fiction
Mystery, crime, murder, unsolved cases. Contribute your own tales of crime to Criminal.
Following the Yellow Tape
“Spread your legs and arms wide”, the officer stood behind me as I stared at the cream colored wall. There were scratches that took off the rugged paint job and random numbers etched in, scattered about with no correlation. I’d get bored if I was in here too.
By Reylene Garcia 5 years ago in Criminal
It's in the Code
Blood trickled down his face, sweat dripping off his hair and eyelashes, a deep purple bruise had already begun swelling under his left eye. He kept his head down, panting. He’d been here for what felt like forever. There were no windows in the room. The walls were metallic and he could hear distant groans of the facility. It looked bunker like in nature.
By Michelle Kaldy5 years ago in Criminal
“How Would You Like a Job?”
He was walking to work. He was walking because his car had died the day before, and his girlfriend was unable to drive him, on account of her having left him the day before that. It was an overcast morning, the sky the milky color of dishwater, like his mood. His head was bowed and his shoulders hunched; he was looking down as he trudged to work. If he hadn’t been he might not have noticed the small black notebook when he stepped on it. He bent down and picked it up. The front cover, aside from the print left by his shoe, was blank, as was the back. He opened it. Inside, the pages were almost entirely blank except for one right in the middle, which had a strange set of numbers scribbled on it. He went to toss the thing away when he heard his ex-girlfriend’s voice in his head, asking indignantly, “You’re just going to litter, then?” He slipped it into his pocket until he could find a trash can, and promptly forgot about it.
By Marissa Barnier5 years ago in Criminal
Golden Touch
Light streamed in from the slatted windows, exclaiming every mote in the dust-ridden air of the bar. One soul sat at the rugged counter, nursing his obvious hangover with a hair-of-the-dog and trying to keep the creak of the saloon doors out of his ears. He leans back in the stool, seeming to exhale for the first time in about a week, until he’s alerted to a metallic sound in the open air. That breath is sucked back in as he reaches for his hip and kicks his stool out into the lonely room. Heart racing and sweat beading, he draws and brings his sights up to meet the door. As it slowly swings in the late summer breeze, stillness sets in again when he remembered the windmill on the old fire-tower had needed greasing for a year or more, and malaise falls over the man once again. He pulls the stool back to the bar, his revolver finding its way back home as he tries to lose that breath again. He reached in his pocket, producing a handful of bills and change. Counting out the 3 cents needed, the clinking of the coins masked the jingle of spurs approaching. The man left the change, took a deep breath, and realized just how quiet it was. Recognizing the new silence of the groaning old doors, he turned to them and now faced down the barrel of a lawman’s rifle.
By Philip Smith5 years ago in Criminal
The Sunnyside Deli Corporation
THE SUNNYSIDE DELI CORPORATION 1:33AM - A TRAIN The young man, half awake on the train, his name is Sebastian. A lost soul, wondering in purgatory. He’s on his way to his uncle’s deli in Sunnyside to work the night shift. Apparently he’s an actor, or at least I think he thinks he’s one. No one really knows who he is, what he does. He comes in and out, and fades away into the void. Every. Single. Day...
By Daniel Salgado5 years ago in Criminal
Rouge
Entry 1 - June 2nd, 1997 I felt taken care of, but it always felt lonely. I loved my husband with all my being, yet it seems his thoughts are always transfixed onto his art, as if there can only be one masterpiece in his life. As I write and write, it feels as though this journal knows more of me than anyone else, the pages openly receiving my desires, my sorrows, and the woman in me that nobody desires to invest in, to uncover. The textured black cover like the gatekeeper to my heart, each thick, unwavering page a vessel for my very blood and soul to be poured out into.
By Naomi Samuel5 years ago in Criminal
