Can You Leave Us Breathless Contest Entry

Brenda Drake's blog is hosting another contest:  Can You Leave Us Breathless? with some amazing prizes.  It is open today, Oct 21st.  Feel free to enter something that will "take their breath away."

Meanwhile, here is my 303 word entry, an except from my manuscript, Kingdom of Obsession (title still pending):


We lived on a curvy street, and the sun was hitting the leaves just right to make the bend in the road framed beautifully.  I took off the lens and shoved it into my pocket and shot a few photos.  I heard a loud beep, turned around just in time to see the yellow school bus shatter my mailbox into a million pieces.  I saw the look of terror on the driver's face, trying to slam on the brakes again and again.  And then I died...

Or that's what I thought when I saw my dead mother standing over me.

“Oh, thank Heavens!”  She clutched her chest with older hands than I remembered. 

Catherine, my ex-best friend, was standing on the other side of my mother.  “It’s about time!”  She had put on a few pounds than when I had last seen her, eight years ago.

And the first words out of my mouth in the afterlife were, “Cat, you died?”  My mother and Cat looked at each other, quizzically.

“Still hanging in there, thank you very much.”  She scoffed.

“Wait… I’m not dead?” 

My mother was wide-eyed, hair grayed and falling across her face in wiry tufts.  “Honey, you’ve been in a coma for the past nine years.”

My spine tingled until it stopped feeling, everything was shifting sideways, and my vision went blurry.  I heard this rapid beeping somewhere off in the distance and my brain swelled.  “Where is Dennis?”  The two figures standing over me looked at each other.  “Where is he?!”  I grabbed my mother’s old leathery arm.  “Where is Asher?  Where’s my son?”  Nurses came running in.  I was being pushed down into my bed.  I couldn’t breathe with everyone on top of me.  I thrashed in a panic before I felt a sharp prick in my arm.