator was kidnapped by a cult, until the twist ending revealed that the narrator was actually a sugar glider, and what we thought was a cult was just the normal world seen from a rodent's perspective. That provided some material to chew over.
Things were tense. That's the best way of describing where we were in life at that moment. I was without a steady job, and my girlfriend Jamie's parents were divorcing.
It started when the guys from one of the frats got drunk one Thursday night. I was walking back to my apartment when I heard some scuffling noises. I went to see what was up. Three guys, a girl - this wasn't good.
"HEY! What the -?" This got their attention, as did the fact that my phone was up to my ear reporting the rape.
The girl - she was a small redhead - slipped away into the night. The dudes chased after me. I evaded them as best I could, running more or less in a circle across back alleys and untraveled sidewalks until the cops showed up. They were locked up for about a month, then released, somebody rich was there to clean up "this minor mistake," as they called it.
So they tailed me, waiting for an opportune time to strike back. This didn't help ease the tension between me and Jamie, either. She knew I wasn't telling her everything, but she didn't press. That wasn't her way.
I was walking out the store to deliver a pepperoni when they jumped me, slashed up what felt like everywhere. Someway or another I got to the hospital - since they knocked me out those details were fuzzy - and I slowly healed, except for the large jagged scar on my right forearm. It was raw and red and every day multiple people commented on it, or pointedly didn't. Eventually it faded into a nasty-looking birthmark sort of thing, and once I had enough saved up I got a tattoo to cover it.
But the paranoia continued, as did the pain.
It was rough.
And it took a while, but I'll finally graduate in a couple months, after missing all that time recovering and paying off medical bills. Some days I almost forget about the scar. And some days I still feel like I'm being followed, but I always remember to --
"Brad? Are you okay?!" Jamie looked distraught.
I looked around, groggy, from her couch, where I'd been taking a nap. And then I knew. Not sure how that works, but it wasn't a dream: It was a vision. This was all going to play out, someway.
The final line of the voiceover haunts echoingly in my mind - "Some days I almost forget about the scar. And some days I still feel like I'm being followed, but I always remember to..."
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