I need a break!

[scribblinlenore]

I've been working very hard this week, peoples. Much harder than usual! Tonight, I'm having dinner with bexless and barely_bean, so that will be good. Something to look forward to! But in the meantime, I need a break.

I didn't have time to do that "give me a title and I'll tell you about the story" meme, but I wanted to, and now I'm have time. Or, at least, I'm making time.

So:

Comment with the title of a story that doesn't exist, and I'll tell you about that imaginary story, maybe even write a little snippet. Feel free to include a fandom and pairing, any fandom, I'll figure something out.

Anyone else need a break on a Friday? Come out and play!

Comments

[katkim.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, picking a line from something I'm reading - it was the boy who followed.

How about something original? Failing that, SV or OC, please.

[scribblinlenore.livejournal.com]

Okay, you want original. Original, you get. :)

***

It was the boy who followed that always ended up in the shit, so Dale's grandmamma always warned him. He hadn't thought too much about it back then, adrift in his loneliness the way he'd been, nobody to follow anywhere, to any end, good or bad, even if he'd been of a mind to. Dale just never was too good with people, all want and no way to say even half of what he would have liked to. He wandered the gray halls of high school like somebody who was just visiting. Even his teachers didn't recognize him when they ran into him at the Food Lion or the Long John Silvers.

That's the thing he always thinks about now--because he has nothing but time to think--that he wouldn't have ended up where he did if he hadn't been so dazzled by people and the easy connections they just seemed to fall in to, those magic circles he'd spent all his life on the outside of looking in.

After high school was over, he'd started working construction for Joe Walden, one of his Uncle Deuce's friends who had his own contracting company, and Dale had really hoped things might be different. That he might be different. By lunchtime on the first day, that pale little hope had all but been snuffed out. When the whistle blew for break time, Joe Walden went to the trailer with his foreman to talk money, and the rest of the guys straggled off to somebody's car to smoke weed, and Dale sat down on a rock and ate his tomato sandwich in the quiet, alone like he always.

It went on like that, day after day, until one noontime break, Billy Preston, kind of the unofficial leader of the guys on the work crew, turned to Dale and said with a chipped-tooth smile, "Hey, why don't you come have lunch with us? We never do know where you go off to."

Dale dug the toe of his shoe into the dirt nervously. "Oh, I just sit right here."

Billy swung an arm over his shoulder and grinned. "Well, hell, we're not fascinatin' or nothin', but we gotta be more interesting than that."

The rest of the guys laughed, and Dale figured it was okay to smile.

"So what do you say?" Billy asked.

Dale nodded. "Sure. Sure thing. I'd be pleased to join you."

Billy clapped his hands together. "Great!" And then frowned. "'Cept..."

"What?" Dale asked, too quickly.

"I promised my ma I go by the bank for her. But my car's a piece of shit, I tell you what. I'm always surprised it gets me anywhere. You wouldn't mind driving me into town, would you, Dale?"

"Oh, no, of course not."

Billy nodded in the direction of two other guys. "Hank and Ray here might like to go along. That okay?"

"Well sure." Dale's head bobbed in his eagerness.

Billy clapped him on the back. "Let's go then."

The thing is--this is what Dale always thinks--there just wasn't any way to know what they were planning. If he had, he wouldn't have drove them to that bank. But he didn't know, and he did drive them, and when they came running back out like bats from hell, he believed they really were just worried about being late from lunch and getting docked some pay. He didn't know anything about the robbery or the guard that got killed, didn't know Billy and the other guys had had guns hidden under their jackets the whole way into town, not until the state troopers came to his grandmamma's door to take him away. Not until it was too late.

He believed every word they said, believed they were finally going to let him inside. He believed them, and no one believes him. And that's twenty-five to life, just for wanting somebody to finally notice that he was there.

[ceares.livejournal.com]

I'm all hormonal and trying not to give in, and this is one of the saddest things I've ever read. Now I'm crying and have to run off and find something happy to read. Damn it!

[scribblinlenore.livejournal.com]

*pets* Sorry I traumatized you!

[amber-32random.livejournal.com]

This was beautifully sad. Poor Dale.

[scribblinlenore.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Dale is oddly real to me for something I wrote in a few minutes. I gotta try this original fiction thing more often.