There's a stretch of woods along the road home. At night it can turn any odd sound into a prowling coyote, an escaped murderer or your ex-husband. You can either breathe deeply, listen for a hoot owl and whistle yourself back to calm, or you can succumb to a blind panic that will send you fleeing up the middle of the road, flat-footed and round-hipped, to pause on the other side, by the Gaffey's mailbox, hunched over and about to vomit from the stress or the effort or the thought of your ex-husband out in the woods you successfully left behind.
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Ooo, dark and creepy - I love that the ex-husband is the most terrible of the three possibilities. I also love that your pacing lends a sense of speed to it. You can practically feel her running.
ReplyDeleteI love this. The other comments are right on, the pace and how the ex is is worst possible of the horrible possibilities. I have to laugh, I'm an ex-husband and I'm not that bad!
ReplyDeleteThank you all for the comments. Nice to hear, and to know what works!
ReplyDeletelumdog2012: if you replace "ex-husband" with "ex-wife", bet you read it differently.
Ooo. I do like this. I like the way you've built us up to be afraid of something and then tell us it's the ex that we should be fearing. I think a lesser piece would've been written the other way around--by showing us the ex-husband first. Nice job.
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