Delayed Vengeance
Literary Short StoryThis commentary contains spoilers
To my complete astonishment, this turned out to be the winning entry in October 2015's last Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge about a former cop named Carl on a cruise with his wife, being found by old bills from his days as a street cop.
I did not go the usual route and confront him with some former gang member or something like this, so I had the mother of his illegitimate daughter appear, of whose existence Carl was completely ignorant. Then I had them meet up while Carl's wife is away for a few minutes. Added to that a few little jabs about the fakeness of the marine experience on a cruise ship, just because I enjoyed that. Simple as that.
Both the everyday setting and the dialogue-heavy nature of this piece were things I rarely ever do, so this is an unusual entry in this collection of more unusual entries. Had it not been for the challenge, I would probably never have written a tale I found so unremarkable myself. And then it won. As happy as I am about that, I never figured out why this is the first piece I did that managed to do so. Maybe my low opinion of the plot helped elevate the tone of the prose and the characters.
Part of why I did this regardless of my opinion of it was that I had skipped a few of these challenges where I thought any story springing from it would be too obvious to be interesting, only to see very obvious stories win their respective challenges. So I decided traveling a path I perceived as already well-worn might be worth a shot.
Titles on this one are a little confusion: The original title of the challenge was Vengeance Delayed. I myself called it Recollections when writing. And when it surprisingly won the challenge, it became Delayed Vengeance, making this the title it was eventually published under in the challenge victor's collection.
This is also collected in Indies Unlimited's 2015 Flash Fiction Anthology, collecting the challenge's winning entries of that year.
Because of its success, this was one of two pieces recorded to open my Youtube channel in late 2016, to be joined by Perfect Prison for being the other piece of contemporary fiction I had done by then.
October 2015
Available in:
How to Sing Butterflies
Indies Unlimited 2015 Flash Fiction Anthology
