The Compassion Experiment

This story was inspired by the idea of what would happen if someone broke into my house. It was dark that moonless night and the wind bit at his skin. Mookie was lost again. Typical. He had a map, he’d used his GPS, but from where he was standing, every single house looked the same. Red brick. White Shutters. Blue garage doors. Welcome to the vanilla suburbs, he thought to himself. He was on a mission that night and needed to keep moving if he was going to accomplish anything before sunrise. Mookie looked at his stylish watch (it was a Ralex, a fake) and it declared the time as 01:34 AM. “Where is this damn place,” he muttered under his breath. Mookie was not a small man. He was six foot six and 280 pounds, his blood type was beef gravy. He checked the map again. The address he had been given was 1234 Rolling Road. He was on Rolling Road, but he couldn’t find 1234 anywhere. This wasn’t even his heist, or his first heist for that matter. He had sworn off h...

        Every week on Wednesday I meet with a writers group and we read each other our work and have it edited and critiqued.         This week we decided to try a writing exercise. We would have to write an original story on the spot. And then read it to the other writers.         The only stipulations were - The story had to start with the phrase “This year as Thanksgiving host, we bought a twenty pound turkey.” And end with the phrase “And that’s why we ate hamburgers.”         We also had to use 5 words that were chosen by the other members, they were Canary, Spline, Shoes, Spatula and Watermelon.         I was late to the meeting and only had 15 minutes to write my story.         This is what I wrote:         This year as the Thanksgiving host, we bought a twenty pound turkey ...         I...