Darren pours the water from the bottle to the mug and takes a sip. He swishes it around in his mouth and winces. “Yuck.” He walks to the sink.
The wooden floorboards creak as he crosses the shack. He tips the bottle of water down the drain. “Bloody bugs.”
The door swings open when he pushes it. He rubs at his stubble and scowls at the scraping sound it makes. Outside, it is drizzling. The sound of rain on the roof fades into the background. There is water on the floor. Will this place fill up with water? Maybe I should get out. Go back to town. Maybe he won’t find me. I could get on a flight and leave the country.
He shakes his head and walks back to the table, sitting down. Tears course down his cheeks and he sighs, looking towards a photo of him and a woman. The two of them are hugging. He is different in the photo, staring at her with a sparkle in his eyes, grinning. Now his mouth droops and the bags radiate out from under his eyes.
There is a bed in the corner of the room. He walks to it and sits down. It creaks and sinks under his weight and he grunts when it almost touches the ground. Springs scream as he bends down and pulls a bag from under the bed.
He rummages through it, throwing things aside. A couple of changes of clothes, a razor. He pulls and envelope out and shudders when he looks at it. “Bastard.” He pulls out its contents.
They are photographs of Darren and another woman. The photos are taken from outside a building, taken by someone with a steady hand. That man is used to such assignments.
Darren flicks through the photos. After he puts the last to the back again, he looks at the note, scrawled on cheap paper. Get out of there, or you don’t wake up tomorrow. No man deserves what you did to him, even if he is screwing your wife. AM.
Darren throws the note and photographs across the abandoned cabin. He takes the phone from his bag and looks at the screen for a second before nodding. After dialling, he puts it to his ear.
He waits, tapping his foot, until an answering machine starts. At the beep, he says, “Diana, it’s me, Darren. I’m sorry. I had no choice in this. He made me. I would never leave you if I didn’t have to. You know that, don’t you?”
“It was a guy, initials A.M. I guess someone told them to run me out. Maybe they paid for it. I don’t know who it could have been. Do you, Diana? I need to know if someone’s after me. If I can come back, when they’re gone. If it was – Diana. Oh God, no. What I did was wrong, but I was angry. You couldn’t do this, could you?”
He pulls the phone away and hangs it up without finishing his sentence. It goes back into his bag, along with almost everything else. He puts the jacket on and something goes into the pocket.
Water is beginning to come through the door. Darren walks to and out of it, not looking back. He doesn’t get his things.
The rain coats his skin. His clothes stick to him but he ignores them. His face holds no expression and his walk is neutral, arms held by his side. It does not take long to get to where he is going, because he doesn’t know where that is.
The trees don’t allow any light to come into the forest. When he had stayed in the cabin as a boy, the trees were not grown. Patches of light still shone between the branches. In the intervening decades, they had shot up.
There is a clearing. It is more than thirty minutes’ walk from the cabin, which is itself a two hour drive from anything, and from there twenty minutes until a settlement. There is reception there.
He stands in the centre of the clearing, the rain soaking him. He puts his tongue out, remembering what he used to do as a boy.
There is nothing he can do to delay time. He takes the something out of his pocket. The bullet bites his brain and he is dead within a second. He falls to his knees; the blood splatters across the trees. His knees give way and he is eating the soil.
Hey, guys. This is my first try at something like this. It's the first of five, which'll all have different perspectives and ways of telling the story. I haven't posted anything here for a while, but Kylan's competition kind of kicked me into starting.
One of the first things I noticed is the choppiness of your sentence structure. I do understand that this has to be stripped down only to the bare minimum (fewer adjectives and no adverbs) but that doesn't mean that all of your sentences have to be short and choppy, does it? It's hard for the readers to establish a flow as they're reading this when every sentence is so short, so even in length. For example, the opening:
You've gone over your adjective limit.
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